By Kim Velsey 6/21/12 2:42pm

Manhattan Transfers

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John Patrick Shanley: From Gramercy Park to Williamsburg

Playwright John Patrick Shanley Gives Brooklyn the Finger in Move to Williamsburg

John Patrick Shanley must have been Moonstruck when he saw the eleventh-floor condo in Williamsburg’s brand new Finger Building.

At least, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright was taken enough with the three-bedroom pad at 144 North 8th Street to pay $1.85 million for the privilege of being its first inhabitant, according to city records. Mr. Shanley paid a little more than the $1.82 million ask set by developer Gabriel Realty. Read More

By Irina Aleksander 12/08/08 9:23pm

Doubt Director John Patrick Shanley: ‘I Was Thrown Out of High School for Saying I Didn’t Believe in God’

John Patrick Shanley is the playwright, screenwriter, and director of Doubt, a film adaptation (starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis) of his Pulitzer-winning play about a nun who suspects a priest at a Catholic school in the Bronx of sexually abusing a young black student.

Monday afternoon, Mr. Shanley Read More

By John Heilpern 6/06/05 12:00am

Tinseltown Dominates Tonys, But Who Will Win?

When it comes to Tony time, I’m all in favor. I think anyone who works in the theater should be showered with awards and love and money all the time. For one thing, why would I wish them anything less than I wish for myself? For another, the lives of theater folk are so very Read More

By John Heilpern 12/13/04 12:00am

Doubt: Nun Cries Sex Abuse, But This Sister’s a Disgrace

My difficulty with John Patrick Shanley’s highly regarded moral parable Doubt at Manhattan Theatre Club has all to do with the dubious credibility of its central character, the righteous, nagging nun.

Rarely has any woman-least of all a nun-enraged me so much. Yet if anything, I’m sentimental about nuns, as Mr. Shanley is in his Read More

By John Heilpern 11/22/04 12:00am

Norman’s ‘Night, Mother Makes Good Case for Suicide

Marsha Norman’s ‘Night, Mother, at the Royale on Broadway with Edie Falco and Brenda Blethyn, is the first play I’ve seen that makes suicide utterly mundane. You might think the least suicide could be is dramatic, particularly in a play, but that isn’t Ms. Norman’s intention.

The intriguing raison d’être of her 1983 Pulitzer Prize–winning Read More

By John Heilpern 3/24/03 12:00am

Mad-as-Hell Playwright Comes Out Swinging

The moment of the week for me came during John Patrick Shanley’s feverish, deranged and gloriously welcome political satire, Dirty Story, which he also directed at the Harold Clurman Theatre in a feverish, deranged, gloriously welcome way.

Ostensibly about love, literature, apartment-hunting and American involvement in the Israeli-Arab war, Mr. Shanley takes no prisoners Read More

By John Heilpern 2/26/01 12:00am

Snap Out of It! Shanley’s Florentine Folly

One of the curious things about John Patrick Shanley’s overheated drama about the Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini is that he should dedicate it to “My Florence.”

“The play is dedicated to New York City. My Florence,” goes his solemn and not a little pompous pronouncement in the Second Stage Playbill , and it Read More