Shanley and the Deep Blue Sea

“Doubt” writer John Patrick Shanley on stage, screen, and survival

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, August 31, 2009

Your Broadway play wins a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony, and a Drama Desk Award. You write and direct a film adaptation, which is nominated for five Academy Awards and as many Golden Globes. What do you do for an encore?

If you’re “Doubt” author John Patrick Shanley, you do what you’ve always done: Write something utterly different.

The playwright, screenwriter, and director is presenting a staged reading of his latest play, “Pirate,” as part of New York Stage and Film’s 25th season at Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theater. Emerging from a six-hour rehearsal, he blinks in the sunlight and speaks in a gravelly rasp with the unmistakable cadence of his native Bronx. “It got nice out. Let’s walk.”

Shanley strolls across campus at an easy lope. His manner is quietly confident, verging on cockiness; this is far from his first interview. He can be gracious, even courtly, but there’s also a sense of some inner lava on permanent simmer.

The youngest of five, he grew up in East Tremont, a working-class neighborhood full of Italian and Irish immigrants. His father was a meat-packer, his mother a telephone operator. The home was tumultuous, and Shanley was often in neighborhood fistfights. He started school at St. Anthony’s, a Catholic grammar school that served as his model for “Doubt.”

When Shanley was 11, he started writing “kinda sorta Edgar Allan Poe poetry, gangster 1920s machine-gun kind of stuff.” By 13, he’d written a four-line poem about the Holocaust that caught his teachers’ attention. “People took notice of me,” he says. “They thought I had something.”

That wasn’t the only reason people took notice: The rebellious teenager spent virtually every afternoon in detention at Cardinal Spellman High School. The poet and the pugilist came together when he worked on the stage crew of “an amazing production” of “Cyrano de Bergerac.” “I loved the depiction of the poet as the toughest guy in the room–and a freak,” Shanley says with a wild, braying laugh. “And that a poet can be in the theater. And I liked colored lights.”

Midway through high school, Shanley was expelled. He spent the next two years at a Catholic-run private school in Harrisville, New Hampshire, which he describes as “500 acres on top of a mountain...snowy, windswept—that’s all it is, is winter.” There were 55 students, all boys. “It was very intense, very different from the Bronx,” Shanley says. Here, too, teachers encouraged his talent for writing.