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The World of John Patrick Shanley
On Growing Up... John Patrick Shanley is from the Bronx. He was thrown out of St. Helena’s kindergarten. He was banned from St. Anthony’s hot lunch program for life. He was expelled from Cardinal Spellman High School. He was placed on academic probation by New York University and instructed to appear before a tribunal if he wished to return. When asked why he had been treated in this way by all these institutions, he burst into tears and said he had no idea. Then he went into the United States Marine Corps. He did fine. He’s still doing okay. — Excerpt from John Patrick Shanley’s biography On Winning Awards... “Well, I really enjoyed winning the Pulitzer. I won an Academy Award back in ‘88 and a Dramatists Guild Award (for Moonstruck), but in New York though, I’ve never won or been nominated in 25 years for the Tony. (Primarily of course because it's the first one that we've brought to Broadway!) It’s kind of exciting to suddenly have all this stuff be showered upon me for one show. It’s almost funny in a way …“ — Broadway.com, 2005 On Audience Response... "The most powerful response is when people go to see the play with family members and friends, and they talk about it afterward and discover things about themselves and each other. I remember one e-mail saying, 'Thank you because I had a conversation with my daughter tonight the likes of which I've never had.'" — Courant.com, 2007 On 1964... “I wrote Doubt about an era of my life where everybody was absolutely certain about everything. And then there was this queasiness, and people started to become uncertain ... The next era really was the late 1960s, where the society really became defiant. They started to rebel against these underlying values that everyone had shared. Out of that came Defiance.” — The Denver Post, 2007 On His Writing... “People want comfort, you know? And, at the same time, we're sick of it, which is why I think people like the play. I'm not interested in morality. One of my larger premises in doing this play, in what's not said, is that doubt itself is a passionate exercise. I think it's perceived in this culture as something weak or denatured, and that's a huge mistake. Conviction is what you do to be comfortable, to write the end on thinking. Doubt keeps you in the present; it keeps you conscious and reacting to and acting on what is going on now. It's work, and people like to avoid work." — ew.com, 2005 On Writing Doubt... “I think there was something in the air I was picking up. There was a quality of certainty being exercised around me that something in me was answering with something that felt very powerful called "doubt." Not a weakness, but in fact a passion to answer this certainty that was not as founded as doubt. Then at another point I started to think about black and white. And about those nuns. And their certainty. And that connected it to the past.” — Broadway.com, 2005 On Growing Up Catholic... “I went to a Catholic Church school in the Bronx and was educated by the Sisters of Charity in the 60s. That's a world that's gone now, but it was a very defined place that I was in for eight years. I realized later on when the Church scandals were breaking that the way a lot of these priests were getting busted had to be by nuns. Because nuns were the ones who were noticing the children with aberrant behavior, distressed children, falling grades, and in some cases they had to be the ones who discovered what was happening. But the chain of command in the Catholic Church was such that they had to report it not to the police but to their superior within the Church, who then covered up for the guy. This had to create very powerful frustrations and moral dilemmas for these women. It was very shortly after that that they started to leave the Church in droves.” — TCG.com, 2006 |
John Patrick Shanley, who wrote critically acclaimed Doubt, has done countless interviews promoting the play. Following (in excerpts from these interviews) are his thoughts on Doubt, his writing and the Catholic Church.