In a life of feeling things incredibly deeply, John Patrick Shanley has experienced some thrilling highs: the rapturous audience response in 1984 to “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” his first success as a playwright; accepting an Academy Award in 1988 for best screenplay for “Moonstruck.”
Add to that list the thrill of discovering the luxury of drop-off laundry. “I was like 35 years old, and I was in Poughkeepsie,” Shanley said in a phone interview during a rehearsal break last month. “I went in to do my laundry, and after a couple of questions, I realized that they would do it for me, fold it and give it back to me. And I was like, ‘This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened in my life.’”
Shanley’s latest play, “Brooklyn Laundry,” is about sacrifice and everyday heroism that begins with a character placing her “bag of rags” on the scale at a laundromat. Opening on Wednesday at New York City Center, it is the 13th play the playwright has premiered with the Manhattan Theater Club. “There’s an incredible flair, intelligence, grace and humor to his work,” said Lynne Meadow, the theater company’s artistic director. Most of all, she added, “he writes with such humanity, and so personally.”
“Brooklyn Laundry,” whose cast includes Cecily Strong and David Zayas, is also part of an unofficial triptych of Shanley plays this season. In January, an Off Broadway revival of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” starring Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott, concluded a successful run at the Lucille Lortel Theater. On March 7, the first Broadway revival of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 play, “Doubt,” about a priest who may or may not have molested a child, opens in a Roundabout Theater Company production led by Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan.
In a conversation that touched on all three plays, Shanley revealed that the accidental retrospective isn’t the only reason his life has been flashing before his eyes recently. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How does it feel to have three shows — spanning over 40 years of your career — staged in quick succession?
I didn’t engineer it, but it certainly invites reflection on my life as an artist. You see how you’ve changed, how you remain the same, and whether or not what you were talking about is still relevant 20 years after, 40 years after, to the moment that you’re living in.
When I heard that I’m doing “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Doubt” and “Brooklyn Laundry,” I thought, well, I’m going to Paris, I’m going to live it up because I’m getting older. So I went to Paris. And I got a phone call the night I arrived: “You have melanoma. And it didn’t start where we found it. We don’t know where it started.” I hung up the phone. I’m like, that’s it.
I got back to New York and I had two melanomas on my scalp. The first one had migrated to a second location. It looks bad. But after three and a half hours of surgery, I’m out of the woods.
Three plays, two melanomas, one existential crisis. I’m reminded of something the director Norman Jewison said about you and your script for “Moonstruck”: Do you believe coincidences play an important role in our lives?
Anybody who’s paying attention will notice that there are these confluences — these karma spots that come up from time to time. This is certainly one. All of this happened right before I went into rehearsal with “Brooklyn Laundry,” which is a play that deals with a family that is having very, very serious health issues. That informed things in a way that I can’t even explain. I have to be so careful what I write about.
“Brooklyn Laundry” is also inspired by your experience at your local laundromat?
At a certain point, they lost my whole bag of laundry. Somebody took the wrong bag. We wait weeks and weeks and they never came back. Someone got a whole bag — my sheets, my clothes — and said, “I’m keeping this. I’m sleeping on these sheets. Maybe I’ll wear one of his sweatshirts.”
And I had to negotiate how much the credit would be with the guy at the laundry. I just took him in: He had this look in his eye of a slight weariness. He turned into a character in my mind that became part of the play. I started to just admire the heroism of all the people who we don’t see in the newspaper and who run this city, who make New York City the great city that it is.
How has it been in the rehearsal room?
Usually when I do a play, if it’s an emotional subject, I’ll choke up a couple of times. I have broken down every day we’ve done this show. Once in a blue moon you fall into a treasure room you didn’t know was there.
“Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” was your first experience like that. Do you recognize the version of yourself that wrote it?
Oh, absolutely. Before “Danny” I had not found my true voice. “Danny” was when I broke through into my own truth. I was able to put it into words the pain I felt. That hasn’t dated for me. I’ll never step away from that.
For much of the run, Christopher Abbott was in actual physical pain.
It’s the thing that I love and hate most about theater: You just don’t know what’s going to happen. They had the trials of Job down there. It was like Old Testament stuff. Heroic and talented actor that he is, Chris went on in great pain and used it to explore other parts of the character. When I heard he was going on using crutches, I’m like, “Well, Danny said he was in a fight, but it must have been a hell of a fight.”
You’ve always said the last act of “Doubt” is what happens after the play. I wonder if that last act will be even more fiery and impassioned today.
I think it will be. The place where I was as an individual writing “Doubt” has become something that I’m sharing with virtually everybody, which is that the ground underneath us is moving. We’ve always contained all of these warring elements inside. But recent events have brought them more to consciousness. Fracturing is taking place within the individual as opposed to simply within society. People are disagreeing violently with themselves. And that’s a great and terrible moment. It’s ostensibly bad for group action because it’s every man for himself, every woman for herself. But it’s good and humbling for individual consciousness.
One thing that inspired “Doubt” was finding out, years after the fact, that your high school mentor figure, who has since died, was a predator. You’ve said that it placed you in an “interesting moral universe.”
The fellow that was a predator — and a significant predator — was really, incredibly solicitous and supportive of me as a human being in a time when I had nothing, I had no one. And I look at that with just, like … What do you do with that?
I always think about this with a smile, but probably because I’m perverse: There was probably some kid in Germany who got a Hitler scholarship. He was really good at composition or math or something, and he got the Hitler scholarship and everybody’s like, “Oh my God, what an honor, you’ve gotten the Hitler scholarship.” And then at a certain point, he lost bragging rights. And if you’d asked him, he’d say, “Well, Hitler was good to me.”
Roman Polanski directed a 2006 production of “Doubt” in Paris. That must also figure in your interesting moral universe.
When I met Roman, it was a very long time after the incidents in Los Angeles. [The director fled the United States in 1978 while awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to statutory rape, and has faced additional accusations of sexual assault since then.] He’s a very good director, and I thought it was a very interesting thing for him to do. He’d gone to court, he’d admitted what he’d done. And then at a certain point — from my point of view, understandably — he fled the country in complete terror.
I am not a judge. That is not what I do. It closes off processing. I’m never going to stop processing.
Roman’s alive. Should he be dead? Should no one speak to him? I don’t feel that way. Does he have a strong artistic sensibility to offer? Yes. Has he, in my presence or in recent times, engaged in malfeasance? No. OK, I’m in. Let’s go.
To rephrase a line from “Doubt” as a question: Are we not supposed to sleep well at night?
Well, you know, it’s a Kurosawa film, it’s a great title: “The Bad Sleep Well.” And I think they do. When you wake up in the middle of the night wrestling with something, sometimes that you didn’t even know you were wrestling with until it’s the middle of the night, I think that’s good. I think that’s good.