Busier than the bedrooms at the offices of Boi, Broadway sees a whole lotta action at this time of year. The Tony Awards are in June, and everybody wants one. This year' favorite for drama is John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, a recent transfer from a very successful Off-Broadway run. The play has hardly changed, with Brian F. O'Byrne's Brooklyn priest still coming to loggerheads with Cherry Jones' stringent and stubborn nun in 1964. The heart of their problem is the fact the Jones is convinced that O'Byrne's priest has molested one of the boys where they both work. No matter that there is no evidence. A young nun acts as a sort of go-between, who finds herself questioning her own faith - in her religion and herself - as the charges play out. Only the rather rushed and clumsy scene with the boy's mother feels false. There is a good deal of humor (especially for you extremely lapsed Catholics) in Doubt, as well as a message important in the light of today's world events. If political leaders were less sure of themselves, and allowed themselves to listen to others, perhaps the world would be a different place.

A different kind of drama plays out a couple of blocks away, where The Pillowman has also just opened. This dark comedy drama is by the prolific wunderkind Martin McDonaugh, who has finally left behind the Irish environs of the Beauty Queen of Lenane, The Cripple of Inishman, The Lonesome West and so many more. Here, he sets up Jeff Goldblum as a detective in a totalitarian state. The object of the investigation is an unsuccessful writer, played by Billy Crudub, in a harrowing performance. What begins as a frustrating version of Kafka's The Trial, soon moves into darker territory, as it becomes apparent that children are being tortured and killed in exactly the same fashion as they are in Crudup's stories? The ingenious set allows the high walled prison cell to open up to reveal storybook tableaus, where the tales play out. While a few audience members walked out during onstage murder and torture, they missed great humor, and the sight of Bob Saget and an Olsen Twin (was it the thin one or the thinner one?) running to a giant SUV out front during intermission. Only the crowd waiting nightly outside the theater nearby, where Denzel Washington stars as Julius Caesar were more agog.