Meanwhile, he finished a second screenplay, The Bride and the Beast, instructing his agent to send it to director Lawrence Kasdan, who liked Shanley’s plays. She also sent it to Norman Jewison. “Both of them wanted it,” Shanley recalls. “Norman responded first, and a week later, Larry Kasdan called him and asked him to step aside so he could direct it. So I knew then that there was no way Norman was going to let that screenplay go.” Jewison shot the film and released it under a new title: Moonstruck.
Shortly after it opened, Shanley opened his mailbox at the tenement where he was living and took out a royalty check. It was for $85,000. “I just knew that my life had changed,” he says. “I was 36 years old, I’d been living below the poverty line for my entire life. Suddenly I could buy anything they had in the store.”
The wild ride continued with six Academy Award nominations, including wins for Cher, Olympia Dukakis, and Shanley, whose acceptance speech included the much-quoted line, “I want to thank everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life, and everybody I ever punched or kissed.” (There may be long lines in both columns: The former Bronx brawler, twice married and divorced, has dated a string of celebrities including actress Kim Cattrall and model Paula Devicq.)
Shanley’s Hollywood track record veered from commercial fiascos The January Man and Joe Versus the Volcano to the much-lauded Doubt. He’s never been tempted to move to Los Angeles. “I could have just kept on earning a lot of money,” he says, but “I was very concerned with being able to write in a way that was real for the rest of my life. This is what I do.”
As a playwright, Shanley refuses to play it safe. Along with his Pulitzer/Tony/Drama Desk triple crown, he’s garnered some brutal reviews. In his “Butcher of Broadway” critic incarnation, New York Times columnist Frank Rich sharpened his cleaver on Shanley so often it started to seem like a personal grudge. Shanley always came back punching, and once sent an unsolicited letter to a younger playwright whose debut had been panned by Rich, assuring her it was a backhanded compliment, “like being blacklisted by Nixon.”
Deeply Different
“Pirate” is the 13th script he’s tried out at the Powerhouse, his artistic home since New York Stage & Film’s inaugural season, which included his “Savage in Limbo.” It’s a challenging work, a complex political allegory sharing a bed with a surreal comedy, full of music-hall accents and a central image of blinding which may allude to Shanley’s ongoing fight with glaucoma. The playwright’s bold choices and unmistakable dialogue thrill some audience members and seem to infuriate others. Midway through the reading, a man in the first row walks out, crossing the black-box stage so close to the actors that Fisher Stevens stops in mid-sentence and waits for him to reach the exit. When Stevens shrugs and continues the scene, the audience claps.
“This play is deeply, wildly different from my last, which was deeply, wildly different than the one before that,” Shanley says. “You don’t dream the same thing every night. Why would you write the same thing every day?”
Besides, he adds, “I’m not the same. I am what I was, plus what I am. You have to find a way to get to the next step on the road.”
Shanley’s writing process usually starts with “a title, an image, or a room that I think has power. With ‘Doubt,’ all I had was the title. I didn’t know the subject matter, didn’t know it was about nuns.” What interested him was the state of uncertainty, something he feels is alarmingly absent from modern debate. The idea developed through images of black and white: the nuns’ habits, the first black child in an all-white school. Color is extremely important to Shanley; he often describes a set in meticulous detail before he begins writing lines. “I really design it,” he says. “I try to keep people out of the room for as long as possible, then they walk in and the play starts.”
He was equally specific about decorating his Manhattan apartment, choosing colors so vivid they rated a spread in the New York Times “Home” section, and his cottage upstate. After staying with friends and at local B&Bs for many years, Shanley purchased a tract of land on a fishing creek in Ulster County. He didn’t build on that site, but planted some tulips he hoped would come up every spring; the local wildlife thought otherwise. Twelve years ago, he bought a cabin on a mountaintop near the Rondout Reservoir. His teenage sons Nick and Frank, adopted during his marriage to actress Jayne Haynes, grew up with the country house. “They love it,” says Shanley, who also enjoys using it as a writing retreat. “I’d go up there for seven days alone. It was utter isolation—very, very remote. The house isn’t on a dirt road, it’s off a dirt road.”
