Your Broadway play wins a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony, and a Drama Desk Award. You write and direct a film adaptation, which is nominated for five Academy Awards and as many Golden Globes. What do you do for an encore?
If you’re “Doubt” author John Patrick Shanley, you do what you’ve always done: Write something utterly different.
The playwright, screenwriter, and director is presenting a staged reading of his latest play, “Pirate,” as part of New York Stage and Film’s 25th season at Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theater. Emerging from a six-hour rehearsal, he blinks in the sunlight and speaks in a gravelly rasp with the unmistakable cadence of his native Bronx. “It got nice out. Let’s walk.”
Shanley strolls across campus at an easy lope. His manner is quietly confident, verging on cockiness; this is far from his first interview. He can be gracious, even courtly, but there’s also a sense of some inner lava on permanent simmer.
The youngest of five, he grew up in East Tremont, a working-class neighborhood full of Italian and Irish immigrants. His father was a meat-packer, his mother a telephone operator. The home was tumultuous, and Shanley was often in neighborhood fistfights. He started school at St. Anthony’s, a Catholic grammar school that served as his model for “Doubt.”
When Shanley was 11, he started writing “kinda sorta Edgar Allan Poe poetry, gangster 1920s machine-gun kind of stuff.” By 13, he’d written a four-line poem about the Holocaust that caught his teachers’ attention. “People took notice of me,” he says. “They thought I had something.”
That wasn’t the only reason people took notice: The rebellious teenager spent virtually every afternoon in detention at Cardinal Spellman High School. The poet and the pugilist came together when he worked on the stage crew of “an amazing production” of “Cyrano de Bergerac.” “I loved the depiction of the poet as the toughest guy in the room–and a freak,” Shanley says with a wild, braying laugh. “And that a poet can be in the theater. And I liked colored lights.”
Midway through high school, Shanley was expelled. He spent the next two years at a Catholic-run private school in Harrisville, New Hampshire, which he describes as “500 acres on top of a mountain…snowy, windswept—that’s all it is, is winter.” There were 55 students, all boys. “It was very intense, very different from the Bronx,” Shanley says. Here, too, teachers encouraged his talent for writing.
He enrolled in New York University, but, characteristically restless, dropped out after a semester to join the Marines. After a two-year tour of duty, he returned to NYU and took “every writing class they had. The last one I took was a playwriting class. As soon as I started writing dialogue, I knew that was what I did.” The final project was writing a one-act play. Shanley wrote a full-length instead; it was produced three weeks later.
Inflamed by his newfound passion, he churned out play after play, with Off-Broadway premieres nearly every year at such theaters as the Vineyard, Theater of the Open Eye, and Ensemble Studio Theater. “I earned on the average $75 to $100 a year as a playwright for 10 years,” he says without irony. He supported his playwriting habit with a series of blue-collar jobs: unloading trucks, painting houses, and working as a moving man, elevator operator, bartender, locksmith, and glazier. At 34, he went to work in the licensing department of Dramatists Play Service. “I’ve never had another job to this day,” he pronounces with deep satisfaction.
Write or Starve
Shanley’s next production was “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” an explosive two-hander about a volatile guy from the Bronx and the equally bruised, angry woman he meets in a bar. A joint production of Circle Repertory Company and Circle in the Square, it starred John Turturro and June Stein. Shanley, who seems to remember the details of every paycheck, earned $5,000. That and a $17,000 NEA grant allowed him to patch together a living for over a year while he explored a new genre, having made a commitment to quit taking day jobs. “It was write or starve.
I thought, ‘I better learn to write screenplays if I want to make a living,’” he says.
He read lots of screenplays and wrote two on spec. “And they made them,” he marvels, still sounding awed. Five Corners was optioned by the first person who read it, director Tony Bill, with ex-Beatle George Harrison as his executive producer; it starred Jodie Foster and Tim Robbins. “People kept telling me, ‘It doesn’t happen this way,’ but it did,” Shanley says.
Meanwhile, he finished a second screenplay, The Bride and the Beast, instructing his agent to send it to director Lawrence Kasdan, who liked Shanley’s plays. She also sent it to Norman Jewison. “Both of them wanted it,” Shanley recalls. “Norman responded first, and a week later, Larry Kasdan called him and asked him to step aside so he could direct it. So I knew then that there was no way Norman was going to let that screenplay go.” Jewison shot the film and released it under a new title: Moonstruck.
Shortly after it opened, Shanley opened his mailbox at the tenement where he was living and took out a royalty check. It was for $85,000. “I just knew that my life had changed,” he says. “I was 36 years old, I’d been living below the poverty line for my entire life. Suddenly I could buy anything they had in the store.”
The wild ride continued with six Academy Award nominations, including wins for Cher, Olympia Dukakis, and Shanley, whose acceptance speech included the much-quoted line, “I want to thank everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life, and everybody I ever punched or kissed.” (There may be long lines in both columns: The former Bronx brawler, twice married and divorced, has dated a string of celebrities including actress Kim Cattrall and model Paula Devicq.)
Shanley’s Hollywood track record veered from commercial fiascos The January Man and Joe Versus the Volcano to the much-lauded Doubt. He’s never been tempted to move to Los Angeles. “I could have just kept on earning a lot of money,” he says, but “I was very concerned with being able to write in a way that was real for the rest of my life. This is what I do.”
As a playwright, Shanley refuses to play it safe. Along with his Pulitzer/Tony/Drama Desk triple crown, he’s garnered some brutal reviews. In his “Butcher of Broadway” critic incarnation, New York Times columnist Frank Rich sharpened his cleaver on Shanley so often it started to seem like a personal grudge. Shanley always came back punching, and once sent an unsolicited letter to a younger playwright whose debut had been panned by Rich, assuring her it was a backhanded compliment, “like being blacklisted by Nixon.”
Deeply Different
“Pirate” is the 13th script he’s tried out at the Powerhouse, his artistic home since New York Stage & Film’s inaugural season, which included his “Savage in Limbo.” It’s a challenging work, a complex political allegory sharing a bed with a surreal comedy, full of music-hall accents and a central image of blinding which may allude to Shanley’s ongoing fight with glaucoma. The playwright’s bold choices and unmistakable dialogue thrill some audience members and seem to infuriate others. Midway through the reading, a man in the first row walks out, crossing the black-box stage so close to the actors that Fisher Stevens stops in mid-sentence and waits for him to reach the exit. When Stevens shrugs and continues the scene, the audience claps.
“This play is deeply, wildly different from my last, which was deeply, wildly different than the one before that,” Shanley says. “You don’t dream the same thing every night. Why would you write the same thing every day?”
Besides, he adds, “I’m not the same. I am what I was, plus what I am. You have to find a way to get to the next step on the road.”
Shanley’s writing process usually starts with “a title, an image, or a room that I think has power. With ‘Doubt,’ all I had was the title. I didn’t know the subject matter, didn’t know it was about nuns.” What interested him was the state of uncertainty, something he feels is alarmingly absent from modern debate. The idea developed through images of black and white: the nuns’ habits, the first black child in an all-white school. Color is extremely important to Shanley; he often describes a set in meticulous detail before he begins writing lines. “I really design it,” he says. “I try to keep people out of the room for as long as possible, then they walk in and the play starts.”
He was equally specific about decorating his Manhattan apartment, choosing colors so vivid they rated a spread in the New York Times “Home” section, and his cottage upstate. After staying with friends and at local B&Bs for many years, Shanley purchased a tract of land on a fishing creek in Ulster County. He didn’t build on that site, but planted some tulips he hoped would come up every spring; the local wildlife thought otherwise. Twelve years ago, he bought a cabin on a mountaintop near the Rondout Reservoir. His teenage sons Nick and Frank, adopted during his marriage to actress Jayne Haynes, grew up with the country house. “They love it,” says Shanley, who also enjoys using it as a writing retreat. “I’d go up there for seven days alone. It was utter isolation—very, very remote. The house isn’t on a dirt road, it’s off a dirt road.”
“I like the Hudson Valley. I always think of Washington Irving, and the Hudson River School of painting, that sort of stately magnetism the place has.” John Patrick Shanley gazes at his interviewer, amused and a little impatient. “You done with me yet? There’s a barbecue.”
This article appears in September 2009.
