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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
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And I'm Melissa Block. The play "Doubt," about a priest suspected of sexually abusing a child, won a Pulitzer and a Tony. As a movie, four of its actors earned Oscar nominations. Well, this weekend, "Doubt" gets its world premiere as an opera. Minnesota Public Radio's Euan Kerr reports, the creator of all three says this just might be his story's fullest telling.
EUAN KERR, BYLINE: As the opera opens, Father Flynn leads his congregation in mass and in asking a question which will come back to haunt him.
(SOUNDBITE FROM OPERA "DOUBT")
KERR: The question is the basis of his sermon, but it becomes the theme of the story, as suspicions arise about his relationship with one of the altar boys. John Patrick Shanley admits he was dubious when composer Douglas Cuomo first suggested he adapt this unsettling story for opera.
JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY: Being a mook from the Bronx, my initial attitude towards opera was like Bugs Bunny's, why are those people singing that way?
KERR: But today, Shanley, who wrote the screenplay for the movie based on his original play, and now the libretto for the opera, sees things differently.
SHANLEY: With opera, I have a new set of materials available to me in addition to the ones that I've employed so far. And so I took the materials of film and of stage and of music, and can tell an ever more three-dimensional story and that's a fun and compelling challenge.
KERR: Shanley's collaborators credit the musicality of his writing style for making it such a natural fit for opera. Composer Douglas Cuomo says he still had the challenge of coming up with a score which produces a sense of unease, of doubt. Is Father Flynn innocent or guilty? Cuomo creates an extra edge by playing with tonality.
DOUGLAS CUOMO: Sometimes, it's just a matter of adding just even one note to kind of unsettle some more sort of traditional-sounding major chord. You add a note that's not in the chord. And so you get a sense of familiarity, because here's a nice, you know, C major chord, but there's also this other note that doesn't belong in there. And so you have these two things happening at once that together add up to something that's slightly unsettling and slightly off-kilter.
(SOUNDBITE FROM OPERA "DOUBT")
KERR: The overall result is what John Patrick Shanley calls a "Hitchcockian" score.
SHANLEY: That takes the best of the two previous mediums and adds to it this whole crayon box of audio color and it becomes something, a third thing, and maybe the most beautiful thing.
(SOUNDBITE FROM OPERA "DOUBT")
KERR: The combination of music, words and story has sparked some doubt in the Minnesota Opera's cast. Soprano Christine Brewer sings the role of Sister Aloysius, the school principal who becomes Father Flynn's accuser. Brewer is a former teacher herself and says she's seen the play a couple of times. The first time, she came away feeling he was guilty.
CHRISTINE BREWER: And the next time I thought, wow, maybe not, you know. And certainly to play this role, I have to believe he's guilty.
(SOUNDBITE FROM OPERA "DOUBT")
KERR: Another key role is Mrs. Miller, the mother of the boy at the center of the firestorm of suspicion. Mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves plays that role. Coming out of a rehearsal, Graves said on that particular day she believed the priest might be guilty. But as an actor, she has to convey how her character is torn between what may have happened to her son and the need to get him through the school year and on to better things.
DENYCE GRAVES: I think the fact that also she is an African-American is an important layer in this story. She's dealing with a lot here and trying to hold everybody together, and herself included.
KERR: When asked directly, John Patrick Shanley says he doesn't know whether Father Flynn is guilty, but he does know that the operatic form allows the shades of gray in the story to come through.
SHANLEY: Two people in the scene can be at complete disagreement, but on musical terms they are very much in agreement. And that's a fascinating, different kind of a subtext for me. It's sort of like, in other words, we may on the face of it differ on many things, but we very much inhabit the same world with the same laws of the universe.
KERR: John Patrick Shanley says he wants to do more opera, including an operatic adaptation of one of his early screenplays, "Moonstruck." For NPR News, I'm Euan Kerr in St. Paul.