After Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck announced from the podium that John Patrick Shanley had won the 1988 Oscar for Moonstruck, the writer ascended the steps of the stage, grasped the statue, and said, in his thick Bronx accent, “Oh, wow!...I’d like to thank everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life, and everybody who I ever punched or kissed.” Those acknowledgements for his screenplay award reflect in miniature the impetus for and style of Shanley’s writing, whether for stage, television, or film: he oscillates between poignancy and raw intensity that hits audiences like a punch to the gut. His work bears a hallmark dedication to both tenderness and toughness. As fellow playwright Tony Kushner notes, Shanley is “in pursuit of why people behave as badly as they do along with having great compassion for them. That’s an unusual and interesting combination.”
Over the course of nearly four decades, Shanley has written over two dozen plays, ten screenplays, and racked up awards ranging from a place on the Bronx Walk of Fame to the Pulitzer Prize. The road to his success was far from certain during his childhood. Born in 1950 to a father who immigrated from Ireland and a first-generation Irish-American mother, Shanley states that he “grew up in a violent place where people did not communicate well.” He goes on to say that in his neighborhood “there were big feelings and big longings.” His plays likewise toggle between intimate emotions and larger social issues.
Summing up his volatile school years in the playbill for the original production of Doubt, Shanley wrote that “he was thrown out of St. Helene’s kindergarten, banned from St. Anthony’s hot lunch program and expelled from Cardinal Spellman High School.” Shanley went from flinging food in the cafeteria and spending afternoons in detention to a more peaceable school experience at the Thomas Moore Preparatory School in rural New Hampshire. Seeing a production of Cyrano de Bergerac there would inspire his later interest in drama. Shanley had experimented with writing early on in his life, “when I was eleven and I was a poet, exclusively, for several years,” he recalls. Yet in his early twenties—after a stint in the Marines punctuated a tumultuous college career at New York University, where he received academic probation his first year and later returned to graduate as class valedictorian—he remembers that he “tried the dialogue form, and it was instantaneous.”
His first Off Broadway production, Welcome to the Moon, premiered at Ensemble Studio Theatre in 1982, kicking off a decade of theatrical successes, like Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (1983), which follows protagonists Danny and Roberta as they fall in love in a Bronx bar, and Savage in Limbo (1984), a comedy set in another shabby dive in the same borough, where thirtysomething Denise Savage and her former classmates evaluate whether or not they’ve gone far in life. BackStage lauded Savage in Limbo as “existential and dramatically compelling work dealing with our search for roots and purpose in an often purposeless world.” In 1986, Shanley went from representing the Bronx in Italian American Reconciliation to depicting its eponymous neighboring borough in Women of Manhattan. Shortly thereafter, he penned his rom-com Moonstruck, about the romantic tribulations of widowed Loretta Castorini (in a star turn for singer and actress Cher), who eventually finds love in an unexpected place. Time labeled Shanley’s work a “witty, shapely script,” and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences certainly agreed.
After ticket sales for Shanley’s Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks vehicle Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) tanked, Shanley took a break from Hollywood, and returned to playwriting, experimenting with form and theme. His wide-ranging artistic production throughout the 1990s included, among others, the more surreal family drama Beggars in the House of Plenty (1991), a battle royale between Hollywood actresses in Four Dogs and a Bone (1993), and even an adaptation Cellini (1998) about the Italian Renaissance-era biographer of the same name.
The early 2000s saw Shanley grapple with politics in his HBO film Live from Baghdad (2002) and stage-play Dirty Story (2003), a comedy which addressed US involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict. During the lead-up to the War in Iraq, Shanley watched pundits and politicians argue for and against the existence of weapons of mass destruction in that nation, and debate over whether or not to go to war. He noticed that priority seemed to be placed in winning the argument, rather than searching for the truth. Shanley observes, “there is no room or value placed on doubt, which is one of the hallmarks of the wise man. It’s getting harder and harder in this society to find a place for spacious, true intellectual exchange.”
Enter Doubt, his 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the suspicions and concerns raised by two nuns, Sister Aloysius and Sister James, over whether or not a priest, Father Flynn, abused a pupil in their Bronx Catholic school in the 1960s. Shanley reached back to his own schooldays and Sundays spent in Catholic masses for inspiration, and also drew on a family member’s abuse at the hands of a priest. However, Doubt eludes conclusion; Shanley points out that “all of the characters are basically asking you to believe them, each in their own way,” and yet, “all four of them have a secret.”
Shanley’s recent plays include Storefront Church (2012), which explores issues of property, politics, and faith as Bronx pastors, a borough president, loan officers, constituents, and bankers grapple with the mortgage crisis and foreclosure. The Tony Award-nominated Outside Mullingar (2014) tells the story of middle-aged Irish farmers Anthony and Rosemary who grapple with love and the future of their farms; Charles Isherwood praised the play’s “lyrical writing” in The New York Times. Prodigal Son (2016) tells the story of a Bronx teenager attending a New Hampshire prep school, not unlike Shanley’s own teenaged experience. Time Out New York hailed the play as a “keen, passionate portrait of the author as a poetry-spouting romantic punk torn between literary dreams and his roots in the Bronx.” After his latest Manhattan Theatre Club premiere – 2017 comedy The Portuguese Kid – Shanley is slated to return to writing for the screen, adapting Outside Mullingar into the newly titled Wild Mountain Thyme, which he will also direct.
While he remarks that he is “savoring life now,” as opposed to moments when he “used to just wolf it down,” Shanley continues to excavate the potential in dramatic writing to examine relationships, center individual artistic expression, and provide catharsis for audiences. He explains, “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.” Throughout the vicissitudes of his life and career, Shanley has maintained a scrappy sense of perseverance, consistently giving voice to interpersonal connections and disconnections, against the backdrop of pressing social and political problems.
—Alexandra Kennedy