Strong women, strong settings: John Patrick Shanley's world of theater
Who? What? When? Where? Why? The classic storytelling questions, for journalist or for playwright — though not necessarily in that order.
For Oscar, Pulitzer and Tony-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley, the first question is usually: "where?"
"Setting is incredibly important to what I do," said Shanley, who has three plays more or less simultaneously on the boards this season.
The revival of his 1983 play "Danny and the Deep Blue Sea" will no sooner conclude its run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre Jan. 13 than a revival of his 2004 "Doubt: A Parable" with Tyne Daly and Liev Schreiber will open at The Roundabout Feb. 2, followed immediately by a new play, "Brooklyn Laundry," opening at New York City Center Feb 6.
Two of those plays are set in his native Bronx. Which makes it easy for him to nail the details.
"When you write, it's never a generalization," he said. "It's always specific. It's like saying, 'A guy got on a horse.' What guy? What horse? You need to know."
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn...
A third play, "Brooklyn Laundry," is set in the borough where he currently lives. So was his biggest popular hit, the 1987 movie "Moonstruck," which won him an Oscar for his screenplay, while injecting some of his best lines ("Snap out of it!" "It costs money because it saves money") into the cultural bloodstream.
"The whole experience of 'Moonstruck' giving people such joy has been a lasting satisfaction to me," he said.
What people remember about "Moonstruck," as much as stars Cher and Nicolas Cage, is the setting — the Italian neighborhood that Shanley delineated with such humor, love, and attention to detail. That's how he works.
"When I sit down, maybe I'm full of ideas and characters, but where are they?" Shanley said. "I tend to go either to someplace I know incredibly well, or to some escapist fantasy that I have, that I want to flee to."
The three plays in this, his triple-crown year, are all set in his beloved boroughs.
"Danny and the Deep Blue Sea" is about two characters (Christopher Abbott, Aubrey Plaza) striking up a conversation in Bronx bar. "Doubt: A Parable," about the clash of wills between a conservative nun (Daly) and a progressive priest (Schreiber) is set in the Bronx's Parkchester neighborhood.
More, it's set within a specific congregation: The Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul of New York, founded in 1809 (it announced last year that it is closing to new applicants and will die out with its current members). "Those things start to dictate the specifics of the story," he said.
God is in the details
It was the particulars of the nuns' habits, and the details of their world, that — as always — sparked Shanley's imagination.
"I went to a church school in The Bronx for eight years," he said. "That's an incredibly formative period in a person's life, from the time I was 5 until the time I was 12. And I absorbed it. It was in my body. And when I got to adulthood and I was writing a lot I remembered the Sisters of Charity. That very distinctive bonnet. And I thought, someday I'm going to write about that. Because I'd never seen that particular outfit anywhere else. That's something I know about that not many people know about."
Most of us, he said, take our home environments for granted. We forget that they're not familiar to others.
"In fact I was raised by women who had taken a vow of celibacy, and who dressed all in black Victorian mourning costumes — that's pretty freakin' trippy," he said.
Something else, learned from childhood, also made its way into his writing. The toughness of women. Especially in the face of feckless or otherwise questionable men.
Classic specimens are Rose Castorini (Olympia Dukakis) in "Moonstruck," reining in her roving husband (Vincent Gardenia), and Sister Aloysius in "Doubt," determined to get the goods on Father Flynn. Whether she does, and whether he has any goods to get, are part of the interest of the play. Who's the hero, who's the villain? What really happened? That's the "Doubt" of the title.
Eye of the beholder
"The last act happens when people leave the theater," he said. "It's when they start to talk to each other. Because one thing I discovered, when I did the original production of the play — I had my email address in the program, and I heard from a lot of people, and a very common response would be that a husband and wife went to see the play, and went out to dinner afterwards, and they realized they'd seen two different plays. That's wild. That wakes you up to the fact that everyone is a kingdom unto himself."
Strong women also figure in Shanley's new play, "Brooklyn Laundry," whose hero, Fran (Cecily Strong) has gotten to middle age shouldering the burdens of other people.
She has a last chance at romance with Owen (David Zayas), the laundry proprietor — but ultimately finds the baggage of a lifetime not so easy to lay down.
"Her life has already been in progress for almost 20 years by the time she walks into that laundry, and her life starts to interfere," Shanley said. "What her family needs, what her life needs, starts to interfere with anything meaningful happening with this guy. This is a dramedy — certainly, not a comedy. It's about responsibility. It's about self-sacrifice — which I've seen in my life mostly from women. Basically, 'Brooklyn Laundry' is about the people you never hear about, who do heroic things that are the right things to do, even though it costs them."
Further afield
When the need arises, of course, Shanley can leave the greater metropolitan area. "Outside Mullingar" is set in Ireland. "The Portuguese Kid" takes place in Providence R.I. The 1993 movie "Alive," which he co-wrote, is based on the 1972 Andes plane crash.
But even here, his Bronx background came in handy.
"I lived in a place where survival was difficult, and I figured out how to survive," he said. "On an emotional level, it was familiar to me.
"When one of the survivors read the screenplay, he said, 'How does this guy know what it's like to be in the deep snow?' And my response was: 'There's a lot of kinds of deep snow.' "
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: John Patrick Shanley, back to back on Broadway with play revivals
