The playwright as a translator of himself: Doubt, a Parable on the page and on the screen

Resumen

John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt, a Parable (2004) revisits the world he knew as a child, the Bronx of the 1960’s. The story centers upon a Catholic Irish- Italian school community, and the plot relates to a doubt – that grows into belief, and ends up as certainty – on the part of Sister Aloysius, the principal of the school. She is persuaded that Father Flynn, the vicar, has been harassing the only Black student in the school. The play is an open-ended construct, allowing each reader/spectator to build his own interpretation of the facts implied. Shanley is more than the author of the play. He is also the producer of the stage version, the author of the screenplay and the director of the movie version. This essay examines the strategies used by Shanley to keep the possibility of interpretation open as he translates his own work into different media, on the page and on the screen.