John Patrick Shanley's award-winning Doubt ends with no neat resolution. But the audience can e-mail him with comments and questions, he tells Belinda McKeon
For more than a year, it was the show that had Broadway abuzz. Then, when its producers announced an American tour, it became the show that theatres across America were begging to stage. It broke box-office records at its Broadway home - several times over. It more than recouped the $20 million (€30 million) spent to get it there. It won a Pulitzer Prize and a whole mantel's worth of Tony Awards. And all without a sequin in sight. It is a straight play with the staying power of a musical, and its author - in the process of moving into his plush new apartment in Manhattan's West Village - has every reason to be cheerful. The Bronx-born writer John Patrick Shanley's play has come a long way from that day in a rehearsal studio when he announced, to nobody in particular, that he wanted to write a play called Doubt.
"An actor beside me said, 'what's it going to be about?'," recalls Shanley, grinning beneath his trademark floppy grey fringe as he sits outside a cafe on the corner of his new block. "I said, 'oh, that's all I have. Just the title.'" He laughs.
Having written more than 20 plays before Doubt, and having seen most of them produced off-Broadway, Shanley has a pragmatic approach to writing theatre; once the idea reveals itself, in whatever form that may be, the hard work of chipping away at its flinty exterior begins.
"And you have to have faith," he says. "You don't know the hell what you're going to write after this, how are you going to turn the corner with it, but you have to have faith that you will."
IT'S A PROCESS he is going through at the moment as he strives to meet the deadline for the screenplay of the film version of Doubt. Though Shanley is a screenplay writer of some experience - he won as Oscar in 1988 for Moonstruck - he has been finding it difficult, he says, to adapt Doubt for the screen.
"Because it was conceived for four people, talking for long periods of time, in very few rooms," he says, "it's a challenge." Doubt, which will this month have its Irish premiere in a new production at the Abbey Theatre, is a play which centres around a challenge, and which has its power in the challenge it presents to its audience.
Set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, it presents a bitter confrontation between a well-loved priest and a steely nun. Father Flynn is accused by Sister Aloysius of being sexually involved with a student. The subject matter is a troubling one, but Doubt is as funny as it is disquieting. As for what it leaves its audience with, the play's title says it all. To be intensely concerned with a serious question, Shanley shows, is not necessarily to answer that question. Though in its neat structure Doubt exemplifies the well-made play, it ends with no neat resolution, and resists the temptation to pull definitively at its dangling loose ends.
And yet nobody could accuse Shanley of leaving his audience high and dry. Printed under his biographical note in the programme for doubt is an e-mail address - shanleysmoney@aol.com - to which playgoers are invited to write with their comments, questions, and anything else they want to address to the scribe. It may look like a publicity stunt, but in fact it's a tactic which Shanley takes very seriously; he answers every e-mail, no matter how off-message the e-mails can be. And they can be off-message. Along with the demands to know which character should be believed, and the notes on costume details from priests, there have been offers both romantic ("Leggy Blonde Who Lives Near You") and artistic (one man sent Shanley an entire alternative ending to the play, complete with new light cues).
There have also been moving messages from priests struggling with their sexuality, and from men admitting for the first time to youthful encounters with priests. Regardless of what kinds of stories his correspondents have to tell, Shanley likes to hear from them.
"When you're a playwright, you're in dialogue with the audience," he explains. "And when your email address is in the programme, the dialogue continues."
Shanley maintains that the conversations between audience members after Doubt ends comprise the play's last act. Printing his e-mail address - something he has done for his last four plays - allows him to be a part of those conversations. Of course, it also has the useful function of allowing him to spy on productions and ensure that all is going according to plan.
"I had one play that I allowed a theatre out west to do, and I got a message from the director telling me how well it was going," he says. "And then I got e-mails from the audience telling me that the actress kept forgetting her lines. So I wrote back to the director saying, that's not what I hear; I hear that the actress isn't off book yet!"
He laughs. "So it's a way of accurately finding out what's going on, not through the opinion of any one person, but through a consensus."
DOUBT IS A play with deep contemporary relevance, but so acute is that relevance - every week seems to bring fresh scandals for the Catholic Church - that it risks seeming shallow or simple. It's the strength of Shanley's writing which makes the difference. Even as it flows with a conversational pace, his language has its roots in profound moral dilemmas; it grapples with issues of belief and betrayal, of religion and responsibility. This reach beyond the central drama is one of the reasons he gave the play the subtitle A Parable.
"I wanted the audience to see the play for more than just a story in itself, a whodunnit," he says. "I was giving them the hint that they might want to look beyond that and make other connections."
In the ambiguity it exhibits at its core, Shanley says, the play is about faith; indeed, it is a play about the nature of his own faith. In what sense? "In that I am comfortable by now with discomfort," he says. "I am . . . and this is an achievement of many years' work, I am comfortable with paradox, and I prefer it. I don't find it inhibiting, or in the way of my passionate response to things. People ask me if I believe in things: in God, in astrology, and I say, absolutely! I believe in everything! And I believe in its opposite. Like the positive and negative volts on a battery, you need both for power."
SHANLEY WAS EDUCATED in Catholic schools, in the Bronx and New Hampshire, and was thrown out of almost every one of them - including his kindergarten. At NYU, he was placed on academic probation and responded by joining the Marine Corps (he later returned to NYU). Though he did not regard himself as disruptive at the time - "I had no idea what was going on at all, people seemed to be reacting to me as if I was doing a lot of things" - he is not bitter about the difficulties of his religious education; he recently returned to the school where he was most unhappy, a Christian Brothers high school, to give a talk to students. Harping on about the scars of Catholicism is not for him.
"It's an interesting way to be brought up. It's a very specific thing that you can react against, and it's a mythology that you can manipulate to express almost anything." Looking back on his childhood, he now realises that the impression he had of how he was treated by his teachers was not an accurate one. And that realisation has marked a turning-point of sorts in his development as a playwright.
"Most playwrights, myself included, when they first write about their family, write a play where everybody in the family is crazy except them, except the character based on them." He laughs. "And their character is a very reasonable person, and very wan, very pale, a sort of ghostlike figure saying, 'oh, why are you so crazy?' And a writer truly grows up when they see that they're one of the crazy people in their family, and maybe not one of the sanest; that they may be even more active than other people in the family at causing trouble, or disharmony, or miscommunication."
So has he grown up? "I have. I have. I made a sort of New Year's resolution once that for the first half of my writing life, I would write about my problems, about my personal concerns, and for the second half, I would move on to larger concerns - my culture, my society, the world around me. And that I would try, if I grew enough in the first half of my writing life, to be able to bring the personal to the larger themes."
Part of "the personal" for Shanley, of course, is his background as an Irish-American. His father moved to the Bronx from a Co Westmeath farm in the 1930s. Growing up, he felt more of an affinity with his father and with his Irish uncles than with other people around him, and it was when he returned to the farm in Ireland, which is still owned by his cousins, that he first felt "at home", he says. "They spoke the same language that I did. They spoke in verse. It was all poetry."
There are plenty of Irish people who would raise a doubtful eyebrow at that description of their speech, I tell him, and he smiles. "When I would go to the farm in Ireland, I would have a notebook and write down everything that my aunt and uncle and cousins said. And then they'd have a party, and I would read back to them what they had said. And they would laugh until the tears rolled down their faces. It was the most entertaining thing in the world to hear themselves talk."
Will any of his Westmeath cousins be going to the Abbey for Shanley's opening night? He grins. Only 18 of them, he says
Doubt by John Patrick Shanley runs at the Abbey Theatre from Oct 25-Nov 25 (Previews Oct 21, 23, 24). A post-show interview with Shanley will take place at the Abbey on Oct 26. A preshow talk by comedian Kevin McAleer takes place on Nov 7
