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	The Playwright and the Seeds of 'Doubt' The War in Iraq Played a Key Role in John Patrick Shanley's Tony-Winning Tale By Nelson Pressley Washington Post March 11, 2007 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030900507.html New York — John Patrick Shanley has won a lot of big writing prizes — the Oscar, the Tony, the Pulitzer. But lately the acclaim is so universal that he's even getting impressive editorials. "Shanley's play is short in duration but long on hard truths," gushed the Boston Globe last month. The work in question was the widely lauded "Doubt," and by then the Globe was merely jumping on the bandwagon. "Doubt" debuted off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club, rapidly moved to Broadway in 2005, then won the Pulitzer and four major Tony Awards, including best play. Cherry Jones is reprising her Tony-winning performance as Sister Aloysius in the current tour — another rare measure of success for a drama — that arrives Tuesday at the National Theatre. And next year "Doubt" goes Hollywood, with Shanley directing and Meryl Streep to star. It's a theatrical juggernaut but hardly a breakthrough. Shanley made it big with his Oscar-winning screenplay for "Moonstruck" in 1987, famously thanking "everyone who ever punched or kissed me in my life, and everybody who I ever punched or kissed." Yet after Shanley's more than two dozen plays over three decades, the sly, crowd-pleasing "Doubt" is easily his biggest stage success. And he can't say why. "You write these things, and you never know," Shanley says over cupcakes in a kids' bookstore. (The place is just down the street from where he lives in downtown Manhattan, and the toddler-driven ambiance confers upon the playwright an unpretentious charm.) Certainly "Doubt" — which traces the concerns of a nun who suspects a priest of molesting a student — could be torn from the headlines. In part, the Globe editorial was an acknowledgment of the abuse scandals that ran through the Catholic Church in recent years. "I thought about the priests, that question," says Shanley, recalling the genesis of the play, which is set in 1964. "But it's too on-the-nose. That's just an issue play, and I don't really want to write an issue play." And yet the story was inspired in no small measure by a different unrelenting headline: the weapons-of-mass-destruction muddle. "Doubt" director Doug Hughes, who has known Shanley for more than 20 years, points out: "When John was composing this play, we were ramping up and invading Iraq. And the government would brook no objection to its certainty — would not countenance doubt." Says Shanley of the run-up to the current war in Iraq: "We were asked to believe in something based on this moral authority of government that was basically: 'Trust me. I have intelligence that you don't have. I would never say this to you if I wasn't really sure.' But we never did see that intelligence." Audiences won't hear any of that mentioned in the tightly plotted 90-minute play, which Hughes calls "a high-powered thriller of sorts." "Doubt" can be taken straight, as a tantalizing dilemma between the suspicious nun and the charming priest. Shanley deliberately kept the political resonance at arm's length. "I pushed it away," he says. "I didn't want it to be knowing about some future time. I want it to be about the time that it's in, and only the time that it's in. But I hear the echo." The result, says Jones, is "the most dependable play I've ever been in, as long as you keep the balance honest — really make it hard for the audience to choose between the two main characters." It might seem inconsistent, this cool parable from a writer who made his name as a hot-blooded romantic. Shanley's early plays ("Savage in Limbo," "Danny and the Deep Blue Sea") and films ("Five Corners," "Moonstruck") were filled with passionate characters and ravishing street language. Influences on the young artist included reading Plato's "Dialogues" and seeing "Cyrano de Bergerac" at an early age. Shanley's native New York accent emerges as he recalls that student production of "Cyrano": "It was as fahh from the Bronx as one could get. Still, it had an element of 'West Side Story' about it, and certainly an element of the Bronx. So I got this idea that my life and my culture [were] on some level no less than 'Cyrano de Bergerac.' " Shanley began as a poet, but didn't like the career path. "You can't even get one person to sit down and listen to a poem," he grouses amiably. "It's not the era we live in, you know?" Yet his plays and movies have often been brazenly poetic. "If you look at the language of 'Moonstruck,' " he explains, "it's incredibly stylized, just doing exactly what the hell I want. It's very influenced by the Old Testament, the King James version of the Bible. But it was me listening to people on the street — not, 'How can I make people speak that way?' They are speaking that way." Hughes says that from the beginning, Shanley struck him as "somebody who had drunk from the poetical elixir, who was on fire about the stage as a place of activated poetry. And that's never changed." It comes through in the way Shanley talks, even though his conversational style is as laid-back as his faded jeans and untucked shirt. Within minutes he's talking about the Stoics and how he adopted their philosophy at an early age. Shanley sounds like one of his characters when he says: "I was living in a world that was quite passionate and violent and all that. And I developed a philosophy based on that [stoicism] and on my own interior experience of life, just of acceptance of whatever was goin' on." A question about "Doubt's" national tour leads to thoughts on the recent remarks made by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California about the city-state. Shanley segues into the positive potential of states' rights (which "got a bad rap because it became code for segregation") and concludes that audiences across the country "want the Tony winner" when hits like "Doubt" come around. "And the Tony winners," he finishes with a twinkly smile, "are smelling that another way to national prominence, besides film, is to go around and do what Harry Truman did." That's right: Harry "Whistle Stop" Truman. Shanley's bent for expansiveness and poetry, though, backfired when his "Moonstruck" success led to the film "Joe Versus the Volcano," the quirky fable starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. "I took a lot of [grief] for that movie," says Shanley, who not only wrote but also directed. Despite that critical drubbing, he might have tried directing again if his personal life hadn't grown complicated. Shanley and his then-wife (he's twice divorced) adopted two boys, now 14, and then his advanced glaucoma led to several eye surgeries. Yet the sharpest turn in his professional life came on a single day: 9/11. "You're a New Yorker, that happens, you wake up," he says. "You're going, 'Oh, my feelings,' and 'I can't find the right girl,' and it's like, Wake up. There's other big stuff going on." He can't remember what he was working on during the terrorist attacks (it was "Where's My Money?", a vicious comedy about — guess what? — divorce). But after that day, he tore into the well-reviewed, seldom-revived "Dirty Story," a comedy about a bickering couple who turn out to be stand-ins for the Israelis and Palestinians. Then came "Doubt," the first in a trilogy dealing with hierarchies in America. (Shanley's "Defiance," dealing with racial issues in the military of the 1970s, was another Hughes production for Manhattan Theatre Club last year; the playwright hasn't begun the third work.) Lest people accuse him of churning out left-wing agitprop, Shanley reports that Israeli and Palestinian audiences alike called "Dirty Story" fair. "And they don't agree on much," he says. His target, in "Doubt" and in a conversation that keeps circling back to Iraq, doesn't seem to be policy so much as public discourse. He blames both major political parties for the "diagrammatic" tone, and the media, too. "I'm not interested in 'Hardball' as a proper forum to talk about grown-up issues," he says. "I don't think what Chris Matthews is doing is adult. I think it's an incredibly old sophomore bullying his way through the debating club. I don't think that's the way to talk about these things." His own dashing, romantic tone — the one that first brought him acclaim — might be revived and amplified if he gets back to work on the musical of "Moonstruck," a project that got derailed a few years ago but that he'd like to see through. Meantime, his next play will be a collection of related one-acts called "Romantic Poetry," then he'll try his hand behind the camera for the first time since "Joe" to film "Doubt," returning to the maddening oddities of the Hollywood he savaged in his comedy "Four Dogs and a Bone." " 'Doubt' is particularly close to me; it's about my neighborhood," he says, explaining his eagerness to film it himself. Breaking into a fatalistic grin, he adds: "Of course they'll probably tell me, 'It's cheaper in Romania, and there's a place that looks exactly like your neighborhood.' And they'll show me photographs. Suddenly you're in Romania going, 'How did this happen?' "
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