My Life and Times

November 7, 2004
The Confessions of John Patrick ShanleyBy ALEX WITCHEL
ow can you pass up a chance to attend a family reunion with an Oscar winner who got up and thanked ''everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life and everybody who I ever punched or kissed?'' Think of the drama, the intrigue, the ice packs. But in a park in Rockland County, N.Y., on a September Saturday, there was nary an Irish temper in sight. The men in John Patrick Shanley's family toted bags of charcoal, raw meat and tongs. The women, like the Italian characters in Shanley's original screenplay for ''Moonstruck,'' unwrapped enormous bowls of pasta salad and oversize platters of deli sandwiches, more than enough for 40. Everyone shared, hugged, talked, showed pictures and yelled at their kids to stay out of the brook.
Shanley, the youngest of five, father of two, drove up from Manhattan with his sons. He traveled light, taking only a badminton set, two sandwiches from Gourmet Garage and a reporter for The New York Times. Within minutes, the rest of the family had swarmed to the far side of the table, a spontaneous quarantine.
They knew that come November, Shanley, 54, would have three plays opening in New York. They also knew that the curse of having a writer in the family is that everything -- sooner or later -- becomes material. Witness the new lineup: ''Doubt,'' inspired by a relative's experience with a priest who was convicted of child molestation, opens Nov. 22 at Manhattan Theater Club. ''Sailor's Song,'' a lyrical meditation on choosing to love in the face of death, written after Shanley's mother, father and eldest sister all died within an 18-month period, opens Sunday in a LAByrinth Theater Company production at the Public Theater. And a revival of ''Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,'' Shanley's 1984 two-character play about desperate loners afraid of love (think the very dark side of Nicolas Cage and Cher in ''Moonstruck''), opens on Wednesday at Second Stage Theater.
They also knew that it was Shanley's tormented relationship with his mother that became the template for many of his physically and emotionally damaged or maimed male characters (remember Cage's wooden hand?) who must face down a profusion of often indifferent, always ambivalent females. No, certainly no need to go there during a family reunion. Though of their mother, Shanley's older brother, Tom, said gallantly: ''Up to and including me, my mom's batting arm was still good. By the time John came along she was worn out. But I always, always felt loved. She probably didn't hit me enough.''
Shanley only smiled. Those requiring further instruction can refer to ''Where's My Money?'' (2001), his scathing play about divorce, in which a male lawyer says, ''Women consume, and they must be directed what to consume, or they may identify you as lunch.'' From the same play comes one of Shanley's most quoted lines: ''Monogamy is like a 40-watt bulb. It works, but it's not enough.''
Although it was the angst of finding love in and beyond the kind of volatile Irish-American family Eugene O'Neill would recognize that dominated Shanley's earlier plays, it was his biting humor that aligned his work with the surreal domestic comedies of John Guare and Christopher Durang. Shanley has since found increasingly larger canvases for his rage: in last year's political allegory, ''Dirty Story,'' he portrayed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a sadomasochistic relationship between a man and a woman. In The New York Times, Ben Brantley called it ''appallingly entertaining,'' going on to say that Shanley's ''broadening of perspective has led him to create one of the liveliest, boldest and -- against the odds -- funniest studies ever of a subject that even hard-core satirists tend to approach on tiptoe.''
It surprises no one that Shanley's triple crown -- two new plays and a revival -- skirts Broadway, a bottom-line marketplace where ''tiptoe'' rules, and where his plays have never been produced. As Robyn Goodman, a producer of ''Avenue Q,'' last season's Tony Award winner for Best Musical, said: ''When John wants to make a lot of money, he writes 'Moonstruck.' When he writes from his heart as an artist, he's not thinking of mass appeal.''
For Shanley, writing was how he learned to make sense of a childhood in which he was always an outsider. Growing up as a son of an immigrant meat packer in the east Bronx in the 50's and 60's put him in ''a very violent neighborhood,'' he said. ''It was extremely anti-intellectual and extremely racist and none of this fit me. I was in constant fistfights from the time I was 6. I did not particularly want to be. People would look at me and become enraged at the sight of me. I believe that the reason was they could see that I saw them. And they didn't like that.''
His hyperdeveloped skills of observation have afforded him a lifetime of highs and lows. The hard-knocks childhood gave way to a stateside stint in the Marines during Vietnam; a meteoric rise in Hollywood with the success of ''Moonstruck'' led to a meteoric crash after writing and directing the catastrophe that was ''Joe Versus the Volcano.'' An impassioned rededication to the theater followed. Shanley's 23 plays, many of which he has also directed, have been translated into 15 languages, performed in 17 countries and receive about 80 productions a year in the United States and Canada. Both his marriages failed, replaced by, as one theater producer put it, ''a different blonde on his arm every night,'' Kim Cattrall among them. Recently, in a cruel twist, he weathered a siege of glaucoma that has cost him 50 percent of his sight yet, incredibly, has slowed his work pace not at all.
With a history this tumultuous, perhaps it is best to trace its particulars away from the convivial crowd by the brook. Though the quarantine held, Shanley's Aunt Peggy, his mother's only surviving sister, did make room on a picnic bench to offer her own assessment of her nephew's work. ''It's all in his head,'' she confided. ''I think every kid thinks he had a hard time.''
She went on to recall that Shanley's father, who came here at 24 from County Westmeath, used to admonish his youngest son to ''get a real job.'' And he did. Before he won his Oscar, Shanley worked as an elevator operator, a house painter, furniture mover, locksmith, bartender and sandwich maker. But looking and listening and telling a story was the only job that stuck.
Shanley lives on a sunny block in Brooklyn Heights, in a modest apartment building without a doorman. There is color everywhere; bright blue walls in the living room, bright green in the kitchen. There are two small bedrooms, one for Nick and Frank, Shanley's sons (named for his parents, Nicholas and Frances), who come on the weekends. In the otherwise meticulously clean bathroom, a white strand of dental floss lay on the white tiled floor. Like the white birdie at the reunion that flew at him across the badminton net against the white light of the sky, Shanley could not see it.
He sat at a large dining-room table across from his desk, which was jammed with scripts. Above his computer, a framed handmade sign read ''Make Me.'' A multicolored glass chandelier from Provence hung in the center of the room; another was in the entrance hall.
''That was what they called me in the Bronx,'' he said. ''They said: Your name's Shanley? We'll call you Chandelier. Then it became just 'Lier.' '' He pronounced it ''Leah.'' Along with his huge, bursting laugh, the Bronx comes and goes when Shanley speaks, though it doesn't stray far. The kid from the hot-lunch program who never saw a play until he worked on a high-school production of ''Cyrano de Bergerac'' broke through barriers of class and education to become one of the theater's most successful playwrights. He wears that victory lightly, although the courtly, cagey manners of an outsider -- always gauging a response, planning a parry -- tend to peek through. He rarely disagrees; he simply restates someone else's opinion until it resembles his own. He seems open and often is, displaying the flamboyance, warmth and humor that have shaped many of his characters. Just as frequently, he will catch himself and draw back. His lips purse, a heady, distancing speech begins and he is gone.
These days, Shanley is dancer thin, and against his graying hair, his blue eyes are vivid. But after five operations they tend to flash unexpectedly, disconcertingly, revealing what look like shards of mirror, a writer's fun-house distortion that seems to dare the person before him: Do you see what I see?
From the beginning, Shanley went to Catholic schools. The Sisters of Charity, who ran St. Anthony's Grammar School, which he attended in the Bronx and has written about in ''Doubt,'' were the sympathetic antithesis to the Irish Christian Brothers who ran Cardinal Spellman High School. ''They beat children with their fists,'' Shanley said. ''I saw a 220-pound brother put a boy, a little gangly boy, against a wall and hit him in the stomach as hard as he could.''
Shanley's response to that environment was to become a professional problem child. In religion class, he insisted he did not believe in God. In the cafeteria, he flung mashed potatoes over his shoulder often enough to get banned from the hot-lunch program. He read science fiction books during all his classes and spent five days a week, every week for most of the two years he was there in detention before the brothers finally kicked him out.
He went instead to the Thomas Moore Preparatory School, a private school with a Catholic orientation, in Harrisville, N.H., which afforded him a few humane teachers. It was their kindness, actually, that was among the reasons he wrote ''Doubt,'' in which a nun suspects a priest of being a bit too interested in a young boy. The strength of the play is how skillfully Shanley exposes the two sides to every suspicion.
''It was homosexual teachers for the most part who saved me,'' Shanley said. ''The head of discipline at Thomas Moore was gay, and he was my friend and protector. Did he have his reasons for being interested in me? Everybody has their reasons. Passion fuels many things, and it's used in many ways. Many of these people never cross the line.''
Shanley's relative, unfortunately, was not as lucky. ''A child in my family was molested by a priest,'' he said. ''The parents went first to the local level, then up the chain of command to a highly placed church official, who took them by the hands and said: 'I'm so sorry this happened to you. I will take care of it.' And then he promoted him. They were so shocked that they left the church for 10 years. But they missed it, so they returned to a parish where the monsignor gave a sermon saying that with these church scandals it was the parents, not the clergy, who were responsible. They had to leave the church again.
''And still another reason I wrote this play is that I'm very aware that debate has become the form of communication, like on 'Crossfire.' 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. It's all becoming about who won the argument, which is just moronic.''
''Sailor's Song'' -- an emotionally raw piece about a man whose wife is dying, the nephew who keeps him company during her coma and the two women he meets in a bar, one of whom channels the dead -- mines his grief over his parents' and sister's deaths. When he began to speak about his father, Nicholas, his ''good parent,'' who died in 2001 at 95, he turned away and wept.
''He was this guy from the land with the ability to forcefully say the thing that needed to be said or to make the observation that cut away everything and revealed the essence of the situation,'' Shanley said. ''He was very affectionate, but from about 20 feet away. He would scream as if there was a chasm, 'I love you, boy!' He was not violent to me, but my oldest brother, Jim, said a curse word when he was, I think, 5 years old, and my father punched him with a closed fist. By the time I showed up he had deeply mellowed out. He slapped me once at my mother's repeated exhortation -- 'Hit him, Nick! Hit him' -- and I could see it broke his heart to do it. He didn't have it in him anymore.''
Shanley's mother died in 2002. So what was the problem, exactly?
''She was a pill,'' he said. ''It took me many years of thinking, reading psychological tomes of various kinds, talking endlessly, writing plays, to finally say: 'You know, she was a pill. That was the problem.' And in my climactic interchange with my mother, she called me up and said: 'What was it? What was so terrible?' And I said very easily, very kindly really, 'Well, you just weren't very affectionate.' And she said, 'No, that's not how I am.' And that was the conversation. To get to that was a byzantine, tortuous road. But that was the crux of it. These things always end up being pretty simple.''
Not really. In Shanley's ''Beggars in the House of Plenty'' (1991), Pop, a butcher, terrorizes his eldest son with a cleaver and says: ''You'll look for love to stop the starving thing in you that I put there, but nothing will stop the starving thing. I'll never approve of you.'' In the same play, Ma bemoans her recurrent headaches.
''My mother wasn't comfortable with me no matter what I did,'' Shanley said. ''When I was a kid, she had these terrible headaches, and was always screaming, 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I've got a splitting headache!' And many years later I said, 'Do you still get headaches?' And she said: 'What are you talking about? I don't get headaches.' I said, 'Wait a minute, when I was growing up you had headaches all the time.' And she thought about it and went: 'Oh, yeah. That's true.' I said, 'When did they stop?' She said, 'When you left.'''
He went on: ''I remember I'd asked if she had seen 'Five Corners,' my first movie. And she said: 'No, I haven't. I understand the mother is thrown out the window in that movie.' And I said, 'Yeah.' That was the end of that subject.''
Not that his father was terribly different. After Shanley's freshman year at New York University, he was placed on academic probation and dropped out to enlist. He returned to school two years later, putting himself through on a combination of the G.I. Bill, loans and odd jobs. In 1977 he graduated as valedictorian.
''My father said, 'It's not too late to join the Sanitation Department,' '' Shanley recalled. ''But he was kind of joking. I would say that my parents were intermittently proud of me. They couldn't hang onto it, you know? It would come and go, like the flu.''
Well, beside his ex-wives, there must be a long line of women who would have loved to get their hands around his mother's neck. He laughed. ''Absolutely,'' he said, adding dryly, ''although you do tend to wrestle with the same problem, so you often choose somebody who is going to give you something to work with.''
It was his second wife, the actress Jayne Haynes, with whom he adopted his sons, who are now 12, in 1992. Through open adoption, he agreed to pay the room and board of two pregnant women, assuming one might change her mind. Neither did.
''We got two children, four and a half months apart,'' Shanley said. ''It was very intense and very hard but ultimately great. Nicky is Mexican-American, from just this side of the Rio Grande. Frankie is a blond, blue-eyed Celt from Texarkana. They're joined at the hip.''
After Shanley's glaucoma was diagnosed, however, it wasn't easy to stop two roughhousing boys from climbing all over Dad. ''The really bad three-year period ended about three years ago,'' he said. When medication failed, surgery became necessary. ''They basically had to puncture the eyes to lower the pressure,'' he continued. ''My eyes deflated, and I went blind in one eye, then in the other, fortunately never at the same time. When you have eye surgery, you have to be awake. They use a topical anesthetic, and by the last surgery I'd become immune to it. I was just in agony. But for some reason it always would time out around productions so that I would go blind and then they would be able to bring back the vision just in time for me to go to work. And then I would be blind in the other eye after I finished that job, and then they'd fix that.
''After the last surgery, the surgeon said, 'You'll take these drops, and if the pressure remains constant, then you're out of the woods.' And he thought for a minute and said, 'Actually, you're never going to be out of the woods.' And I said, 'So I live in the woods now.''' He sighed. ''Look, I can read, I can drive, I can direct plays. But I just, you know, live in a delicate eyeball world.''
And there's no family history of this? He shook his head. ''None,'' he said. ''Except my mother. Late in life.''
n a rainy morning, Shanley went to the Public Theater to hear the first read-through of ''Sailor's Song.'' With three plays opening almost at once, he made the judicious decision to direct none of them.
Sitting at a large table, two actresses threw some moony looks Shanley's way; hope springs eternal on the first day of rehearsal. The playwright responded not at all, until the reading began and one of those actresses spoke some lines. ''Phony Baloney,'' he wrote in the margin of his script. An actor stumbled on a speech and, like everyone else who made a mistake, looked guiltily at Shanley, whose benign expression never changed. Though at a certain point, when one character said, ''It can be a curse to love,'' it became clear that the soft panting noise in the room was Shanley, bent in his chair, crying.
When the reading ended, he went into the lobby of the Public and sat at a cafe table. Even within the theater, Shanley is considered something of an outsider, a tough guy; some of its gay denizens refer to him as Manly John Shanley. But while everyone bows to his talent -- and covets his Oscar -- most people don't know him well. Because he has so often insisted on directing his own work (which has earned him some critical slaps for self-indulgence, when the text might have benefited from an outside eye), some charge that he is, at heart, an arrogant control freak.
''I find that people who say I'm a control freak are control freaks themselves,'' Shanley said calmly. ''For them it's about power; for me, it's about ideas. Nothing would be better than to learn in wiser hands than mine. In the past I have tried that and found that the news was not good. I waited to see my work expanded, and instead, I saw it become less than.
''I have to fight for what I believe. I came from a background that I wasn't going to be able to capitalize on. If I had, somebody could have gotten me into the telephone company or maybe the Fire Department. I was going to be a writer, and I had never met a writer, and I had never gone to the theater. I was completely having to invent this from scratch. It was going to have to be about my craft and my desire to be heard, and you push your way to the front and say, 'Damn it, you're going to do my play.' That kind of braggadocio and aggressiveness, which was in my case based on real conviction -- was very important.''
Because ''Moonstruck,'' which grossed about $80 million and won three Oscars, was only his second movie, he didn't have to fight as long or as hard in Hollywood. The time for that would have been in 1990, after ''Joe Versus the Volcano'' bombed. But he chose not to.
''When I was in Los Angeles, I was in the above-the-line community pretty much all the time,'' he said. ''And it's a very small group of people who basically reassure each other that they must be doing O.K. because they're in the room with these other people. I found it, after a while, just antithetical to my nature. I like to make a good living, but there are limits to how much cash is good for a person to have coming over the transom every day. It's also addictive. Money is like heroin, and I grew up in a neighborhood that was destroyed by heroin. I've watched addiction all my life. Celebrity is like heroin. And constant praise is like heroin. And, you know, no one can resist constant praise. I had to get out.''
Shanley has written numerous screenplays since then; four have been produced, including ''Alive'' and ''Congo.'' A script he co-wrote for HBO, ''Live From Baghdad,'' about journalists who covered the 1991 Persian Gulf war, was nominated for an Emmy Award. ''I still make an awful lot of money out of Hollywood,'' he said. ''And once in a while they make something I write. But that's not my raison d'etre.''
That would be the theater. Tony Kushner, who had a big-time show-biz success of his own with HBO's adaptation of ''Angels in America,'' said of Shanley: ''What I admire most are that his plays are beautifully well made, economical, sharp and coherent. I like the toughness of his writing a lot. He's not a misanthrope, but he's in pursuit of why people behave as badly as they do along with having a great compassion for them. That's an unusual and interesting combination.''
For Shanley, there is no calling greater: ''Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism. That's why sometimes I get very frustrated watching plays. I'm like: 'Man, you have the shot here to say anything and this is what you're saying? This boring retread of a play I've seen 500 times, this denatured Arthur Miller? I mean you could do or say anything that's within the bounds of the law if you don't harm anybody physically, and this is what you're doing?'' He shook his head. ''Theater is just too exciting a prospect to be left to dullards.''
That less-than-collegial attitude may account for the fact that in the 25 years Shanley has been writing and directing in New York, he has never won an award for either. ''Maybe they think I have enough,'' he said easily, getting up to return to rehearsal. ''And if that's it, that's O.K.''
As it is, that Oscar of his is still causing problems.
While even more family arrived at the reunion, Aunt Peggy was recalling that she and her sister Bessie had gone to see each of Shanley's plays, from the very beginning. ''When he won, we were so disappointed,'' she said. ''He never mentioned our names.''
But her granddaughter, Mary Murphy, chimed in, ''It's very cool, having a star in the family.''
The star sat alone, watching Nick and Frank play badminton with cousins, uncles and aunts. When they took a break, conversation centered on starting the sixth grade. At Frank's school, students call teachers by their first names. ''We could have done that, too,'' Shanley said amiably, ''but then we'd be put to death.''
Both boys are protective of Shanley, almost tender in their vigilance of him. They continually surround him, seeming to stand sentry. Maybe it's the glaucoma. Maybe it's because he's just not like other dads. When Frank came off the makeshift court -- a patch of grass dotted with rocks -- and Shanley saw his skinned knee, he said, ''You know, in Ireland, kings were kings until they had a physical imperfection, and then they were put to death.''
His brother Tom quickly interjected, ''Well, Frank, it's a good thing you're not a king.'' But Frank didn't need reassurance. He seems to hear stuff like that all the time. He sat near his father a while longer, then returned to the game.
Shanley watched his sons. ''They're going to fall in love and have their hearts broken,'' he said quietly. ''I don't think I can take it.''
The next time it was Nick who left the court. He wore a silver medallion around his neck, a leadership medal he won at camp. As the apparent conscience of the group, he had determined that there were too many questionable calls on whether the birdie was in or out.
''Dad, we need more string,'' he said.
Shanley seemed puzzled and looked toward the net. ''Why? Is it falling down?''
Nick shook his head. ''No, no, I want outlines,'' he said, gesturing to the court.
''Oh, you want boundaries,'' Shanley said and burst out laughing. ''No, I don't have any of those.''
Nick smiled before turning to go. Actually, he knew that.
Alex Witchel is a staff writer for the magazine.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top