Recalling Meryl Streep’s “Half-Assed Genuflection”

“Doubt” is now back on Broadway, in a Roundabout revival, and Sister Margaret, a cheery, chatty eighty-eight-year-old, had once again met with the cast, including Zoe Kazan, who plays Sister James. “They always pick a good-looking young actress to play me,” Sister Margaret boasted. She sat in a former novitiate, now an administrative building on the Riverdale campus of the University of Mount St. Vincent, which the Sisters of Charity founded as a women’s academy, in 1847. (About sixty Sisters live in the on-site convent, and the “Doubt” film was shot at the chapel.) Sister Margaret had seen the revival two nights earlier, but some thirty Sisters were about to catch the Saturday matinée. They boarded a chartered bus, wearing cardigans and trousers and blazers. “Doubt” is set in 1964, when the Sisters still wore black robes and bonnets, but the order abandoned the habit in the late sixties, post-Vatican II, to be more accessible to the community. Many had short white hair and spoke in honking New York accents. Sister Donna Dodge, the order’s current president, had enjoyed the movie, but was critical of Streep’s “half-assed genuflection.”