PDA

View Full Version : 'Doubt' to 'Defiance': Shanley vs. Marines



thedrifter
03-24-09, 08:13 AM
Posted on Tue, Mar. 24, 2009
'Doubt' to 'Defiance': Shanley vs. Marines

By A.D. Amorosi

For The Inquirer

War is hell. You've heard that one before.

Yet, if John Patrick Shanley is correct, the priesthood is no heaven either.

That can be surmised from Shanley's Doubt: A Parable (2004), about a showdown between a priest and a nun, and his Vietnam-era Marine Corps drama, Defiance (2005). The plays are two parts of what the Bronx-born playwright, screenwriter, and director has called a trilogy based on his notion of U.S. hierarchies - institutions reflecting American value systems - that also delves into the 59-year-old author's life.

"Hierarchies are an extremely illuminating lens to look at America through, don't you think?" Shanley says on the phone from New York. "It says a lot about the mores of a culture what the hierarchy is."

This week, Defiance - the second, lesser known of the trilogy's completed plays - opens at Bristol Riverside Theatre. Shanley is delighted to hear that a regional theater is tackling his passionate military drama, set in 1971: The country, he says, is filled with veterans eager to see real depictions of armed forces life.

"This show is rare," he says. "It's not generals in a court martial. . . . It's something on a smaller, more intimate level" - and nowhere near as widely seen or discussed as Doubt.

That controversial play casts a long shadow over his life and work. "That story, set in a church school I attended in the Bronx in 1964, reflects something of my experience of the early '60s," Shanley wrote in an essay in a Manhattan Theatre Club publication about Doubt's tale of pedophilia and paranoia, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and that year's Tony for best play. "Doubt was about the birth of uncertainty in a person of faith."

En route to Doubt, Shanley wrote the theater classics Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (1983) and The Wild Goose (1995) and screenplays for 1987's Moonstruck (which won him a screenwriting Oscar) and Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), which was his directing debut.

Again in the director's chair, Shanley turned Doubt into a 2008 Academy Award-nominated film starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman; it will be released on DVD April 7. Like Defiance, Doubt was a 90-minute play with no intermission. In taking it from stage to film, Shanley kept the story mean and lean (105 minutes) with the struggle between Streep's acidic Sister Aloysius and Hoffman's genial yet perverse Father Flynn creating a diffident ambiguity that lingers long after the film ends.

Tease Shanley about how some critics found Doubt's film version stagy and he laughs: "Most plays turned into films don't get Oscar nominations or turn a profit."

Shanley hasn't written Part 3 of his trilogy yet, though he has serious ideas about where that biographical-based drama will lead him.

The connection between Doubt and Defiance goes beyond the fact that Shanley witnessed these actions, respectively, as a Catholic-school student and as a young Marine flame-thrower operator stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in 1971.

Doubt - a parable for the Iraq conflict - was written after the 2003 invasion as an invitation to question the Bush administration's weapons of mass destruction rationale. "I was so struck at that time by the pundits on television arguing that there were WMDs with there being absolutely no empirical evidence."

To Shanley, that broad acceptance was a pure act of faith, reminding him of an earlier time in his life when certainty led to a great blindness: "During the early '60s in the working-class neighborhood I grew up in, it was inconceivable that a priest could be victimizing children - so much so that if it was happening, people would look right at it in front of their eyes and just not see it."

Doubt, in his mind, was something to be valued - a hallmark of wisdom that had fallen by the wayside and needed to be lifted to a higher place. And after that cultural earthquake - questioning the faith of the early '60s - came the ensuing cynicism of a decade later: Doubt turned into defiance.

Shanley again witnessed unthinkable things during his tenure in the Marines from 1970 to 1972 at Camp Lejeune, where Defiance takes place. Along with violent racial strife and disgusting living conditions, he saw the sort of rootless deception between an enlisted officer, a young private who trusted him, and a nosy chaplain that would warrant great drama.

In Defiance, Lt. Col. Littlefield seeks to battle the bare-knuckled racial tensions between black and white Marines by enlisting the assistance of an African American captain. A power struggle ensues when the captain accuses Littlefield of sexual misconduct with the wife of a young private. A chaplain with questionable motives intervenes and stirs the pot to a ferocious boil.

"The idea 'where does authority come from?' is fascinating to me," Shanley says. "The idea of a chaplain's intriguing because it's a man of the cloth in uniform" - and the uniform is that of a killing machine.

It's no accident that Shanley has included the actions of a clergyman in Defiance's drama. And it's no fiction that he's conjured up to describe that tension.

"A guy I was in infantry training with had this happen to him, where a senior noncommissioned officer befriended him while he was living in a trailer park at the base with his wife and used that friendship to have an affair" with the wife, Shanley says. "That guy was a true innocent and was shattered by those events."

The rest is history. Or rather, it's the disturbing finale of Defiance.

The notion of war's destruction and the military's totalitarianism disturbs Shanley, but Defiance isn't a war play ("David Rabe does those best"). And he doesn't write about things he is against or stories that are simply biographical; he creates tales about those elements within society he is for.

"I'm in favor of humanity. People have always been in the services. People have always been in religious orders. I'm not writing to change that. I'm not trying to condemn anyone. I'm interested in looking at the crises and areas of stress that occur in life."

http://www.philly.com/philly/gallery/20090324__Doubt__to__Defiance___Shanley_vs__Marine s.html

Ellie