Shanley at opening
Born in the Bronx in 1950, John Patrick Shanley likes to call attention to his urban bad-boy background. In his Playbill “bio” for the New York production of Doubt he said this about himself:
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.
A working-class reprobate, a boat-rocking intellectual, and a Marine, Shanley has written more than a score of plays reflecting this multi-faceted past. In Italian-American Reconciliation, for example (produced by the Public Theater in 2000), he examines the perils and poetry of love among gun-toting blue-collar folk from the outer boroughs. By contrast, in Psychopathia Sexualis (produced at The Public in 1999), he explores sexual obsession as experienced by well-heeled Manhattanites and their brainy shrinks. And in Defiance (2006) he portrays life in the Marine Corps in the 1970s.
Set in a parochial school in the Bronx in the early 1960s, Doubt (2004) clearly draws on those childhood experiences Shanley cites in his “bio.”
According to Everett Evans in The Houston Chronicle, the playwright’s “years at St. Anthony’s grade school supplied the play’s milieu, right down to the distinctive attire worn by the Sisters of Charity. A fondly remembered teacher inspired the character of Sister James, the impressionable young nun who becomes a pawn in the central conflict.”
The playwright told Broadway World.com’s Robert Diamond that, “I’ve reconnected to my own past in many ways as a result of doing the show. My first grade school teacher, Sister James, who still teaches, has come back and was my guest at my opening night. . . . I’ve heard from a lot of nuns and clergy who have both liked the play. . . “
Although the play is rooted in the particulars of the playwright’s own past, Shanley wants us to know that he intends Doubt to reach far beyond the Bronx in 1964. Explaining the genesis of the play to David Drake at Broadway.com, he recalls that while rehearsing for another show, “just out of the blue, apropos of nothing—I said, ‘Think I’m gonna write a play called Doubt.’ And someone said, ‘Well, what’s it about?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.”
But eventually an idea began to form, coalescing around what Shanley felt to be an objectionable “quality of certainty being exercised around me. . . ” To this quality, “something in me was answering with something that felt very powerful called ‘doubt.’” Far from seeing doubt as a weakness, Shanley says that it was in fact “a passion to answer this certainty.” In fact, he felt that certainty was far less reliably “founded” as an approach to the world than the more tentative, and therefore more trustworthy, attitude of doubt.
Summarizing this process for the Houston Chronicle, he declares, “I wanted to write a play embracing doubt. About the merit of doubt as opposed to certainty.” Such a project, he acknowledges, runs counter to the human “attraction to absolutes. . . . People want to get everything all settled. . . . But if you want to understand anything about the human experience, it’s not about . . . ‘the verdict.’ How the two adversaries handle their clash is the important thing.”
Clearly, this play about a priest accused of sexually exploiting an eighth grade boy is in part a reaction to the sexual scandals that erupted within the American Catholic Church in the years just preceding the play’s 2004 opening. But, Shanley tells the Chronicle, it was also inspired by “the certainty about weapons of mass destruction (as a rationale for the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq). I kept saying, ‘How do they know?’ Why are people so accepting of this notion [?]” In the end, though, Shanley insists that “the play is no more about Iraq than it is about the church sex scandals. ‘I’m not a topical writer. I’m writing about something unanswered.’” In other words, both the sex scandals and the controversy over weapons of mass destruction were particular instances of what Shanley takes to be a universal proposition: when in doubt, doubt.
Doubt went on to win a number of Tony Awards in 2005, including Best Play. It also won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for that year. These were the first playwriting awards bestowed on the author in a prolific career in theater that spanned three decades. Ironically, his most notable previous accolade was in another medium, film. In 1988 he won the Academy Award for best screenplay for the romantic comedy, Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicholas Cage.
According to Everett Evans in The Houston Chronicle, the playwright’s “years at St. Anthony’s grade school supplied the play’s milieu, right down to the distinctive attire worn by the Sisters of Charity. A fondly remembered teacher inspired the character of Sister James, the impressionable young nun who becomes a pawn in the central conflict.”
The playwright told Broadway World.com’s Robert Diamond that, “I’ve reconnected to my own past in many ways as a result of doing the show. My first grade school teacher, Sister James, who still teaches, has come back and was my guest at my opening night. . . . I’ve heard from a lot of nuns and clergy who have both liked the play. . . “
Although the play is rooted in the particulars of the playwright’s own past, Shanley wants us to know that he intends Doubt to reach far beyond the Bronx in 1964. Explaining the genesis of the play to David Drake at Broadway.com, he recalls that while rehearsing for another show, “just out of the blue, apropos of nothing—I said, ‘Think I’m gonna write a play called Doubt.’ And someone said, ‘Well, what’s it about?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.”
But eventually an idea began to form, coalescing around what Shanley felt to be an objectionable “quality of certainty being exercised around me. . . ” To this quality, “something in me was answering with something that felt very powerful called ‘doubt.’” Far from seeing doubt as a weakness, Shanley says that it was in fact “a passion to answer this certainty.” In fact, he felt that certainty was far less reliably “founded” as an approach to the world than the more tentative, and therefore more trustworthy, attitude of doubt.
Summarizing this process for the Houston Chronicle, he declares, “I wanted to write a play embracing doubt. About the merit of doubt as opposed to certainty.” Such a project, he acknowledges, runs counter to the human “attraction to absolutes. . . . People want to get everything all settled. . . . But if you want to understand anything about the human experience, it’s not about . . . ‘the verdict.’ How the two adversaries handle their clash is the important thing.”
Clearly, this play about a priest accused of sexually exploiting an eighth grade boy is in part a reaction to the sexual scandals that erupted within the American Catholic Church in the years just preceding the play’s 2004 opening. But, Shanley tells the Chronicle, it was also inspired by “the certainty about weapons of mass destruction (as a rationale for the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq). I kept saying, ‘How do they know?’ Why are people so accepting of this notion [?]” In the end, though, Shanley insists that “the play is no more about Iraq than it is about the church sex scandals. ‘I’m not a topical writer. I’m writing about something unanswered.’” In other words, both the sex scandals and the controversy over weapons of mass destruction were particular instances of what Shanley takes to be a universal proposition: when in doubt, doubt.
Doubt went on to win a number of Tony Awards in 2005, including Best Play. It also won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for that year. These were the first playwriting awards bestowed on the author in a prolific career in theater that spanned three decades. Ironically, his most notable previous accolade was in another medium, film. In 1988 he won the Academy Award for best screenplay for the romantic comedy, Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicholas Cage.
Born in the Bronx in 1950, John Patrick Shanley likes to call attention to his urban bad-boy background. In his Playbill “bio” for Doubt (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and was staged at The Public Theatre in 2008) he said this about himself:
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.”
A working-class reprobate, a boat-rocking intellectual, and a Marine, Shanley has written more than a score of plays reflecting this multi-faceted past. In Italian-American Reconciliation, for example (produced by the Public Theater in 2000), he examines the perils and poetry of love among gun-toting blue-collar folk from the outer boroughs. By contrast, in Psychopathia Sexualis (produced at The Public in 1999), he explores sexual obsession as experienced by well-heeled Manhattanites and their brainy shrinks. And in Defiance (2006) he portrays life in the Marine Corps in the 1970s.
Outside Mullingar is also rooted in the playwright’s personal experiences. The Encyclopedia of World Biography tells us that he,
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.”
A working-class reprobate, a boat-rocking intellectual, and a Marine, Shanley has written more than a score of plays reflecting this multi-faceted past. In Italian-American Reconciliation, for example (produced by the Public Theater in 2000), he examines the perils and poetry of love among gun-toting blue-collar folk from the outer boroughs. By contrast, in Psychopathia Sexualis (produced at The Public in 1999), he explores sexual obsession as experienced by well-heeled Manhattanites and their brainy shrinks. And in Defiance (2006) he portrays life in the Marine Corps in the 1970s.
Outside Mullingar is also rooted in the playwright’s personal experiences. The Encyclopedia of World Biography tells us that he,
grew up the youngest of five children in an Irish-Catholic family whose home was in the Bronx neighborhood of East Tremont. His father, a meatpacker, was an Irish immigrant, while Shanley's mother was herself the daughter of Irish immigrants. The East Tremont streets were home to similar working-class Irish and Italian families.
It would have been no surprise if Shanley, as the son of an Irish immigrant growing up in a neighborhood thick with other Irish immigrants and their families, had built most of his work around Irish themes and characters. But, as he wrote in The New York Times in 2014, shortly before the opening of Outside Mullingar, “I didn’t want to be labeled an Irish-American writer. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write about everybody. And for the next 30 years I did.” “Everybody,” however, did not include the Irish. Then again, as he says in the same article,
I always knew I’d have to come home eventually. I’m Irish as hell: Kelly on one side, Shanley on the other. My father had been born on a farm in the Irish Midlands. He and his brothers had been shepherds there, cattle and sheep, back in the early 1920s. I grew up surrounded by brogues and Irish music, but stayed away from the old country till I was over 40. I just couldn’t own being Irish.
Something in me hated being confined by an ethnic identity, by any family. In addition, I have often found procrastination to be an enriching exercise. Not saying increases what I have to say. Not writing about the Irish was building up a hell of a lot of pressure to do just that.
When I finally went to Ireland, I had to go. It was 1993. My father was finally too old to travel alone, and he asked me to take him home. When an old man asks you to take him home, you have to do it.
When I sat with my father in that farm kitchen, the one that he had grown up in, and listened to my Irish family talk, I recognized that this was my Atlantis, the lost and beautiful world of my poet’s heart. There was no way to write about the farm, yet I had to write about it. I listened to the amazing language these folks were speaking as if it were normal conversation, and I knew this was my territory. But it was new to me. It was a time to listen, not to write.
Following this Celtic epiphany, Shanley spent the next twenty years not writing about Ireland. Then, facing his 60th birthday, he reports that he “flipped out.” Keeping silent about that experience with his father no longer seemed to be an option.
My parents were dead now. . . . A year went by. One quiet day, I sat down without a thought in my head and wrote a play about the farm. The farm had become a place in my imagination where I had stored up so many things. My love for my father was there. Feelings of grief. My romantic hunger, my frustration with this unpoetic world. I had held back much for a long time, and I kind of erupted with language. I felt free suddenly, free to be Irish. Family stories, family names, changed by dreaming, mixed with my own long longings for love, and impossible happiness unfurled across the page. I had turned 60, and the knife at my throat woke me to the beauty of my own people, the fleeting opportunities of life, the farce of caution. I wanted to write a love story. I wanted to find all the words I had not been able to find because what I have been unable to express has caused me anguish, even as what I have given adequate voice has lent me peace. I found a strange relief in the play. I called it “Outside Mullingar,” a prosaic title perhaps to balance the poetry it contained.
The play opened in New York on January 23, 2014 for a limited run, which ended on March 6 of that year.