Guest Post: Facing Doubt

If you follow the Safe & Sound blog, you probably recognize my sister Marilee’s name. She and her family have lived in Florida nearly 25 years now, but she made it up here for our annual Finke sisters weekend and is here with a guest post to tell you all about it.

by Marilee Amodt

This past weekend I traveled by planes, trains and automobiles to sisters weekend. Every year we plan a getaway with our sisters — we’ve been to Anacortes, Washington, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Louisville, Atlanta, Orlando, and Chicago. This year we were in Michigan. Our sister Bev lives near the coast of Lake Michigan and arranged for us to stay for a chilly weekend in a condo near the center of downtown Grand Haven. And as our mom Flo would say–we had a ball!

At 6 a.m. Sunday morning, Bev drove her three very tired sisters to the Amtrak Station in Holland, Michigan. When we arrived in Chicago, Beth and I kissed Cheryl goodbye at Union Station. She took a commuter train back to her home in the suburbs, and I spent one more day in Chicago with Beth and Mike before returning to Orlando…and warmer weather.

Mary Ann Thebus, who plays Sister Aloysius. Photo by Claire Demos

On Sunday afternoon Beth had arranged for the two of us to see the play Doubt: A Parable, presented by the Gift Theatre Ensemble at the Steppenwolf Theater. Set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, the drama is about a nun who is the school principal and suspects a young priest of having improper relations with one of the male students.

Beth had made plans to attend the touch tour before the play (expressly for people who are visually impaired), and when we arrived we were warmly greeted by the Director of Audience Experience at Steppenwolf  Theatre Company, Evan Hatfield. Evan developed the accessibility programming and services at Steppenwolf, and during the touch tour he introduced us to the four actors in the ensemble so we could hear their voices and learn a little bit about the character each one plays in Doubt. Next, audio describer Bridget Melton described the very small stage and some of the props. After a few questions, it was time for the show.

Evan came by to give Beth an ear piece device so that she could hear the audio description during the play. She told me she doesn’t always use it, but she does appreciate having it available. One example: the audio describer reads the program before the play begins, so while we were waiting Beth put the earpiece in. By chance, she caught the part where Bridget was reading a description of Mary Ann Thebus, who plays Sister Aloysius. She took out the ear piece then to poke me and whisper, “It says she’ll be reading from the script some of the time.”

Hmm…Mary Ann Thebus did say she was 86 years old during the Audio tour, but there was no mention of problems memorizing her lines. I had neglected to pick up the Playbill on my way in, so all I had was the information I’d heard at the Touch Tour, and what Beth had heard during the audio description.

The lights go out and soon we see Sister Aloysius flipping through some papers on her desk. So I am thinking, “Oh, she has the script there in case she needs it — that’s what Beth was telling me.” But Mary Ann Thebus carried the script in every scene. A lot of the time she was standing, reading directly from the page. I even caught a glance of a page (that’s how close we were to the stage) with her lines highlighted. I found it a bit distracting.

After the play, I picked up a Playbill. On our cab ride home I found an insert and read it to Beth:

At The Gift, we believe in ensemble and in always striving for the impossible. When it became clear that our ensemble member Mary Ann Thebus’ consistent retention of the script was challenging due to side-effects from medication, we chose to see it as an opportunity to remind ourselves and Chicago what makes us who we are. At The School at Steppenwolf in 2001, Mary Ann first taught many of us who would go on to form The Gift what it means to be brave, to unabashedly own our truth, to fight, to slaughter vanity in pursuit of helping humanity through our art; with her performance in ‘Doubt’—assisted by the aid of a script—her master class continues. As her character Sister Aloysius says: “I will do what needs to be done.” May we all be so brave.

Back home at Mike and Beth’s I read a Chicago Tribune review where theater critic Chris Jones said he found the on-stage-script-reading distracting, too. So distracting, in fact, that he had trouble deciding what he was going to say about it in his review. He compliments the actress for her long successful career teaching and acting in Chicago Theater, and then it seems like a light bulb goes on over his head. “This is what I am going to say,” he ends up writing. “Gift was right: this was indeed an act of remarkable bravery from one of the great artists of the Chicago theater, carrying on through doubt as we all must do at times.” He credits Mary Ann Thebus for doing her job to the very best of her current abilities, “no doubt at considerable cost to herself. She is a working actor of the Chicago Theater.”

The performance was a perfect finale to my weekend in Grand Haven and Chicago. I am grateful for the time I spend with my talented and brave sisters. And I am grateful to have met Sister Aloysius a.k.a Mary Ann Thebus.

The Gift Theatre’s production of Doubt: A Parable
Continues this week at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theatre, 1700 N. Halsted. Thursdays, Fridays at 8pm; Saturdays at 4pm and 8pm thru March 31, 2019. Link here to purchase tickets now — the Sunday matinee is already sold out. But hey, here’s a way you’ll never miss a Gift show: Link here to subscribe for the entire season.