John Patrick Shanley (born October 13, 1950 in the Bronx) is a playwright, screenwriter, and director. Among his many accolades he won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film Moonstruck. His play, Doubt: A Parable, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2005 Tony Award for Best Play; he wrote and directed the film adaptation and earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His other plays include: Outside Mullingar (Tony nomination for Best Play), Defiance, Storefront Church, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, and Dirty Story to name a few. Born in the Bronx to an Irish American family, Shanley grew up in a hard world. Up to the age 22 he had only seen 2 plays among which was Cyrano de Bergerac. This play touched his life and became one of greatest influences in his writing life. His mother would also have a profound impact on his writing. She lived a life bereft of any belief that life can be anything more than the mundane. This impacted Shanley and made him fight to get his mother to see the magic in life. This desire fed into his writing, with an almost ever present 'magical' element to his plays. 'In the work of John Patrick Shanley, the truth is as charming as it is painful, reality as touched with magic as it is factual, and existence as absolute as it is illusory' "It's almost all struggle...sometimes it just appears (like Doubt)... I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in yourself, in order to move forward and live. It is like a muscle and it must be exercised, first a little, and then more and more. All the really exciting things possible during the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have. A deep breath and a leap." The Following is an interview with Shanley taken directly from ‘In Their Company: Portraits of American Playwrights’ by Victor Wishna published by Umbridge Books. The first half of my artistic life was spent in struggling to understand and accept who I was. The second-half of my artistic life has been to continue running to catch up to the changes that take place internally, so that I can continue to represent accurately who I am to me and to other people. But in the process I've become very aware of the world outside of me. Now for the first time I feel like responding to things far from my living room that's interesting to me. The plays helped me to focus and figure out what it is I need to do. Every play is an attempt to get past an impasse of some kind. An impasse involves the uninteresting things that you can view as obstacles or that you can view as forums, places along the road where you're supposed to stop and take in what's going on. You ask your questions about it and have your feelings about it, and arrive at what tactics you need to employ to derive the meaning from it. To be an artist is a rigorous thing and it is a not always pleasant thing sometimes I've written things about my family, or about my marriage, or about my sexuality, and it might be quite uncomfortable to expose those things to the public gaze. Sometimes I write about things that I don't want to look at, that I don't really want to understand, that I don't want to consciously put on the table, because that's going to cause things to change. And change is a painful thing. But if you're going to go down the artistic path, you're going to have to do that. Sometimes you shudder at what you have to deal with in a given play or a given moment. Very often the question I ask is, “what frightens me? What repulses me?” And the answer is, “that's what I'm going to write about”. You put on plays and you sit there and sometimes you cringe. Not because it isn't working, but because it is working, and it makes you uncomfortable. Sometimes it makes other people uncomfortable. The last play that I did recently had a reading. Everybody there were people I knew, most of them friends. During the 15 minute intermission, no one spoke to me. They were uncomfortable. They were uncomfortable with the material. They were uncomfortable looking at the person who generated the material, and I was uncomfortable having to be that person. But that was my job. The whole notion of story will have a lifelong fascination for me. Stories are an extremely powerful idea for me, more powerful than character, more powerful than language, more powerful than anything else. What is a story? What makes a story work? What is plot? These are questions that I've studied a great deal, and I went and I read everything that I could get my hands on and I thought about plot. I posed the question over and over again: what is plot? What are examples of plot? I realised that some fairy tales were full of plot, So I read thousands of fairy tales. I read every play ever done on Broadway from the beginning through to the end, basically in order. I read everything that was being produced in England. I read everything that was produced in the English language, basically, just to get it into my bones. You want it in your bones so then you can sit down and you're free. Robert bill Goldman, a friend of mine, said, “A writer has to protect his time.” I realised," that's exactly right.” So basically what I do is most of the time I tell people “I can't do that I'm very busy”. What i create is- nothing-maybe for 14 days in a row. And protecting this block of time during which I have nothing to do so that I can go out and read the newspaper and come back here and talk to people on the phone, and look out the window and maybe, for half an hour, right. So anybody can look at this and say, “throw him in jail for being a bum”. But in fact, that's what the job is. That's what you need to do, and you have to recognise that the job. It's hard for a lot of writers- a lot of writers get blocked because they can't handle that. I'm usually pretty sure about where the play ends. But what the last line of the play is, how that works, sometimes it takes me a little while to find. But they do really end for me. My view of life is not that people get married and then they're happy. So my plays reflect that, that there is some kind of open question at the end, because there's an open question at the end unless somebody's dead, but then he slowly walks off stage. Hamlet has really no open questions at the end but look at what length Shakespeare had to go to do that. He really had to stand on his head at the end of Hamlet. I write to get past that impasse full, to get past that obstacle, to get to a new place. Savage In Limbo leaves the audience with, “well, what are you gonna do? The place is closing up soon. What are you gonna do with your life? Are you gonna have the guts to do what's in your heart to do? Or are you gonna narcotise yourself and wait for death? What are you gonna do? Last call.”