Teaching Artist Leah Reddy spoke with John Patrick Shanley about Doubt: Parable.
Leah Reddy: What is your theatre origin story?
John Patrick Shanley: I'm from a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx, and I was educated in Catholic primary school. Then, I went to Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx for two years, until I was thrown out. And when I went there, I was 12 years old, and somebody gave me the tip that it might be fun for me to join stage crew. And so, I joined stage crew, and immediately was put to work building scenery, specifically putting together flats, which often function as walls. They look like walls on the set, and then we would paint the flats or scenic artists would paint the flats to look the way that we wanted them to look, and I really liked this.
Then I was on the run crew when they did Cyrano de Bergerac. I was backstage every night, in the sort of romantic gloom with little colored lights and ropes and weights, counterweights, standing behind these flats while the actors were on stage in brilliant lights and bright costumes, talking this beautiful language. And that peripheral involvement that I had of just not being on stage, but right next to the stage, became kind of my life's role. I became very fond of being near the fire, but not in the fire. That led me, eventually, into being a playwright and a director.
LR: Are there any later educational or professional experiences that shaped you as an artist?
JPS: It’s a lifelong thing. You just look at the moon, the moon continues to be peppered by objects that hit it and constantly change its appearance slightly or a great deal. My experience of my artistic life is that I've continued to collide with all sorts of people and influences, like other people's plays, events in the world, that continue to put some English on my cue ball, to this very day. That's never going to stop until I stop. That first influence I had was Cyrano de Bergerac, and that turned out to be a very, very important influence on my writing life.
[When I was young] I was in a school where I was failing all my subjects, but I kept writing poetry and essays, and I would give those to the English teacher. I wouldn't do the assignments, I would just write what I was writing, and he would give me extra credit for that, so that I would fail the course, but then pass it just with the minimal grade, because I had turned in so many of these things for extra credit. And that very, very modest encouragement kept alive something in me that was going to continue to grow.
I wrote poetry and typed it. My mother had tables that she liked, side tables in the living room, and so to protect them from getting rings on them, she put glass on them, so there would be glass covers on them. She would put my poems under the glass, so that you could read my poetry and it would be protected in that way. And so, I got that maternal encouragement.
And then, in your writing life, you do plays, you write plays, you put them on, and sometimes they fail. You have this terrible, terrible experience of what you're writing boring people and making them stand up and walk out. Those experiences you never forget, and those help you, because you write your next play and you go, "Well, I'm never doing that again," whatever the heck it was that you did. "I'm never going to hold forth what I think is really important about life, or something like that, because nobody cares." What they care about is telling the story well, and maybe sometimes, if you're fortunate, the story has reverberations beyond its telling, like Doubt.
LR: That's a great transition to my next question. Why did you title it Doubt: A Parable, and were you influenced by a specific parable?
JPS: I wrote the play, and we were in rehearsal and it occurred to me that the audience might not connect the play to other things, that they might simply see it as this sort of whodunit kind of thing, and that was not my intention. And so, because I was very fond, and still am, of Bible stories, especially the parables that Jesus would pose, because they're really kind of inexplicable. You can't get to the bottom of those, most of them.
There was one, in particular, that always struck me, and that was there's a parable about a guy who's got a vineyard and it's time to harvest the grapes. So, he hires a guy for, I don't know, five shekels in the morning, to help him harvest the grapes, and that's at like 7am. And then, at about 8:30am, he's like, "You know what? This guy's not going to be able to handle the whole thing," and he hires another guy for the same price at that time. And then, at 11:00 he goes, "I need more help," and he hires another guy, same price, and another guy in the middle of the afternoon, same price.
At the end of the day, they manage to bring in the harvest, and it's time for the workers to get paid, and the guy that he hired first thing in the morning objects. He goes, "Wait a minute. How is it that I am getting paid for working the whole day, and that guy, who only worked the last hour of the harvest, is getting the same pay that I am? That's not right." And the employer says, "Look, did I pay you when I said I'd pay you?" And the guy says, "Yes." He says, "What is it your business what my deal is with another person?"
That argument has stayed with me my whole life, because in a way, it has to do with that idea of, first of all, it does away with the basis of jealousy, but also that each of us has our fate, our individual fate, and we can't bargain with other people's fates and sort of like, "Well, I'd like a bit of his fate and her fate and..." It's like you're on a path of your own. And if you believe in the deity, you have a relationship with something divine, and it is between you and that divinity, and no one else. And if you don't believe in a divinity or whatever, still, you are in a relationship with the universe, that it's just you and that path. That's it. That's all you have.
Misery is invited by the idea of comparison. It's just not necessary to look at your fellow creature and think, "I measure my life against that person's life." And certainly, now there's a great deal of that going on, but there always has been, there always has been.
LR: Thinking about revisiting this piece, how do you feel Doubt's themes reflect today's time and who you are now?
JPS: Well, I think that, in particular, I've done a lot of plays and movies, but Doubt, in particular, is not about me, it's about society. It's about us, the human predicament, on one level. First of all, the time that I wrote the play about was a time where I was in my life and everything, and this is often the way with a kid, everything seems to have always been the way it is, and that it will always continue to be that way. And then, as it turned out, this is 1964, we're not going to make it to 1970 before all of it is swept away, all of it.
The nuns will not be wearing those habits anymore, they will change their names, what is being taught will be different, the neighborhood will be different, people will leave in droves, other people will come in droves. And this is a neighborhood that's been very stable for many years. The concept of law and order, of shared civility, all of that is going to change, and I didn't know it. And the earthquake that began with Kennedy's assassination was just getting going into a larger framework at that point, that was going to transmogrify, there's a nice vocabulary word, everything I knew. And that, when we did the play [in 2004], some people were having a sense of that in the world.
Now, while the play's being revived, I think everybody has got that sense that there has been an enormous earthquake and shift, and everything that they understood to have permanence now feels shaky and uncertain. I feel like this time, the audience is where I was when I wrote the play, and that they've come to join me there. We are, as a group, experiencing looking back at a time of evident stability that's in the play. Sister Aloysius thinks she's protecting a way of life that will be ongoing, and in fact, she's protecting a way of life that is about to be swept away.
The poignancy of that, and the value of what those nuns were offering at that time, is now thrown into prominent relief. Sometimes I do a play and I think, "I'm putting on this play and I hope people enjoy it and are stimulated by it and everything else." With Doubt, I feel I'm going to have the play do to me what it does to the rest of the audience. This play is smarter than I am, and it will speak to me in a different way, and I do not even yet completely know what that way will be.
LR: What advice do you have for emerging playwrights, thinking especially for our young people?
JPS: When I was a kid, I had these experiences – I went to this church school, I had these nuns and everything else, I looked around me and all my peers, my friends, and parents, and other people's parents and all of them, they were all having the same experience that I was. So when I sat down to write, that's not something I would write about, because I thought, "Everybody knows that." And meanwhile, nobody knew that but this little world that I was in, and the same holds true for everybody who's having these experiences when they're growing up and when they are grown up. It's a natural assumption, "Well, that's not interesting, everybody knows that." They don't.
In my case, and the case of that play, it's really extreme. I was living through history that no one might remember unless somebody wrote it down. Right now, you're living through history, you're a writer, let's say you're 15 years old, you're a writer and you think, "I want to be interesting. I should write something interesting." And you don't know that the most interesting thing that you could write is what's actually going on. It's like the last thing you want to write about. It's boring, you think. And meanwhile, to other people, it's not boring. They don't know about it.
LR: Thank you. I think that will resonate with a lot of our students. We have some amazing, prolific, young playwrights who are just sort of already on that path. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you want to talk about?
JPS: Speaking as a playwright, I mean, I find playwriting incredibly exciting, because nobody can stop you. If you write movies, you need all these people with all this money to get something going, unless of course, you do it on your phone. But you have this feeling that you're going to need help promoting it and all that stuff, television, the same thing. Poetry, who's going to read it? I mean, I started out as a poet, and some people liked my poetry, but it was a thing to get somebody to read your poem. And then, when I started writing plays, I found out that there were people who really like to act, and they will perform your play. And I found that there are other people who want to see what those people are doing, and they'll come to that.
People come and it's an event, it's exciting, and you learn and you get better at it from doing that, and nobody can stop you. You don't need any money to do that. You just need some people who feel like putting on a show, and there are always people who want to put on a show, always. And, if nothing else, you have some laughs, but it can turn out to be so much more than that.
It's a way of communicating with other people. If you're a poet, it's a way of getting people to listen to your poetry. They will listen to it, if it's in the setting of a play, that's what Shakespeare caught onto. He started off as a playwright, pardon me, as a poet. And then, one day, I think he's like, "You know what? I want more people than these 50 people who know how to read. I want all those guys, like the guy who's selling fish, who's illiterate, I want to reach him." And you can, you can, by doing a play. And he figured that out, and I think he had a lot of fun doing it.