David Kelly
Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, he examines the relationships that the characters in this play have with the world outside the Church.
Shanley's drama Doubt centers on a nun in a Catholic parish in the Bronx in 1964. She starts the play with suspicions that a priest in the affiliated church is a sexual predator, and she makes it her mission to have him removed, regardless of the cost to herself, his presumed victim, or anyone else. The play is carefully crafted to raise important issues—from faith to cynicism, compassion to discipline, and righteousness to obedience—but it recognizes the complexity of all these ideas and avoids taking sides. For all the attention Doubt has gained in the media because of its timely subject matter, Shanley's real interest is in the interplay between certainty and uncertainty and how too much of either can be destructive. As such, the play's main character is neither the accuser, Sister Aloysius, nor the accused, Father Flynn; it is rather the young nun, Sister James, who can see the merits of being both steadfast and tolerant. Sister James could be considered a surrogate for the audience: a reasonable, neutral party who is willing to listen to what each side has to say. It is strange, then, that Shanley has her disappear from the play at the climactic moment. It is strange, but it works, because the absence of reason is the whole point.
Shanley uses the word "doubt" in two specific, deliberate places, defining the extremism of the two main characters. Early on, before audiences have even been made aware of Sister Aloysius's suspicions of Father Flynn, the subject of his possibly having a shameful secret is raised when Sister Aloysius and Sister James are discussing his latest sermon, on the topic of Doubt. (Shanley uses the capital "D" in the published script, even though theater audiences would not be aware of it.) Sister Aloysius wonders in a provocative way, "Is Father Flynn in Doubt, is he concerned that someone else is in Doubt?" Much later, when her allegations of sexual abuse become apparent, this question makes sense; outside the context of his crime, however, it seems that Sister Aloysius, who is stringent in her ways, looks down on the priest only because he lacks absolute certainty. At the end of the play, though, having won a battle of wills over Father Flynn, Sister Aloysius suffers from her own uncertainty. "I have doubts!" she exclaims to Sister James. "I have such doubts!" If certainty is what allows Father Flynn to continue as a child molester without crumbling under a guilty conscience and what allows Sister Aloysius to doggedly pursue a possibly innocent man, then uncertainty in the play is not presented as being any more attractive.
This is not a play about the relative merits of child molesting or kindness but about that terrible feeling that one does not know the right course. The two main characters are each insulated, wrapped so deeply in their own self-assurance that they cannot relate to the world outside of themselves. They each feed off the self-righteousness of the other to nourish the righteousness of their own causes, unable, owing largely to surrounding circumstances, to see things in a larger context. Shanley uses the self-contained world of the parish to parallel the self-assured worlds of his characters' minds.
This is why Sister James is such a potentially important figure. Sister James agrees with many of the views of Father Flynn in regard to education and Christian behavior, approaching her job as a...
(This entire section contains 1840 words.)
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teaching nun with the attitude that love, not discipline, is the most important thing to offer her students. She is also in agreement with Sister Aloysius, however, that child molestation is an unthinkable crime that cannot be left unpunished. She is anguished, she wants her peace of mind, and she is as disgusted by Sister Aloysius's cold heart as she is by Father Flynn's alleged behavior. Her allegiances shift, depending on who is talking to her; in short, she is just as uncertain about how to morally judge these two people as most of the open-minded audience members are inclined to be. It would be nice if she could be a voice of moderation, to make the two sides recognize each other, but, given the political structure of the Church, that clearly is not possible. Neither her mother superior nor a priest has any inclination—or need—to listen to her.
It is therefore fitting that, when the final confrontation between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius comes in act 8, Sister James is nowhere to be found. Later, when the excitement is all over, it is explained that she was out of town visiting her sick brother, whose illness has been mentioned earlier (Showing concern for this brother is just one part of Father Flynn's charm offensive, to win Sister James to his side.) This absence in which she attends to other things changes the significance of Sister James in the story. Sister James avoids ending up being a junior version of either side or a combination of traits learned from Sister Aloysius and Father James, because she has a life outside the walls of St. Nicholas school and parish house. The play gives special significance to events that happen outside the insular church environment, showing separation from outer life as a direct cause of doubt and the inability to deal with it.
Each scene takes place on Church property, and the play only hints at what life is like beyond the Church's protection. Outside is a frightening world of violence and disease. One of the four onstage characters, Mrs. Muller, the mother of the boy whom Father Flynn is suspected of victimizing, lives in the secular world. She brings with her a sense of defeat that casts a cloud over the idealism of both Sister Aloysius's need for control and Father Flynn's need to love. Her son, Donald, has been beaten up, both by students at the public school he attended and by his own father, because of suspicions of homosexuality. Mrs. Muller understands that Father Flynn might be using her son sexually, but she accepts such abuse as being better than the violence of the world outside. The parish is a sanctuary for her, albeit a flawed one.
Sister Aloysius is the one member of the Church who has had significant experience with the outside world, having lived a secular life and having even been married before taking her vows. All she says about that time is that her husband fought and was killed in Italy during World War II. Her entry to the Church marked an escape from that violent world and, in itself, might be enough to explain her jaded view, her sense that such common pieces of life as ballpoint pens and sugar are luxuries that weaken the spirit. Shanley also provides a little background of her life within the Church, when, eight years earlier, at another parish, she played a part in the downfall of another sexually predatory priest. As much as life at St. Nicholas seems to be harmonious, a life like Sister Aloysius's will not let her leave appearances to speak for themselves.
Leading the life that Father Flynn has led, on the other hand, offers every encouragement to try to maintain the status quo. The priest has limited experiences to draw on: Sister James even comments on his frequent use of made-up stories for his sermons, which indicates talent and imagination but does not suggest any sort of personal history that he would care to recall. His history is with the Church, and, so far at least, it has been a successful one. If Sister Aloysius is right (and her successful bluff at the end indicates that she probably is), Father Flynn has behaved criminally before and beaten the rap, and so there is no reason to expect that he will not do so again. Perhaps he really does believe that his sexual relations with children are based in love, but, at some level at least, he knows that there is nowhere but the Church where such behavior would be protected. His past is within the Church, his future is within the Church, and in neither past nor future does his behavior earn him the sort of punishment that it would in the real world.
Having one of the key players, Sister James, go outside the Church while the other players battle each other within it is thus symbolically significant. Audiences can assume that Sister James will bring an outsider's view to the situation when she returns to it. For Sister Aloysius and Father James, though, there is nothing but symbolism to connect them to the outside world.
Sister Aloysius indulges in just one personal interest in this play: she listens to a transistor radio in act 8. Her listening is not for pleasure. She does not listen to music, she listens for news, which she relates to the time in her past when her husband was at war and she followed the news reports carefully. This curiosity about the outside world, her constant bracing for the tragedy that eventually did come in her husband's case, shows a lot about her imagination. Sister Aloysius spends her life preparing for the worst, and when she actually does find the worst in Father Flynn's actions, it seems almost a coincidence.
For Father Flynn, the outside world shows up in the form of a crow. Act 7, in which he makes the calmest and most convincing case for his innocence, is bracketed by the appearance of a crow overhead. His explanation to Sister James in that scene is entirely reasonable: he tells her how much he values the Christian principle of love and how much Sister Aloysius opposes such compassion, making it clear why she would try to distort his actions into looking like perversity. Because he apparently believes himself to be innocent, Father Flynn sounds innocent—that is, until the end of the scene, when Sister James leaves and he is left by himself. A crow, which he had accused of "complaining" at the scene's start, caws again, and Father Flynn yells at it. For a man who has just explained his innocence, he betrays himself to be conscience-stricken.
Doubt conveys how the Church creates an environment that encourages security, an environment wherein the uncertainty that rules the outside world is minimized, if not overcome. Because she can see both Father Flynn's and Sister Aloysius's points of view, Sister James is in danger, throughout the play, of becoming an adherent of one or the other extreme; instead, she escapes the trap of narrow-mindedness by renewing her connection to the world. For those who do not leave the Church grounds, there are only abstract images, such as voices on the radio or squawking birds, to remind them of the world they have shut out.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on Doubt, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.
Stephen Phillips
In the following review, Phillips relates how Sister Margaret found out about her role in Doubt, and provides background on the events that shaped the play.
This season's big Broadway hit is a raw story of child abuse in the Catholic church. Stephen Phillips meets the teacher who inspired the author to speak out.
New York theatre-goers currently packing out the hit Broadway play Doubt would scarcely guess that the real-life inspiration for its most endearing character is still teaching at a school nearby—almost half a century on from her fictional stage representation.
It was news to Sister Margaret McEntee, too, last November, when the veteran English and religious education teacher answered a phone call at the Brooklyn convent where she lives. "Did you know you're on the first page of the New York Times arts section?" asked a former student, Geraldine Cunningham-Pare.
Come to think of it, there had been a picture of a nun wearing the old, distinctive full-length habit of her order, the Sisters of Charity, in the newspaper the other day. The play review also mentioned "Sister James," her old name before she'd switched to her baptismal name, Margaret, during the 1960s Vatican reform movement. And it mentioned a "Sister Aloysius," not a million miles from Sister Aloysia, the real-life headmistress at her old school, St Anthony's, in New York's Bronx.
"That was you," Geraldine Cunningham-Pare said. "And guess who wrote it? John Patrick Shanley." "Oh, little Johnny," Sister Margaret replied, recalling a six-year-old she'd taught as a 21-year old rookie teacher in 1956.
Geraldine Cunningham-Pare, a film critic for Catholic newspapers, had taken a keen interest in Mr Shanley's Hollywood and Broadway career. He'd won the Oscar for best screenplay in 1988 for the Cher movie, Moonstruck. "I think your 15 minutes of fame have begun," she told her former teacher.
It's been a rollercoaster ride ever since for Sister Margaret, aged 69 and still going strong at Greenwich Village's Notre Dame high school. Doubt has become one of the hottest tickets in New York. Last month it won the Pulitzer Prize for best drama, and it's tipped to land the Tony Award for best play, in Broadway's equivalent of the Academy Awards, on June 5. But the play is perhaps an unlikely box-office smash, confronting as it does the topical but still uncomfortable subject of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
The Catholic church in the United States has been battered by stories of abuse inflicted on young people by its priests. Some parishes have been pushed to the brink of insolvency by compensation payouts to victims. And painful memories were stirred up by the spectacle of the former Boston cardinal Bernard Law—accused of presiding over the repeated reassignment of alleged paedophile priests to roles giving them access to children—officiating at Pope John Paul II's funeral last month.
In writing his fictional scenario, John Patrick Shanley, 54, drew partly on his experiences growing up in New York's Irish immigrant community. "These guys came out of the woodwork to young boys," he says. "In my case, it wasn't the clergy, but a teacher at a school subsequent to St Anthony's, who was enamoured of me but never crossed the line." A friend wasn't so lucky. After being abused he left the country. "He felt shamed, he had lost his pride."
Doubt is an intense 90-minute, one-act play, leavened by flashes of irreverent humour. Idealistic Sister James is the foil between the polarising characters of a charismatic priest with the common touch, Father Flynn, and a crusty, matriarchal headmistress, Sister Aloysius, who suspects him of abusing one of her pupils. Sister James is torn between the antagonists' clashing personalities and starkly opposing views of the Catholic ministry. Sister Aloysius conforms to an old-school view of boundaries between laity and clergy, decrying Flynn's efforts to reach out to the community.
It's a tension felt keenly by Sister Margaret, who recalls a run-in with the real-life Sister Aloysia, who reproached her as a new teacher for consorting with parents who'd come to school to pick up their children.
These days she wears civilian clothes, having shed the traditional nun's garb along with her male title.
Casting his former teacher's character in Doubt made perfect sense, says John Patrick Shanley, who, at 6 ft 1 in and with more than a passing resemblance to Liam Neeson, could be a leading man himself. "She was this fresh-faced young nun with this very benevolent attitude," he remembers.
Sister Margaret recalls Mr Shanley as a "loveable little kid". But she adds: "Thank God I didn't teach him in secondary school." By his own admission, Mr Shanley was no model pupil. He was banished from St Anthony's dining hall for food fighting, expelled from his secondary school, and dropped out of New York University to join the US Marines before returning to complete his studies. Despite the indelible impression left by his first teacher, he had misgivings about a meeting with her, brokered by Geraldine Cunningham-Pare, who contacted Mr Shanley via a website dedicated to their old neighbourhood. It wasn't so much the dark subject matter he'd cast her character into, but a distinctively American concern. "The word lawsuit crossed my mind," he explains. "There's the old accusation, 'You stole my life'."
A phone conversation allayed his fears. "She was so thoughtful, quoting (Holocaust survivor) Elie Weisel. I thought, 'Oh, I'm fine. This is a complex, rich, life-affirming person'." Still, Mr Shanley was nervous when Sister Margaret attended a performance as his guest in January, the first time the two had met in 48 years. He positioned himself, incognito, behind a newspaper in the theatre foyer, like a spy awaiting a secret rendezvous.
"This man got up, folded his newspaper, walked towards me and said, 'Sister James—oh my God, you don't look like I remember you'," says Sister Margaret. Inside the auditorium, staring at the mock-up of their old school (renamed St Nicholas) on stage, Mr Shanley was on the edge of his seat. "I had no idea what her reaction was going to be."
The guest was also unnerving for actress Heather Goldenhersh, who plays Sister James. "It was like having a rock star in the audience," she says.
They needn't have worried. Sister Margaret was flattered by the stage depiction and thrilled to be a dramatic muse. Ms Goldenhersh has since visited her at school. Hearing Sister Margaret talk about her sense of vocation has been a refreshing antidote to the often self-absorbed world of acting, she says.
Sister Margaret's classroom at Notre Dame, a private all-girls Catholic school where she prefaces each lesson with a prayer, is a world away from the blinking brashness of New York's theatre district around Times Square.
Leading a discussion on altruism and charity, she never raises her voice in coaxing comments from the class of 16-year-olds. Walking the corridors between lessons takes some time as she stops to ask students how they're doing and greets others, eager to say hello, with a ready smile. "My approach to teaching is relational—people before content," says Sister Margaret. "But content's very important," she adds quickly. "She relates morals to real life, so it's personal and we get a higher level of understanding," says Rachel Cardero, 18. "She calls the kids, 'cupcake'," says director of advancement Robert Grote.
Sister Margaret is enjoying her new-found celebrity. On a balmy evening last month, while the curtain's up on Broadway, John Patrick Shanley is the guest speaker at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, home to her convent.
The shrill din of Manhattan is just a distant hum on this picturesque campus beside the Hudson River. Sister Margaret and her family, friends and colleagues take pride of place at the front of the hall and then cameras roll for the Today Show, America's leading breakfast television programme, capturing the local-boy-made-good. After his speech Mr Shanley is mobbed by fans.
Nevertheless, Sister Margaret says she's encountered disapproval from some quarters. Some say Doubt brings up an unseemly subject, publicly airing "dirty laundry". "I say, go see it," she counters. "It opened my eyes."
In the play, her devout character is chided for being too gullible by her headmistress, who counsels that innocence can be a luxury amid lurking evil. Sister James, for whom entertaining such dark suspicions about someone is anathema, is plunged into an existential crisis. Ultimately, the audience is left guessing about whether "he did it", but Sister James is the character people identify with, says Sister Margaret. "She's the voice of reality, trying to step back and make an analysis of what's going on, and it's really hurting her."
Source: Stephen Phillips, "Faith, Hope, and Doubt," in Times Educational Supplement, No. 4635, May 20, 2005, p. 6.
Grant Gallicho
In the following review, Gallicho calls Doubt "remarkably balanced" and praises the play for its "lasting artistic value."
Playwrights and screenwriters have had several years to mine the clergy sexual-abuse scandal, but it is only with John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt that someone has written something of lasting artistic value. Doubt, which recently opened on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater after an extended run at the Manhattan Theatre Club, is gripping. Its actors turn in riveting performances; and the play remains remarkably balanced, scrupulously avoiding caricature and moral posturing.
Shanley, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Moonstruck, has cleverly wrapped the sexual-abuse crisis in the cloak of a whodunit, and set the story in 1964, at a Bronx parochial school run by the Sisters of Charity. Sr. Aloysius (Cherry Jones) is the tough-as-nails principal, whose suspicions about the character of Fr. Flynn (Brian F. O'Byrne) are confirmed when one of her young teachers, Sr. James (Heather Goldenhersh), reports that a student has been removed from her class by Flynn and returned with the smell of alcohol on his breath. Complicating the problem, the boy in question, Donald Muller, whom we never meet, is the only black student in the school.
Setting the play in the 1960s provides insights into the milieu in which clergy sexual abuse might occur—a time when deference to clerical authority was more prevalent than it is today. Shanley's choice of 1964, in the middle of the second Vatican Council—when understanding of the roles of clergy, women religious, and laity was shifting—also offers occasions for dramatic reversals and complexity. Flynn's gruff charm—straight out of Irish Catholic lore—and his easy, teasing way with boys, make clear how he might use his charisma to gain the confidence of potential victims. It is one of the play's shrewder ironies that Flynn is a proponent of the reforms of Vatican II. He regularly articulates liberal-Catholic principles—and seems to mean them. Part of the play's genius is in drawing Flynn in such sharp contrast to Sr. Aloysius, whose Catholicism is so preconciliar that she disapproves of students' singing "Frosty the Snowman" because it's "heretical" and "espouses a belief in magic." A lesser playwright would have freighted the Flynn character with all the negative and authoritarian characteristics associated with the preconciliar church, and presented Sr. Aloysius as a syrupy, saintly defender of the helpless.
Sr. Aloysius is anything but sweet. Anyone who attended Catholic schools staffed by women religious will recognize the sternly rigid yet secretly caring sister, channeled by Cherry Jones's masterly performance. Sr. Aloysius is a tough, self-assured woman who expects a toughness from her staff and fellow nuns in all matters, great and small. She admonishes Sr. James for allowing students to write with ball-point pens—"When they press down they write like monkeys"—and cautions her against being too trusting of priests, too anxious to please: "If you forget yourself and study others, you will not be fooled."
Armed with this steely resolve, Sr. Aloysius goes about the business of studying Fr. Flynn. After hearing from a fellow sister that the priest has been taking boys to the rectory for private talks about "how to be a man," she invites him to her office under the pretense of an administrative meeting, coaxing a reticent Sr. James to attend as a witness. To watch Aloysius and Flynn go through the motions of courtesy (while knowing what's boiling under the surface) is to experience an inspired moment of dramatic irony.
O'Byrne's physical performance in this scene is enormously effective. He strides into Aloysius's office and promptly takes her seat at the desk, making the power relationship perfectly clear. They make small talk. Aloysius offhandedly mentions an elderly sister who recently "fell on a piece of wood, and practically killed herself."
FLYNN: Her sight isn't good, is it?
ALOYSIUS: Her sight is fine. Nuns fall, you know.
FLYNN: No, I didn't know that.
ALOYSIUS: It's the habit. It catches us more often than not. What with our being in black and white, and so prone to falling, we are more like dominoes than anything else.
This back-and-forth, like so much of the play's dialogue, is intensified by tiny dramatic movements, even covert ones, because this exchange has a comédie bent. But they reveal something important about the characters: the hint of predatory menace in Flynn's pointed inquiry about the other nun's health (Is she fit for work at the school?), and Aloysius's protective nature—not naive, but smart enough to play to Flynn's latent misogyny by comparing nuns to falling dominoes. She has his number.
The conversation stalls once Aloysius asks Flynn why he took Donald Muller out of class. Flynn explains that he removed Donald to talk to him about having drunk the altar wine, but then recognizes the meeting is a set-up, and storms out. At a loss about how to pursue her investigation, Aloysius takes a risk by summoning Donald's mother (Adriane Lenox) to her office, but makes no headway with her either. After at first denying that Flynn has molested Donald, Mrs. Muller finally acknowledges that the abuse has taken place. But she refuses to take action against Flynn, or even remove Donald from the school, because, she explains, the priest is "the only one who pays him any attention."
Aloysius pleads with Mrs. Muller to expose Flynn, to remove Donald from his reach, pushing finally to one of the play's most powerful reversals, in which Muller offers an admonishment of her own: "You may think you're doing good, Sister, but the world's a hard place." Adriane Lenox's performance is compact, tragic, and utterly convincing. This wrenching scene is just one example of how Doubt turns every dramatic commonplace on its head. Even when you expect the parent of a victim to be the most scandalized, Shanley pulls the rug out from under you.
The tense last scene is a final confrontation between Flynn and Aloysius, where it's revealed that Aloysius herself has feet of clay. Flynn is at his manipulative best. Even at this point in the play, the audience can't be certain of his guilt or innocence. But Aloysius is. She threatens to expose him if he doesn't immediately request a transfer. He refuses, continuing his denials.
By now, all pretense to courtesy is gone. As the conversation escalates, Aloysius makes no effort to hide her disdain for Flynn, but he will not yield. The actors never succumb to the temptation to overplay the intensity of the scene, yet they clearly convey what's at stake for Flynn and for Aloysius—his future as a cleric and her moral integrity. In the end, however, neither Flynn nor Aloysius walk away unscathed.
"In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God," Aloysius tells Sr. James. This pillar of strength, a woman certain of herself, her convictions, her church, is broken by exposing what she's convinced is a horrific injustice. The price she pays is her certainty. "Oh, Sr. James," she sighs in the play's final sorrowful line, "I have such doubts."
The doubt in the title refers to multiple questions and betrayals. Like other Catholics confronted with clergy abuse, Sr. Aloysius comes to question and have doubts about herself. For in prosecuting the injustice she perceives, she's driven to betray her own moral code. Even in the rooting out of something as abominable as pedophilia, the play shows, other moral truths can be lost. That's the ambivalence so compellingly presented here.
Did Flynn do it? The play itself doesn't say. By not resolving the case, Doubt shows that its ambition extends beyond the whodunit genre. It's gutsy for Shanley to withhold the emotional satisfaction of closure in a drama fueled by such a fraught subject. And in doing so, Doubt reflects what the sexual-abuse crisis has been for so many Catholics: an occasion of profound grief for a church they, like Sr. Aloysius, believed in.
Source: Grant Gallicho, "The Cost of Justice," in Commonweal, Vol. 132, No. 8, April 22, 2005, pp. 21-22.
Robert Coe
In the following interview-essay, Coe provides background on Shanley's life and career, and Shanley discusses his early plays and the experiences that inspired Doubt.
John Patrick Shanley's Bronx characters don't sidle up and ask—they demand to be seen and heard. Saying exactly what they feel, almost without appearing to think about it, they're posturing and naked at once, far-fetched, mercurial and profane, and they effortlessly own the stage. This fall theatre season in New York is offering a major revival of Shanley's electrifying first drama, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, a 1984 two-hander "dedicated to everyone in the Bronx who punched me or kissed me, and to everyone whom I punched or kissed"—by a man inducted this past summer into the Bronx Walk of Fame. The play opened at Second Stage on Oct. 21. Five days later, New York audiences began catching up to Shanley's present work at the Public Theatre's Shiva Theatre, where the LAByrinth Theater Company is presenting the world-premiere production of one of the playwright's most radical stylistic experiments to date: Sailor's Song, a love story with dancing (to waltzes by Johann Strauss), set in an imagined seaside town, about a cynical man and a true believer battling over two beautiful women and the nature of love.
A second new play will open on Nov. 22 at Manhattan Theatre Club's New York City Center Stage I, and will play this spring at California's Pasadena Playhouse: Doubt, a drama set in the 1960s at a Bronx Catholic School—the story of a stern principal, Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones), who grows suspicious of a priest who seems to be taking too much interest in a young male student. Night and day from the animal vitality of Danny, Doubt unfolds in a spirit of poetic restraint and deep seriousness, and it reads as Shanley's most powerful play in years.
This would seem an ideal moment to reconsider the career of an off-center playwright frequently viewed as an eccentric, vulgar provisioner for scenery-chewing actors, but who is in fact a deeply ambitious artist working through primal themes, in a language that people actually use and a voice as recognizable as David Mamet's (although less easily caricatured). An overview of his work reveals a more substantial, shapelier body than this reader had previously imagined, as well as an integrity and steadily deepening gravitas suited to a writer now nearing 54 and living comfortably in Brooklyn Heights, with a leafy school ground for a backyard, since 2000.
Formerly married, now divorced and co-parenting 12-year-olds Nick and Frank, and after two decades toiling with mixed success and failure in the killing fields of Hollywood, Shanley has settled into a solid maturity that, as he once told a journalist, leaves behind the "electric leaps" of youth in favor of "a more considered attempt to converse and discover connection."
It was slightly over 20 years ago that Danny burst onto the American theatre scene with two vivid characters, described by the author as "violent and battered, inarticulate and yearning to speak, dangerous and vulnerable," locked in mortal combat, longing and, eventually, a kind of love. From the beginning Shanley exhibited a seemingly effortless mastery of the rhythms of hostility and longing, along with a natural gift for instilling tremendous spiritual ambition in his characters—a willingness to leap, to let go, far more often than to hesitate and cling. Whether in doubt or rapture, Shanley's characters are unafraid of speaking in banalities or in wild poetic flight—or, when they are afraid of something, then the playwright confronts those fears head-on. (Courage and determination are subjects that Shanley has revisited throughout his career.)
Each of the Bronx plays that followed Danny would be about people wanting either IN or OUT—another way of saying that these plays are about dramatic change and a challenge to imposed definitions and boundaries, especially the ones between the Bronx/Manhattan and victimhood/liberation. Shanley's characters seek transcendence, connection and new identities, via more than words alone: They touch, sweat, spit and spray every available bodily fluid in that alternately claustrophobic and explosive atmosphere that has characterized most of the canonical mainstream of 20th-century American drama.
Shanley worked outside this atmosphere as well. Welcome to the Moon … and Other Plays, which ran in the fall of 1982 at New York's Ensemble Studio Theatre, introduced a strain of surrealistic experimentation that established Shanley's parallel career as a radical stage formalist, not unlike that of another hard-living, essentially naturalistic Irish-American writer, Eugene O'Neill.
Shanley remained in his imagined Bronx and delivered further on his promise with Savage in Limbo (1985), "dedicated to all those good assassins who contributed to the death of my former self." Working with multiple characters this time, Shanley stood closest to his eponymous heroine, the pained and caustic Denise Savage: "We're on the cliff. We were born here. Well, do you wanna die on the cliff?" Savage was in part about the animals lurking inside human beings, just as Danny was, but with a caveat offered by Denise's friend in boyfriend trouble, Linda Rotunda: "It ain't the new clothes that make the man. It's what he does with his dirty things." The project of self-discovery becomes one of finding determination within the grope and flailing of tongues. As the aptly named bartender Murk opines: "The problem with people is they think they're alone. They think what they say don't do nothing. So they say every stupid thing that goes through their gourd, and they do [sh―t] they don't even know why. Which leads to what? The world looks like homemade refried [sh―t]."
Shanley could not keep working forever in this tortured Italian-American ghetto. Women of Manhattan (1986)—this time the inevitable and telling dedication was "to women, women, women … [written 23 more times] and a guy named Larry Sigman [a dying friend, now deceased]"—headed down to a lower borough, away from working-class, ethnic concerns, to address the issue and substance of self-esteem, a screaming lack in all Shanley's earlier characters. Women of Manhattan moved through the animal appetites to search for grown-up identities. I have probably undervalued the verbal intelligence and wit on display in these early writings, but this play, while beautifully written and complete, feels a little weightless.
Shanley wasn't through with the Bronx: His 1985 fantasia, the dreamer examines his pillow, dedicated, simply enough, "to my family," introduced family members for the first time—a daughter, Donna, who is unable to live with her lover, Tommy, or without him (especially after she discovers he's sleeping with her 16-year-old sister). Like Women of Manhattan, the dreamer pursues questions of identity, as opposed to merely coping or desperately surviving: "You are somebody," Donna tells Tommy. "Tell me who…. You know what it is down there inside the last Chinese box?" Dealing with their pie-in-the-sky romantic dreams, she realizes they will always find themselves "back down in this [sh―t]hole room or some other [sh―t]hole room, and I can't feature that no more." The dreamer is a dark attempt to chart the intellectual/emotional terrain of Shanley's imagination, leading to an ambiguous recognition that in sex we can discover identity, and escape it.
Shanley's best work simultaneously imagines and exposes the failure of "the key that lets me outta my life," as Donna puts it. Self-knowledge is far more difficult to obtain than simply escaping the past or some shithole room. In the end, the dreamer reaches for a deeper question: Why live at all? A didactic element entered Shanley's work for the first time: "You gotta make the big mistakes," says Donna's dad. "Remember that. It makes it easier to bear. But remember, too, that Sex does resurrect. Flyin in the face of the truly great mistakes, there is that consolation."
Shanley's constant implicit theme—the marriage of two people—became comically overt in his popular Italian American Reconciliation (1988), the first of his plays the author directed, with a cast including John Turturro (the original Danny), John Pankow, Laura San Giacomo and Shanley's then wife, Jayne Haynes, at Manhattan Theatre Club. Reconciliation had a simple, outrageous plot involving an inappropriate seduction (the commedia aspect of which was inescapable), a hilarious momentum, and an almost maudlin denouement reached when Aldo (Turturro) announces: "And this is the lesson I have to teach: The greatest, the only success, is to be able to love."
Nineteen-eighty-two to 1988 were years of extraordinary creativity for the former juvenile delinquent and NYU grad. By the time of The Big Funk (1990), he was arguing for the interconnectedness of everything. But an undercurrent had entered his work that was not so empathic. Shanley prefaced the published version: "And so I ask the question: Why is theatre so ineffectual, un-new, not exciting, fussy, not connected to the thrilling recognition possible in dreams? It's a question of spirit. My ungainly spirit thrashes around inside me, making me feel lumpy and sick."
The Big Funk was formally adventurous, employing nudity and direct address of the audience, while also reminding us of the Greeks by essentially being about a dinner party—a Symposium. But it also removed all recognizable contexts of time and place—as if the playwright wanted to address the interconnectedness of everything at the expense of its specificity. From this turning point, Shanley wheeled back to a theatrical beginning he never actually had and wrote a nakedly autobiographical family play: Beggars in the House of Plenty (1991), about how some siblings make it and others don't. Beggars is arguably his most successful work employing surrealistic element, while also breaking from his usual intense dramatic focus to explore a more studied irony. Out of the cauldron into what fire? (The old Shanley did periodically surface, as his stand-in "Johnny" intoned: "I look like the Bronx inside. I could vomit up a burning car.")
Inevitably, Shanley stepped back from his investigation of an increasingly distant past: Four Dogs and a Bone (1993) was his first play not driven by insatiable personal demons. Instead, it used bitter, excoriating comedy to limn a social world in which two actresses battle to have their parts beefed up during an indie film production. By the end of the play it's the screenwriter who grows some balls, or is corrupted (it's hard to tell which, but he does take over the show). Shanley knew something about Hollywood wish-fulfillment: Back in the early '80s, watching funds from a large NEA grant dwindling, he had decided that instead of returning to painting apartments, moving furniture or tending bar, he would write a screenplay. Five Corners (1987) ended up being produced by Beatle George Harrison, and was followed shortly by Shanley's signature achievement, Moonstruck, the Norman Jewison film and Cher vehicle that won Shanley a well-deserved Oscar for best screenplay.
Moonstruck brought together all his insights into Italian-American culture with a brilliantly funny, wise and balanced screenplay that holds up, to this day, as a masterful comedic melodrama. This was followed by The January Man (1989), a botched thriller; Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), which Shanley also directed, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, in an odd turn that died at the box office; Alive (1993), about a plane crash and cannibalism in the Andes; and, Congo (1995) a jungle-based techno-thriller about mutant apes—none of which came close to matching his early success.
Shanley returned to the stage with new aspirations: Psychopathia Sexualis (1996) was a clever, entertaining boulevard comedy about sexual fetishism and a loony shrink. Cellini (1998), his first-ever stage adaptation, drew on the notorious Renaissance autobiography; Missing/Kissing (1996) proved a not-particularly-engaging romantic study; Where's My Money? (2001), his first experience with the LAByrinth Theater Company, was a wholly satisfying dark comedic drama about a kinky affair, a cynical marriage and the loss of romantic sentiment—for my money, Shanley's best play since the '80s, although more West Side comedy of manners than raw exposé.
Then came 9/11, which inspired Shanley's topical Dirty Story (2003), featuring characters intended to represent the U.S., Israel and Palestine—a comedic parable so cartoonish that some critics had a hard time taking it seriously, even while the New York Times called it "appallingly entertaining." [Denver Center Theatre Company's production runs through Nov. 13.] Shanley was staying on a Mideast beat: Live from Baghdad, a 2002 film written for HBO, about CNN at the start of the Gulf War, earned an Emmy nomination for him and other co-screenwriters. (My favorite line: "If we can keep talking, then maybe we won't kill each other.") Shanley also recently completed a new script for Moonstruck director Norman Jewison, The Waltz of the Tulips. Apparently the moonstruck writer is thinking in three-four time these days.
Which brings us up to Doubt and Sailor's Song—two new plays, each a major return to form, both resounding evidence of a new confidence, maturity and economy from an artist who has always maintained that "writing is acting is directing is living your life."
We meet at his request at the SoHo Grand Hotel for tea and cookies. Shanley is grayer than the last time I saw him, back in the early '90s, strolling in a black leather jacket down Lafayette Street in Manhattan with the actress Julia Roberts. His explosive, raucous laugh and the classic Irish twinkle in his eye haven't changed; he seems eminently sane, focused, amiable and self-examined. He tells me that today is his son Frankie's birthday, and that after our interview he will be picking him up to celebrate. Both sons were adopted at birth, four-and-a-half months apart, so for the next seven-and-one-half months, Shanley laughs, "both my sons are 12." Speaking with the rhythms of his native Bronx, he is still asking ambitious questions and giving big answers, but with a new subtlety, new tools and a steady, jovial demeanor.
[ROBERT COE]: When was the last time you actually saw Danny and the Deep Blue Sea?
[John Patrick Shanley]: It's been a few years. Some of my plays I've never seen done by anybody since the original productions. Danny I've seen done maybe three times in amateur productions that somebody got me to go to. Actually, the last time I saw it was in Paris, in French.
Did you think you were watching No Exit?
[Laughs] No! Because Danny has a catharsis. Catharses build up a lot of energy, and when the energy is metabolized, it is released, and the audience is released. That can be really important! You have to legitimately achieve it. It's one of the big reasons that I would go to the theatre—in the hopes of experiencing that.
Who will be playing Danny and Roberta this year?
I don't know. Second Stage suggested Leigh Silverman for director—she had done well at the Public [with Lisa Kron's acclaimed solo 2.5 Minute Ride], and I met with her and thought she was smart and driven and completely unlike me. I can't explain that any more than to say she's made of different stuff. So I said, "All right, let's see what you'll do. You're free. I want the Leigh Silverman production."
You really don't want to haunt the rehearsal hall?
Nah. I'm not much for going back. You can either have a career or chase it, and I don't particularly want to chase my own shadow back through time. With the number of workshops of my plays in New York alone, it could have been my career, just going to my own shows—and how sad would that have been!
"Is Shanley here again?"
[Raucous laughter] That's right. "Poor guy."
So let's jump forward 20-plus years to your new play Sailor's Song. The publicity makes it sound as if you were inspired by the two Genes: Kelly and O'Neill.
Sailor's Song is about—just to pull a figure out of the air—35 percent dance. But it's not performed by dancers, it's very much a play. A very, very romantic play—almost a tragic-romance. I'll be very involved in this one. Sailor's Song and Doubt are only four days apart in rehearsal schedule, so I couldn't direct either one of them. Doug Hughes is directing Doubt, and he's great; the other show's got a much greener director, Chris McGarry, who's been an actor mostly, and who I did Dirty Story with. He's very intelligent and I wanted to give him a shot. The music is extant—it's waltzes, used in a very unusual way. It's almost all three-four time—"Tales of Vienna Woods," "Blue Danube," all that stuff. Johann Strauss mostly, right down the line! And it works! I did a workshop of it last fall to make sure, and it's really fun to listen to that music. All the music that's ever been written is still around, but it's amazing how pop music has pushed out everything else, for the most part, except for in formal dance. And it doesn't have to be so.
You've written so much about the nature of love and romance. I sense in Sailor's Song a new wisdom and maturity—almost a mellowness that does not suggest complacency, just a longer overview and a deeper perspective.
Yes. I'm savoring life now, whereas I used to just wolf it down. This play is all about savoring the moonlit moment of romantic choice—that place on the dance floor of the heart when two people could kiss but they haven't yet. You are a dancer and the music is playing like a blue river around you. Everything is on the move and yet, paradoxically, time has ceased its forward motion. And this liquid pulsing, photograph of possibilities is placed side by side in this play with mortality, with the certainty of death, with the brevity of youth, and with the importance of now. So Sailor's Song is about the almost unbearable beauty of choosing to love in the face of death. Love is the most essential act of courage, isn't it? Will you choose to love before you are swept away by oblivion? I hope so.
Now tell me about Doubt.
I went to a Catholic Church school in the Bronx and was educated by the Sisters of Charity in the '60s. That's a world that's gone now, but it was a very defined place that I was in for eight years. I realized later on when the Church scandals were breaking that the way a lot of these priests were getting busted had to be by nuns. Because nuns were the ones who were noticing the children with aberrant behavior, distressed children, falling grades, and in some cases they had to be the ones who discovered what was happening. But the chain of command in the Catholic Church was such that they had to report it not to the police but to their superior within the Church, who then covered up for the guy. This had to create very powerful frustrations and moral dilemmas for these women. It was very shortly after that that they started to leave the Church in droves.
I was not aware of that. Has this been noted elsewhere?
As far as I can make out, never. So showing this experience was one of the motivations behind Doubt. Another was that I saw a dark side to the Second Vatican Council's message of "go out into the community." When I was a kid, priests were not going to take boys out of church [to outside activities]. They were priests, they were in the rectory. And so I think this explosive combination of celibacy and "go out and make believe you're just one of the other folks" had a lot to do with the problems that followed.
But over and above that, the more interesting thing to me doesn't have anything to do with the scandals, and that is the cathartic, philosophical power of embracing doubt—of embracing not knowing, embracing that you may never know the truth or falsity of a story, of a scenario, and that you cannot morally stand in judgment from any place that is utterly firm in relation to another person's life. And yet actions must be taken if you feel the imperative, if you feel that you have the clarity of thought and know what should be done. And that powerful, explosive dilemma for an individual is really fraught for me. Here are these women who stumble on what may be something—and the choice is to go through the normal chain of command, which will lead to the complete exoneration and literally the safety of an abusive priest.
You know a member of my own family was molested by [Father John] Geoghan, the guy who was strangled in prison. And my family members went to Cardinal O'Connor, after they'd gone to everybody locally and gotten no satisfaction, and Cardinal O'Connor took them by the hands and said, "I am so sorry this happened. I will take care of it." And then he promoted him. Unbelievable. So they left the Church, but after 10 years they went back, and that Sunday the Monsignor got up and gave a sermon saying that these children who were abused, it was the parents' fault. That's when they left the Church again.
So this material is very close to home.
It is, but I think when you see the play you'll see that my relationship to it is very complicated. There's an even weirder level: Is what some of these guys do totally bad? That I also have doubts about. When I was growing up, at certain points I was championed by homosexual teachers who were the only people watching out for me. And why were they doing it? They were really into boys. They were really into my problems. Did they do anything to me? No. Did they want to? I don't know. Did they make a pass? No. Was that in the air? Somewhere yes, it was in the air. Did I take advantage of the good things they were offering me? Yes, because I needed to, because I was isolated and there was no one else. Did that make them bad people? Not to me. Not to me at all.
It's only acting out that compromises a child.
That is correct. And, even then, if it's like some guy putting his hand on my leg and me saying, "Get your hand off my leg," and that's it—frankly I wouldn't have been traumatized. But, of course, what happens is that a lot of kids who are more confused than that about their sexuality, which is perfectly natural at that age—and also out of tremendous need—can become very confused. So there are a lot of levels to it. I'm not interested in issue plays per se, although I'm more interested in them now than I used to be. What I'm not interested in is writing polemics on one side of an issue or another. Doubt does not have to dismantle passion. It can be a passionate exercise.
When you look back, do you see any arc or evolution in your career?
One of the ongoing concerns that I have is how to be intimate with another human being. Another is how to invite everybody to the party. We have to be able to find a way to communicate so that we can talk about anything. That's the one thing we should be able to do—to talk about anything.
We don't necessarily have to be able to do everything.
That is correct. Right now, the Democrats and the Republicans, for instance, are never able to cede anything to the other side. Everything has to be crossfire! Which can be a fun part of a play, but that's a play that never goes to catharsis. It ends up forever stuck in some kind of French existential hell! And that's not what's interesting to me. I want to find the dynamic door that leads out of the dilemma and on into the future.
I grew up in a violent place where people did not communicate well, but where there were big feelings and big longings, and I remember that some of the most interesting people were also the most doomed, because they had no tools to save themselves. In some weird way, the Palestinian character in Dirty Story is a descendent of those people: "If you won't solve my problem, if no one will listen to me, then I'm going to blow you and me up." I certainly knew that guy, I certainly grew up with that guy—and I've got a little bit of that guy in me. I always said that if things went well I would spend the first half of my life writing about my problems, and the second half I would write about other people's problems, and that's sort of what happened—I'm able now to start turning out. Maybe that's why I was able to write Doubt, and why I was able to write Dirty Story. Of course they're personal plays, but they are about larger social concerns.
Your own ethnic background provides a great example of communicating across boundaries and bridging differences.
Yes. I'm very Irish, from an Irish-Italian neighborhood in the Bronx. I grew up in a household where talk was important, music was important, clothing was not important, food was not important. Then I went over to my Italian friends' houses, where the guys were combing their hair with "Hidden Magic" which they'd stolen from their mothers and spending an hour getting dressed, and talking openly about sexuality, which was bad in my household! It was just a much more sensual, ebullient world, I went to their houses to soak up the sheer pleasure of it, the stimulation—and I was like, "I want what they got, plus what I got!"
My father came from Ireland when he was 24, had a brogue and was raised on a farm, basically in the 19th century. And my mother was first-generation—her parents were from Ireland as well. And when I went back to the farm where my father was born—he died two years ago at 96—the people on that farm spoke in poetry, and we really got along. And I thought, "This is much closer to my true family than the particular culture I grew up in!"
Most of your plays are language-driven, and yet we know movies generally aren't—the engine of a film is imagery. How do you think writing screenplays has affected your playwriting?
Actually, the influence is very much the other way around. Playwriting has continued to make my screenwriting possible. Without that constant feedback from the audience, writing can become ungrounded. Audiences show up too late in cinema; you don't get a chance to fix it after they get there. So you better have a very strong sense of what you've got, of what the music is between you and the audience. The theatre gives so much back in that way. I feel genetically born to be a playwright. When I started writing in the dialogue form, I had a complete moment of recognition, like, "Oh! This is what I do!" I'd written in many other forms before that—I started writing when I was 11 and I was a poet, exclusively, for several years. But it wasn't until I was 23, 24, that I tried the dialogue form, and it was instantaneous. I wrote a full-length play the first time I ever wrote in dialogue, and it was produced a few weeks later.
When you reflect back on your personal journey, are you ever amazed that here you are, this troublemaker from the Bronx, who ended up playwright with something to say that lots of people want to hear?
Yes. My life is both inevitable and surprising to me. But I've never had the slightest sense of future. I did not envision a fate. So I don't know why I should have any feeling of surprise.
Source: Robert Coe, "The Evolution of John Patrick Shanley," in American Theatre, November 2004, pp. 22-26, 97-99.