Congratulations to John Patrick Shanley …

… one of my favorite playwrights, for winning the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for his new play Doubt. The play is now on Broadway, after a run at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and stars Cherry Jones, one of the best stage actresses (or, hell, best actresses I mean) working today. I need to figure out a way to go see Doubt. I love some Shanley! The review ends with:

While all the performances are excellent, Ms. Jones’s and Mr. O’Byrne’s are extraordinary, master classes in the use of body language and vocal inflection to convey internal conflict. Each has one especially stunning moment. In Mr. O’Byrne’s case, it involves his framing his mouth with the fingers of one hand. For Ms. Jones, it is simply a matter of dropping her voice an octave.

“Doubt” is an unusually quiet work for Mr. Shanley, a writer who made his name with rowdy portraits of bruising love affairs. But gentleness becomes this dramatist. Even as “Doubt” holds your conscious attention as an intelligently measured debate play, it sends off emotional stealth charges that go far deeper.

John Patrick Shanley, bravo!!

I’ll post the following excerpt, which was his preface to his play The Big Funk. I cherish this essay on the art of acting and have it tacked up on my bulletin board. No, wait. It’s not just about acting, although that’s of course his impetus, his world, his experience. He’s writing about how to make a living in the theatre, how to survive, how to DO IT, how to stay true, etc. But more than that, it’s an essay about how to live life… The ending is killer. Packs a punch no matter how many times I have read it.

Congratulations to one of my favorite living playwrights on your Pulitzer.

John Patrick Shanley’s preface to his play “The Big Funk”

A man in our society is not left alone. Not in the cities. Not in the woods. We msut have commerce with our fellows, and that commerce is difficult and uneasy. I do not understand how to live in this society. I don’t get it. Each person has an enormous effect. Call it environmental impact if you like. Where my foot falls, I leave a mark, whether I want to or not. We are linked together, each to each. You can’t breathe without taking a breath from somebody else. You can’t smile without changing the landscape. And so I ask the question: Why is theatre so ineffectual, unnew, not exciting, fussy, not connected to the thrilling recognition possible in dreams?

It’s a question of spirit. My ungainly spirit thrashes around inside me making me feel lumpy and sick. My spirit is this moment dissatisfied with the outward life I inhabit. Why does my outward life not reflect the enormity of the miracle of existence? Why are my eyes blinded with always new scales, my ears stopped with thick chunks of fresh wax, why are my fingers calloused again?

I don’t ask these questions lightly. I beat on the stone door of my tomb. I want out! Some days I wake up in a tomb, some days on a grassy mound by a river. Today, I woke up in a tomb. Why does my spirit sometimes retreat into a deathly closet? Perhaps it is not my spirit leading the way at such times, but my body, longing to lie down in marble gloom, and rot away.

Theatre is a safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done. When it’s not a safe place, it’s abusive to actors and audiences alike. When its safety is used to protect cowards masquerading as heroes, it’s a boring travesty. An actor who is truly heroic reveals the divine that passes through him, that aspect of himself that he does not own and cannot control. The control and the artistry of the heroic actor is in service to his soul.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Do not be fooled.

Don’t act for money. You’ll start to feel dead and bitter.

Don’t act for glory. You’ll start to feel dead, fat, and fearful.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Do not be fooled.

You can’t avoid all the pitfalls. There are lies you must tell. But experience the lie. See it as something dead and unconnected you clutch. And let it go.

Act from the depth of your feeling imagination. Act for celebration, for search, for grieving, for worship, to express that desolate sensation of wandering through the howling wilderness.

Don’t worry about Art.

Do these things, and it will be Art.