Cherry's Jubilee 

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And I know that sounds arrogant, coming from one of the performers in this production, but it is so brilliantly balanced. And it takes a very mature director to direct this play. There will be beautiful productions around this country once the rights open up in September, and there will be some failed productions, because people will not understand how important it is to make Sister Aloysius almost appalling at times.

People come in with so much baggage now, unfortunately, about priests. They see a man in a collar, and they just automatically think he's guilty of something. And it's dreadful. Both John and Doug Hughes have made Aloysius this almost crazily tough character. There are people who love her right off the bat, because she is kind of nutty, and she is so tough, and yet they understand that she's doing it from a very profound love for the children.

Then there are other people who just think she should be burned at the stake! She's Joe McCarthy, she's the devil himself, she's this horrible wicked person who should never be allowed near children!

And people feel the same way about the priest. They feel like they've never seen a more Christlike individual. Charming, handsome, wonderful, loving -- everyone should be so lucky -- every child should be so lucky to be around a priest like that. Then the other half of the audience thinks he's this manipulative, arrogant, sonuvabitch.

This play is a tough sell, because of the subject matter. People just assume it's going to be this grim play about pedophilia, and it's not! That's the jumping-off point. We present this little parable onstage that then sends the audience to work with their own minds and hearts and souls and emotions and guts, trying to figure out what the truth is. And that's what the play is about.

It's about our own process of decision-making and our own uncomfortableness with doubt and uncertainty and our need to know the truth and to know that we're right.

That kind of gets into my next question, because the people that you play, like Catherine Sloper [The Heiress], Mary McCarthy [Imaginary Friends], or Sister Aloysius — these are not always the nicest of people. And I imagine to really do them justice, you need to discard your objective judgment and dive into them in a certain way. Is that a lot of fun, or do you find that frightening?

Oh no, it's fascinating getting to understand the psychology of a character. There are two things. I've read that Laurette Taylor said that the most important thing for an actor to have is imagination. And I would say that the second most important thing for an actor to have is great compassion, because you have got to understand your characters — of course, in a way that your characters would understand themselves.

You have to embrace their flaws and understand that it is their flaws that make them so fascinating in the play and so fascinating for the audience. Doug Hughes, again, who kept just staying on me and staying on me, because I kept wanting to make Aloysius in a way that people would understand why she's so tough and to love her. He was one who wisely just kept making her more and more appalling.

It's so funny, because last night I greeted a group of people who were in a tour, who were staying at my hotel. And I saw them after the play. Almost to a person, they thought the priest was innocent. As the actress playing Aloysius, immediately I start spinning off into, "Am I making her too tough now? Is she too irascible?"

But it's true that you really don't want to make her too unlikable to tip the balance.

What you have to understand is that, in playing her, the more certain she is and the more passionate she is about her certainty, the people who are drawn to that kind of argument are going to think, "She's right," and the people who are repulsed by that kind of argument are going to think she is not.

It's interesting because John Patrick Shanley — this is a great example, Perry — I actually spoke with John on Monday, day before yesterday. And he said that he gets a lot of e-mails, because he puts his e-mail address in the playbill, and he's continuing to do that on this tour. He said for a while there, a lot of the e-mails were thinking that the priest was guilty, and now they seem to be tipping back to thinking the priest is innocent.

And I heard that, and I thought, "Oh no!" And I mentioned that to our stage manager, and he died laughing. He said, apparently in our last stop, which was Washington, a city paper had bashed the play — or actually, Chris McGarry, who plays Father Flynn — saying that he is so clearly manipulative, that there was no doubt that he had done it. This is at the same time that John Shanley is getting more and more letters ... !