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Interviews
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John Patrick Shanley - the Hottest Writer of Straight Plays on Broadway Philip Fisher talks to the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. The hottest writer of straight plays on Broadway, John Patrick Shanley is a tall, lean man who despite greying hair looks way younger than a man in his mid-50s should. He gave up some time on New Year's Eve, just before a well-deserved holiday in the sun, to talk about his career and his current hit, Doubt. This is selling well, having become the deserved winner of multiple awards in 2005 including both a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize. The meeting took place in the writer's apartment in the Brooklyn Heights area of New York made famous by The Cosby Show, Prizzi's Honour and, most appropriately, Moonstruck. The straight play has almost disappeared from Broadway, with at best no more than two or three running at any time and generally each for no more than a few months. In that context, John Patrick Shanley's debut on the Great White Way is really bucking the trend, having already completed nine months, adding to a four month Off-Broadway run at the prestigious Manhattan Theatre Club. Doubt is set in a Bronx convent in 1964 and this is precisely the kind of institution where the Irish-American playwright was educated at that time. While the play ostensibly considers child abuse by a Catholic priest, itself currently a hot topic, its author had a much deeper and more contemporary agenda, underlying his gripping story. This included "the invasion of Iraq and the utter certainty that my Government had about the weapons of mass destruction being there; and it turning out that they weren't; and how they dealt with that change in reality". It is a thought-provoking piece that has been much discussed by audience members who are obliged to take sides. As its writer puts it, "the last act of the play takes place when people leave the theatre and begin to talk about it". Surprisingly for a prolific writer who is proud of the diversity of his work, until 2005 he had not had a play transfer to Broadway. Though he has never written with large-scale theatres in mind, Shanley can neither explain this omission, nor why Doubt has proved to be such a success, having indubitably become the play of the year in New York. Writing about major issues confronting society fits in with the playwright's current goals. Shanley has for some time known that he wanted to divide his writing career into two parts. The first half would be devoted to "writing about my problems - the second half about society - and that's what has happened". He admits that when he made the transition between the two, "I was grateful to have washed up on the shores of a new world". Shanley's work has proved popular around the world, including some pretty surprising places. Productions of Doubt have already been planned for a long list of countries including France, where Roman Polanski is to direct, Australia, China, South Korea, Spain, Japan and many others. In Japan Shanley's work is revered and he wryly observes that "the National Minister of Education has insisted that every library in the country buy a copy of Welcome to the Moon". For a man with an Irish name and ancestry, one of his more surprising career moves was to join the LAByrinth Theater, which is intended as a Latino company and is best known in Britain for its work with Stephen Adly Guirgis. Shanley explains that "I went to see one of their shows and met John Ortiz (the artistic director). He asked me to write a play and I wrote Where's My Money?, with John in it. It was great fun and later transferred to Manhattan Theatre Club". Subsequently, he has written both a Christmas show for LAByrinth and Dirty Story, a play about the Arab-Israeli conflict that opened to very good reviews, even though "nobody came because this was the time of the invasion of Iraq. It came back in December and after Bush was re-elected, it got really popular". Shanley writes many different types of play but can be seen as a political playwright with liberal tendencies. However, he regards his work as more open and says, "I don't want to write only plays that Democrats would like. I want Democrats and Republicans to be able to have an interesting conversation afterwards". There is no question that this wish is fulfilled by Doubt. There is also to be a film version of Doubt which will be directed by Shanley himself, an experience that he has had once before, with his own screenplay of Joe Versus the Volcano, which was produced by a team that included Steven Spielberg and starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Shanley has wanted to write for as long as he can remember - "I was born a writer" - and was a prize winning essayist as a twelve year old. In his early twenties, after a stint in the Marine Corps, he went to NYU and, having tried out almost every type of writing, "as soon as I started the playwriting course, I immediately recognised that that's what I did and I've been doing it ever since". Over the last thirty years, he has been "a very active playwright", having some 25 plays produced, the most widely-travelled of which was the two-hander Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, which launched the career of John Turturro. The pair have worked together subsequently, notably on Five Corners, Shanley's first film that also starred Jodie Foster. His biggest movie hit to date though, is Moonstruck. This is the 1987 film that starred Cher, Olympia Dukakis and Nicholas Cage and won its scriptwriter an Academy Award, handed over by Audrey Hepburn. He explains rather prosaically that the motivation behind turning to film screenwriting was not so much to emulate Eisenstein or Welles but a desire to avoid "painting people's houses for the rest of my life". From here, he moves on to Defiance, the second play in a projected trilogy about American hierarchy following Doubt. By the end of the third play, he expects to have anatomised the United States today in the way that Sir David Hare did the United Kingdom with his Absence of War trilogy in the 1990s. New York can hardly wait and it can only be a matter of time before this genial and generous man becomes a household name on the other side of the Atlantic as well.
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