Doubt wins Pulitzer for drama

Doubt, John Patrick Shanley's play about allegations of sexual misconduct in the Roman Catholic Church in the Bronx, N.Y., circa 1964, on Monday won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The play, first produced last year at the Manhattan Theatre Club, an off-Broadway venue, opened on Broadway last week for an indefinite run at the Walter Kerr Theatre, with out actress Cherry Jones in the role of Sister Aloysius, a strict Catholic-school principal who suspects that a well-liked priest has sexually abused a 12-year-old male student. Doubt is also being staged at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, with Linda Hunt as Sister Aloysius, through April 10. Doubt marks the Broadway debut for Shanley, a veteran playwright and screenwriter who won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for 1987's Moonstruck, starring Cher (who was named Best Actress) and Nicolas Cage. Shanley told the Associated Press that Doubt grew out of his experiences with Catholicism. "I went to a church in the Bronx in 1964," he told AP. "It was such a specific world that has now vanished.... More recently, the world around me started to remind me in certain key ways of this time--of people of conviction and people who weren't certain [and] at odds with each other--and their power struggle." Shanley said he planned to celebrate his Pulitzer with a champagne toast with Jones, Broadway director Doug Hughes, and the producers of Doubt. The April 26 issue of The Advocate (on sale April 12) features a review of the Broadway and Pasadena productions of Doubt.