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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (July 13, 2017)
JULY 13, 2017 // 3 SCRATCHPAD ‘Doubt’ provokes moral outrage, inspires discussion tainty. Why are we inclined to believe one party over another when the evidence doesn’t privilege either one? What prejudices color our perception of events for which we weren’t present ? Our instinct is to respond to the plot twists with moral outrage that we often don’t know where to direct . At fi rst, we feel confi dent that Sister Aloysius, who accuses Father Flynn of By ERICK BENGEL FOR COAST WEEKEND J ohn Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt, A Parable,” a play showing in Ne- halem and the subject of this issue’s cover story (see Page 8), is a unsettling piece of theater, and not simply because it involves whether a priest molested a boy at a Catholic school. It is unsettling because it compels the audience to track their own moral judgments and sense of cer- coast INSIDE THIS ISSUE weekend child abuse, is probably in- correct, and may be seizing on an opportunity to rid the school of a bother- some priest whose progressive atti- tudes, she believes, threaten the institu- tion. Then we’re not so sure. We believe the head nun is fi rm in her convictions and almost possessed by a pathological certitude — about every- thing from her allegations against Father Flynn to her COAST WEEKEND EDITOR ERICK BENGEL CALENDAR COORDINATOR REBECCA HERREN arts & entertainment ADVERTISING MANAGER BETTY SMITH ON THE COVER CONTRIBUTORS MARILYN GILBAUGH RYAN HUME BARBARA LLOYD McMICHAEL Actors rehearse a scene from the play ‘Doubt’ at the Performing Arts Center in Nehalem. PHOTO BY COLIN MURPHEY See story on Page 8 COASTAL LIFE 4 Music in the Gardens 2017 8 ‘Doubt, A Parable’ 12 Tour explores seven private gardens FEATURE Award-winning drama comes to Nehalem DINING Mouth of the Columbia Highlighting Mudd Dogs’ hot dogs FURTHER ENJOYMENT MUSIC CALENDAR .....................5 CROSSWORD ..............................6 SEE + DO ........................... 10, 11 CW MARKETPLACE ......... 15, 16 GRAB BAG ................................ 19 Find it all online! CoastWeekend.com features full calendar listings, keyword search and easy sharing on social media. To advertise in Coast Weekend, call 503-325-3211 or contact your local sales representative. © 2017 COAST WEEKEND New items for publication consideration must be submitted by 10 a.m. Tuesday, one week and two days before publication. TO SUBMIT AN ITEM Phone: 503.325.3211 Ext. 217 or 800.781.3211 Fax: 503.325.6573 E-mail: editor@coastweekend.com Address: P.O.Box 210 • 949 Exchange St. Astoria, OR 97103 Coast Weekend is published every Thursday by the EO Media Group, all rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced without consent of the publisher. Coast Weekend appears weekly in The Daily Astorian and the Chinook Observer. faith in God — until we don’t. We think we know how the alleged victim’s mother will react to the news that her son, Donald Muller, may have been “interfered with” — until she reveals that the boy’s life has been one long crisis, and forces us to ask: Is it really worse to have a caring priest show an interest in him, even if it is sexual, than to be regularly beaten by a father who despises him (possibly for being gay), or relocated to a different school where white students may kill him because he is black? And we think the priest is innocent, and that we’ve been judging the situation fairly, distinguishing the just from the unjust, until we don’t know what to think. The play contains so much weighty matter — tra- ditional vs. modern values, segregation vs. integration, homosexuality vs. pedo- philia, doubt vs. certain- ty — that it’s tempting to wonder if the playwright kept a checklist of hot-but- ton issues on hand while he composed it. The reason it works as absorbing drama is that the issues are kept in close-up, played out as the person- al story of adults whose decisions will determine the survival of Donald Muller — a child who is always offstage, but whose presence is felt in every scene, haunting characters who claim to have his best interests at heart. CW
