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.

Maybe he didn't mind paying a little more? After all, he had some extra cash sitting around following the $3.1 million sale of his 3-bedroom Gramercy Park co-op at 149 East 18th Street just days before. Mr. Shanley moved into the apartment with ex-girlfriend Canadian actress Paula Devicq, in 2006. He paid, according to city property records, $505,000, to add his name to the deed. (If Mr. Shanley ever had any Doubt about the Manhattan real estate market, the experienced should have restored his faith.)

With his move to Williamsburg, Mr. Shanley will enjoy a spacious, sunny space, one that looks, from the listing photos, nice but bland. The listing, from Corcoran brokers Stefanie Barlow, Deborah Rieders and Sarah Shuken, is itself a generic one describing the standard perks of units in the buildings: black granite countertops, Sub-Zero refrigerators, "truly one-of-a-kind bathrooms" with custom hand-painted ceramic tiles, custom lighting fixtures and Robern medicine cabinets. Still, looking through pictures of Mr. Shanley's former home, we assume he'll soon be personalizing the space. Unless the interiors were all Ms. Devicq's doing.

With the move, the Bronx-born Mr. Shanley can now tick another borough off the list. Although we doubt he'll be house hunting  in Staten Island anytime soon.

kvelsey@observer.com

We attended a party celebrating Jessica Cutler's (a.k.a. the Washingtonienne) wedding to a nice lawyer at the Tribeca Grand.

Billionaire David Koch told us how he's cutting back this holiday season at the 11th Annual Food Allergy Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. 

We talked with director John Patrick Shanley about his days as a renegade alter boy at a lunch in honor of his new film Doubt. 

At a screening of Planet In Peril: Battle Lines, we talked with host Anderson Cooper about his vacation week plans (he's looking for a story to cover!) and heard about Mo Rocca's idea for the next installment of the CNN special.  

We got to know Seagull and Revolutionary Road actress Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of the late Elia).  

Monday afternoon, Mr. Shanley stood among friends, publicists, and Miramax president Daniel Battsek at a luncheon at the Four Seasons hosted by Peggy Siegal in honor of the film.

"To take a play with four characters and turn it into a feature film seemed pretty challenging until I realized that I can shoot the neighborhood I grew up in, I can shoot the priests in their rectory, the nuns in their convent, I can show the kids in their classrooms," said Mr. Shanley, who shot the film in the Eastern Bronx. "It made a lot of sense to grow this small thing, the play, to a bigger canvas that you can show more of."

This is the first project that Mr. Shanley—who has written plays like Women of Manhattan (1986) and Dirty Story (2003), as well as screenplays for  Moonstruck (1987) and Congo (1995)—has nursed from writing the play, to writing the screenplay, to directing the film adaptation. The Daily Transom wondered if he missed having the constant creative challenges that he would typically get from a director or a screenwriter—roles, that in this case, he has himself occupied. 

"Oh, there is always plenty of people second-guessing you on a film set in the best sense of the word—very smart people who worry deeply that they're going to lose their money and stay up nights thinking of what could go wrong and then bring it up to you," he said. 

The playwright attended St. Anthony's School in the Bronx, which he used as the inspiration for his story.

"I was thrown off the altar boys for drinking altar wine; I was thrown out of the hot lunch program for throwing anything I didn't like over my shoulder as hard as I could," he recalled. "And I was thrown out of high school for saying I didn't believe in God, which wasn't even true, but I wanted to start an argument."

As far as the cast is concerned, Ms. Streep and Mr. Hoffman were the director's first picks for their respective parts. Ms. Adams came to Mr. Shanley interested in the part of Sister James, and Ms. Davis was recommended by the film's producer, Scott Rudin. ("I screen-tested her and she blew the entire crew away," said Mr. Shanley of Ms. Davis.)

"Yes, I guess I did," Ms. Davis said. "I wish I knew that I blew them away. Maybe I would have been less stressed out afterwards." 

Mr. Shanley at one point became known for insisting in his contract that not a single word of his screenplays can be changed if ever adapted—something that the playwright wanted to clarify.

"The real story is that I wrote several movies in a row and when someone wanted to make them, I would go and I would meet with the director, with the script in hand, and I'd say, 'Do you want to make this script? Or is this like the basis of or something like that?'" he explained. "If they agreed, then I would go into business with them and sign a contract. But I own the material so I wouldn't sign it unless they agreed."

We wondered why other screenwriters don't do the same thing to ensure creative control. 

"It's hard to get away with that and you have to be willing to go home," he said.

Unless they aren't richly deserved. But let's not go into The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee quite so soon. It would spoil the atmosphere. Juth becauth it's a childlike muthical lithping its way to thuctheth. Personally, I still haven't got over its cute little girl played by an adult actress in fierce pigtails who can spell "thithtitith."

Nevertheless, I wish all the winners well. True, the televised Tonys have never been quite as glamorous as the Oscars. But watch out for a glimpse of Mayor Dinkins on the red carpet. Here are my tips for the major categories in the 2005 Tony Awards, being shown on CBS on June 5 at 8 p.m. And the envelope, please!

Though I prefer Martin McDonagh's weirdly disturbing The Pillowman, and some think it will take the Tony for Best Play, the winner will be John Patrick Shanley's Doubt. The gifted Mr. Shanley has had a wonderfully productive season, and the play has already won this year's Pulitzer. My doubts about Doubt when I reviewed it were that its outcome is never really in doubt. Mr. Shanley's unstoppably righteous nun fixes the truth about the priest she suspects is molesting a choirboy. Faith, the message appears to be, requires no evidence. Maybe so. Absolutely no doubt, however, that Mr. Shanley will take home the Tony.

This isn't going to be The Pillowman's night. I expect Doug Hughes of Doubt to win Best Director. But what odds as Best Actress on Doubt's Cherry Jones versus Kathleen Turner of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's almost too close to call.

The Best Actress category is already fierce enough, with Laura Linney ( Sight Unseen) and Mary-Louise Parker ( Reckless) also nominated. Ms. Jones is a critics' darling, giving a flawless performance as the nun lying to herself in righteous certitude. But Ms. Turner as Edward Albee's mythic man-eater drinking herself into goading oblivion has been almost unanimously raved over. Hmm … Ms. Turner's unafraid, unembarrassed performance is the more challenging role. But my hunch is the Tony will go to Cherry Jones.

The category for Best Actor in a Play includes such brilliant actors as Brian F. O'Byrne for his dedicated priest under suspicion in Doubt and Billy Crudup's amateur storyteller on nightmare trial for his life in Pillowman. But the sentimental favorite, James Earl Jones as crusty old Norman Thayer in musty old On Golden Pond, will win.

Look at the nominees for Featured Actor in a Play! Three of the five are from the terrific all-male ensemble of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross-Alan Alda, Liev Schreiber and Gordon Clapp. I think Mr. Alda's washed-up salesman begging for his livelihood could just about win, but the split vote hands an opportunity to the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg of The Pillowman.

The melodramatic Roundabout production of Twelve Angry Men was peculiarly popular. But the Tony of Best Play Revival ought to go to Glengarry Glen Ross, which actually gives revivals a good name.

Best Musical is between the underdog Spelling Bee versus the big rich guy, Monty Python's Spamalot. The innate English dopiness of Spamalot is far superior to the manufactured American dopiness of another nominee, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The Italianate musical The Light in the Piazza is much too serious at this level, although its old-fashioned theme about a retarded American girl who falls for a gorgeous Italian in Florence is come se dice-'ow you sayz?-lika beega pizza pie. The whole world loves an underdog, or a puppet, as last year's surprise Best Musical, Avenue Q, proves. Cute lispers or the rampant joys of English schoolboy silliness? Monty Python's Spamalot takes the Tony.

Mike Nichols-for it is he-wins so many awards they should ban him from all awards ceremonies, except as a presenter. If necessary, he could present himself with another Lifetime Achievement Award. Mr. Nichols of Spamalot will surely win for Best Director of a Musical.

I think Eric Idle of Spamalot will win for Best Book of a Musical. None of the four nominations for Best Original Score, however, are exactly "original": They're derivative or pastiche. Adam Guettel's Sondheimean Light in the Piazza is the most original of the bunch. But I think Spamalot will be on a roll and the Tony will go to John Du Prez and Eric Idle.

The neophyte Christina Applegate of Sweet Charity has achieved a dogged miracle by receiving a nomination for Best Actress in a Musical, and some showbiz sentimentalists, including Ms. Applegate, are hoping her dream will come true. Sherie René Scott is great fun in Rotten Scoundrels. The winner will be Victoria Clark for her outstandingly dignified performance in The Light in the Piazza.

Best Actor in a Musical is a tougher choice. Hank Azaria and Tim Curry of Spamalot are both very appealing, but they split their votes. Gary Beach wasn't universally admired in the revival of La Cage aux Folles. Nor was the mannered John Lithgow in Rotten Scoundrels. Norbert Leo Butz of Rotten Scoundrels gave one of the most over-the-top performances I've seen in a musical, or anywhere, and Mr. Butz will win.

I see that along with three other solo shows, Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays has been nominated for a Tony for Special Theatrical Event. And the winner is … Mario Cantone for Laugh Whore!

But don't bet on it. Still, Mr. Cantone will be there proudly in his tux just the same. It's good, of course, that Edward Albee will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. (What kept them?) But I'm particularly thrilled that a Tony for Regional Theater is going to one of the finest troupes in America, the Theatre de la Jeune Lune of Minneapolis.

A decade or more ago, I caught a masterpiece of theirs on tour in Los Angeles. Their stage version of Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise counts vividly as among the best experiences of my theatergoing life. And I remember how, at the end of the performance, the cast members lined up as mere mortals and innocents in the foyer to shake our hands, if that's what we wanted to do. I was so thankful I embraced them, and wrote about their astonishing achievement, and for the only time in my life I pleaded with theater producers here to bring a great production to New York.

Well, they're here at last! Perhaps the Theatre de la Jeune Lune no longer performs their Children of Paradise. It seems like a fantastic dream now. But in theater, it's never too late to make amends, never too late to give thanks for work so wonderfully done.

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 dedication to his play:

"The play is dedicated to the many orders of Catholic nuns who devoted their lives to serving other hospitals, schools and retirement homes. Though they have been much maligned and ridiculed, who among us has been so generous?"

We would expect, then, that Mr. Shanley would have us sympathize with Sister Aloysius in Doubt, though we know the dramatist is too fine a writer to see life in simplistic black-and-white terms. The Sister accuses a popular and apparently innocent priest at her school of molesting a child. Where's the truth? Whose side will we take?

But, far from seeing Mr. Shanley's Sister Aloysius as a good and caring woman, or even a godly woman who might be mistaken, I saw her as a moral disgrace from the start. Her fearsome backbone is meant to impress, but she demeans all charity and kindness. Every flinty word of Christian conviction that I was meant to admire from of her sanctimoniously pursed lips enraged me. Blame the frighteningly steely performance of Cherry Jones with her arms crossed into her black habit in permanent accusation! But I hadn't a shred of doubt about the rights and wrongs of Sister Aloysius' witch hunt against her fellow priest-and surely I was meant to? She's blind bigotry wrapped in a nun's habit.

True, the audience appeared to find her a likable "character" at first, like any "strict but fair" schoolteacher who knows a thing or two. "Innocence is a form of laziness," she announces typically to simpering Sister James (the very appealing Heather Goldenhersh). "Innocent teachers are easily duped. You must be canny, Sister James."

"But I want to feel my students can talk to me," she pleads naïvely.

"They're children," comes the emphatic reply inviting no response. "They can talk to each other. It's more important they have a fierce moral guardian. You stand at the door, Sister. You are the gatekeeper. If you are vigilant, they will not need to be."

Mr. Shanley has caught her voice of unarguable conviction brilliantly. One knows her type, you think with a shudder. A "character," though? A nun capable of sweet reason? For one malign thing, the old bat kills Sister James' enthusiasm and innocence. Her first words of any consequence to her are the joyless pronouncement: "Art. Waste of time." She could be an unsweet Jean Brodie ("Chrysanthemums, such serviceable flowers!")

But still, Sister Aloysius is meant to be a saintly representative of the church! A fierce protector of moral values! The kind of dedicated teacher and worthy nun-"much maligned and ridiculed," as Mr. Shanley puts it, asking "who among us has been so generous?"

And to that I would respond: many, many people.

Doubt is set in 1964 in St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx, and Mr. Shanley has partly drawn on the genre of topical conscience plays that leave us with Food for Thought. To strike a note of old-fashioned cynicism, the production directed by Doug Hughes is made for a Broadway transfer: It's short (90 minutes without intermission); the quartet of actors led by Ms. Jones is first-rate; its theme-priestly child abuse-is timely; and we're left with a little something To Chew On (e.g., Is absolute certainty a balm to doubt? Or did the priest really do it?).

In its central standoff between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, the teacher she accuses of molesting a black choirboy, Doubt is a modern relative of David Mamet's infuriating 1994 psychodrama of sexual harassment, Oleanna. The question is who we believe, and what prejudices are ignited in us along the way. As you can tell, my prejudice against Sister Aloysius shows. But she gives me no choice. The same flaw spoils both Mr. Shanley's drama and Mr. Mamet's, however. Mr. Mamet's neurotic female student has as flimsy a case against her teacher as Mr. Shanley's vigilant nun against her priest.

Astonishingly, Sister Aloysius never reveals even a shred of evidence against the accused priest. She acts on faith and takes faith too far. She "suspects"; she feels it in her bones; she "knows" these things. But she cannot prove it for a second. Furthermore, she has a motive: She dislikes the young Father Flynn's modern teaching ideas and sermons. (One of them is a parable of doubt: "Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.")

But Father Flynn is unshakable. The terrific, humane Brian F. O'Byrne-who could even make a murder-rapist sympathetic in Frozen, for which he won a Tony-has reason to splutter in bewildered indignation here. His Father is innocent as day. I knew a caring teacher like him. We all did. We were lucky.

You can accuse anyone of anything. And something, some mud, some small doubt, will stick. But even the boy's mother (the fourth fine performance of the evening, from Adriane Lenox) doesn't agree with her son's "protector." In her determination to damn the teacher, Sister Aloysius would damn the boy, too. The priest's reputation-his name, all he stands for-are of no consequence to her. She will even lie to prove "the truth" about him.

"In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God," she explains glibly.

That is what all religious fanatics do. And my doubt about Doubt is a serious one. I could see nothing positive in Sister Aloysius, only her blindness and bigotry and injustice. She's no teacher, no maligned nun. She's dangerous and she's godless. When she begs pathetically for our sympathy with the melodramatic curtain line-"I have doubts! I have such doubts!"-she leaves us cold. We are not saints, and our sympathy has long since been forfeited.

Tenn's One-Acts

The pleasure of Tennessee Williams' company in Five by Tenn at the Manhattan Theatre Club is partly ghostly. The ghost of Williams is embodied elegantly by Jeremy Lawrence, who acts as our wry host and the drawling dramatist himself. And there are the five, mostly unknown pieces by our national poet of bruised hearts that inhabit the stage as ghostly reminders of the uncertain, playful talent of Williams' youth and of the wretched despair of the mature playwright.

Some of plays have been recently discovered, and all are being seen in New York for the first time. Minor-key they might be, but the pseudo-controversy over whether they demean Williams' reputation is misplaced. The umpteenth mediocre revival of, say, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof does real harm. But under the sensitive direction of Michael Khan, the opportunity to see these lost one-act plays make an intriguing portrait of a great artist.

The opening sketch of the young man and his suffocating mother in Summer at the Lake from 1937 is the prototype for trapped Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie of 1944. The Fat Man's Wife turns out to be an early, lovelorn pastiche of Cowardesque romantic desire, of all sophisticated, unsexy things. Adam and Eve on a Ferry (1939) is a surprising comic doodle, a curiosity piece about an elderly woman in search of sensual love and D. H. Lawrence (who was one of Williams' literary influences).

But Williams wrote about the human heart and laid it bare, and his 1959 And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens is an astonishing story about a touching, young New Orleans property owner and transvestite (given a smashing performance by Cameron Folmar) who bribes and seduces a hard-drinking heterosexual sailor into living with him for a while. Tell Sad Stories is less about erotic sexual fantasy, perhaps, than the desperate need for companionship in a community of dangerous freedom.

I Can't Imagine Tomorrow was written in 1970, when Williams could scarcely bring himself to write any more. It's a heartbroken poem, perfectly performed by Kathleen Chalfant and David Rasche, about two people who reach out to the other in the pain of being alive. The haunting, emotional reference to "Dragon Country" is unmistakably the Williams whose self-described "blue devils" sank him into terrible despair. Yet the play's tragic message might be Beckett's: "I can't go on. I must."

"Are you asleep?" the woman says to the man softly. "Are you asleep now?"

"I can't imagine tomorrow," comes the answer.

What a thing not to imagine. It takes our breath away. And by then, for Tennessee Williams, there was no escape.

The intriguing raison d'être of her 1983 Pulitzer Prize–winning play is, quite simply, that people who've had enough of life have a right to end it. The playwright deliberately doesn't present us with a moral dilemma or debate in the hackneyed tradition of, say, Whose Life Is It, Anyway? On the other hand, if you find yourself not caring as much as perhaps you ought about the suicidal heroine of 'Night, Mother-if, in fact, you find yourself not even giving a damn after a while whether she kills herself or not-either the play has problems or you do.

Let's not blame you.

The play, directed by Michael Mayer, begins with the sweet-toothed Thelma-or Mama-reaching for a cupcake in the kitchen cabinet. "I hate it when the coconut falls off," Mama (the homey Brenda Blethyn) says to herself. "Why does the coconut fall off?"

Who knows! Enter her dowdy daughter, Jessie (Edie Falco in long, moth-eaten sweater), to ask: "We got any old towels?"

The social message is clear at the outset: These are ordinary folk living in an ordinary house in Anywhere, U.S.A. (We could be in the South, but no matter: Coconut falls off the cupcake just the same). After a few minutes' chit-chat about the gun Daddy left behind in the loft, Jessie says calmly: "I'm going to kill myself, Mama."

She's so matter-of-fact about it, she could have said, "I'm going for a walk, Mama." And, in a sense, that's exactly what Jessie is doing: She's going for a walk and she's not coming back. Mama-who's chatty and a bit dim and ordinary-doesn't take it in at first. Her daughter's suicide will take place 90 minutes later, at the end of the play-at the final curtain, as it were. Jessie actually rationalizes the suicide as if she's getting off a bus. "It's my trip," she explains to Mama, "and I've had enough."

Well, why not? Fair enough …. When Jessie asks what alternative there is for her, Mama suggests buying new dishes or rearranging the furniture. Wouldn't you feel suicidal?

The mother's empty life revolves quite contentedly around shopping at the A. and P., watching TV and a bit of family gossip. She's about as interesting as her life. The daughter isn't too thrilling, either. She lives unhappily with Mama; her life has become pointless; her daddy's dead; her husband has left her; their son's a teenage delinquent who left home for a life of crime; she can't hold a job (she's an epileptic); she doesn't see the point of anything; and she never loved Mama in the first place. The dice are loaded, wouldn't you say? Killing herself is the one positive thing she can do.

She's resolute about it, cruel and not a little smug. The battles with the complacent mother are small and niggling, the family secrets pro forma. A good deal of the play is spent in staggering domestic inconsequence as Jessie organizes Mama's future life without her: how she should work the washer properly; the cancellation of the newspapers; what to do about the milk. The Handi Wipes are under the sink; garbage night is Tuesday ("put it out as late as you can"); the toilet-paper supplies are plentiful. And how about a last caramel apple?

"Family is just accident, Jessie," Mama tells her with genuine innocence. "It's nothing personal, hon. They don't mean to get on your nerves. They don't even mean to be your family. They just are."

True, if forlorn. And Mama got on my nerves just the same. But I simply couldn't connect to her suicidal daughter. There's no turmoil in the role, no sense of struggle or real loss, only a droning, commonplace inevitability.

Sarah Kane's much admired 4.48 Psychosis, which played recently at St. Ann's Warehouse, is a study in contrasts-the last howl of a playwright on the edge of her own traumatic suicide. At times, the piece is bitterly funny; at others, we turn into reluctant voyeurs. ("Watch me vanish.") But with its natural poetry and adolescent fury, Ms. Kane's tragedy is an open wound that touches and infects us. It embraces death by grieving terribly for life.

But the domestic drabness of 'Night, Mother contains no life that I could see. Ms. Falco makes an emotionally cold, pragmatic Jessie, but the star has little or no choice. She's playing the glib role as written. When it comes to the crunch, however, the playwright pulls out all the conventional stops and begs for our sorrow with the mother's tearful breakdown at the close. It's Mama, if anyone, the audience feels sorry for. She's the child. Ms. Blethyn-whose crying jags are familiar from Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies-ensures that Mama's lonely fate is bathetic, not tragic. And Mama, unfortunately, has the meatier role.

Fightin' Words

John Patrick Shanley's early breakthrough play Danny and the Deep Blue Sea at Second Stage Theatre is subtitled "An Apache Dance," and it's typical of the Mr. Shanley we've come to know that he defines "An Apache Dance" for us in the script.

Lest we miss the point of the play, "An Apache Dance," he says, "is a violent dance for two people, originated by the Parisian apaches. Parisian apaches are gangsters or ruffians."

The Parisian apaches are no relation, I assume, to the Swiss apaches. (The Swiss apaches are less visceral, more clockwork). There's a strong sense in all of Mr. Shanley's work that he's gone on some manic improvisation. He works it out by writing the play, but he seems to leave everything in. At 70 minutes, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is short, but it isn't a minimalist play.

Mr. Shanley is a wordy playwright who's warming up here like a fighter entering the ring. "This play is dedicated to everyone in the Bronx who punched me or kissed me, and to everyone whom I punched or kissed," goes another of his notes in the script, and we haven't even started yet. He makes it seem as if there's an awful lot of punching and kissing in his life. The 1984 Danny and the Deep Blue Sea reminds us of early David Mamet in this sense: It comes out swinging.

Danny is a trucker nicknamed "The Beast," and Roberta is a divorced mother who lives with her parents and sucked off her father. "Some fuckin' bar. Nobody here," says Danny, whose hands are bleeding.

"That's why I like it," says Roberta, who looks emotionally battered.

"What's the matter? You don't like people?"

"No. Not really."

"Me neither."

"What happened to your hands?"

"Fight."

"Who'd you fight?"

"I don't know. Some guys last night. Tonight too."

"Two fights?"

"Yeah."

"How come?"

"I don't know. Guys bother me. I start swinging."

"I don't get it. Did they say something to you?"

Danny explodes. "Who the fuck asked you to get it! Ain't none of your fuckin' business. I lock horns with anybody. Nobody crosses my fuckin' line, man! They can do what they want out there, but nobody crosses my fuckin' line!"

"All right."

"They asked me where I was going."

"Who?"

"The guys I was fighting tonight …."

It's good stuff, yes? It zings with gutter vitality and humor. But the narrative is predictable, the more so as time has passed since its first production. Mr. Shanley's two violent protagonists meet in the Bronx bar, end up at her place, fuck, confess, fight, fantasize about marriage-normalcy, comfort-and wake up to reality.

"Just 'cause it don't make no sense don't mean it ain't true," says Danny. "It could be true. If you want it. I ain't never planned no single fuckin' thing in my life. I ain't never done nothin'. Things happen to me. Me, you, what you did. We didn't do that stuff. It happened ta us."

Mr. Shanley believes in the redemption of love. That is, he would like to believe in it. The weakness of his early piece is its whopping American clichés: the inarticulate, tender brute, the needy slut. Directed by Leigh Silverman, the revival needs more nuance from its young actors, Adam Rothenberg and Rosemarie De Witt. Violence is easy. Ask the apaches.

"Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't . Money goes to safety, to consensus …. That's why sometimes I get very frustrated watching plays. I'm like: 'Man, you have the shot here to say anything and this is what you're saying? This boring retread of a play I've seen 500 times …. I mean you could do or say anything that's within the bounds of the law if you don't harm anybody physically, and this is what you're doing?'"

In every man, and every woman, is a critic. But we all share Mr. Shanley's honest response. For myself, though, I always feel badly blaming the playwright (including, on occasion, Mr. Shanley). It doesn't always show, but my heart goes out to the poor sod who fills the blank page with words and, sometimes, with his blood. The image of Eugene O'Neill emerging from his writing room drained and gray from the daily struggle with the wreckage of life suffices. It has always seemed to me that writers are heroes.

Stanislavsky believed that the kings and rulers of the stage are actors. Maybe so, on the night-but without the playwright, there wouldn't be a play. The writer gives us hope, beyond hope, that something magnificent can be created that never existed before.

"Theater is just too exciting a prospect to be left to dullards," Mr. Shanley concluded. True, if harsh. But I prefer to blame producers. They are the ones who choose the plays.

I've no argument with bottom-line Broadway producers. Apart from the usual British import or star-driven revival, Broadway has more or less abandoned serious drama. "Money goes to safety, to consensus"-as Mr. Shanley says. But when the producers of nonprofit theater throw in the towel, we're in real trouble. They represent the last bastion of the true artist, "because it's where the money isn't." Because their stages are the only places left in American theater where the commercial bottom line isn't intended to rule.

Last week, I questioned the Roundabout Theatre's decision to revive the already well-known potboiler from the 50's, Twelve Angry Men , which began life as an hour-long TV play. Not to repeat the arguments: My central point is that the Roundabout's nonprofit status-the very reason why it's in existence-is to avoid typical commercial fare and offer us a radically different choice.

It wasn't too long ago that the Roundabout staged the musical history of Burt Bacharach. Let it be said in fairness that all our major nonprofit houses make similar "necessary compromises," as they say, and the critical fraternity doesn't seem to mind. Reading several other critics on Twelve Angry Men, I found they all enjoyed it, or forgave it, except for one. John Lahr of The New Yorker questioned the choice and even made a few alternative suggestions from "the treasure chest of commercial theatre (George Kelly's The Show Off, Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest, S.J. Perelman's The Beauty Part , Arthur Kopit's Indians , to name four) that have literary as well as theatrical merit."

But what are we to say about the Roundabout's decision to revive Larry Shue's 1983 farce, The Foreigner , at its more intimate second theater off Broadway, the Laura Pels? Proudly displayed on the wall of its lobby is the solemn declaration that the Laura Pels "will be used by Roundabout artists in the creation of new works."

The Foreigner , starring Matthew Broderick, isn't new, and I'm afraid that as farces go, it should have went a generation ago. " This is what you're doing?" It might be that it left my new best friend, John Lahr, rolling alone in the aisles. But it only sank me.

A good farce can be a tonic; a bad one-as Laurence Olivier once said about a fellow actor in a comedy-is about as funny as a dead baby in an open coffin. The revival of The Foreigner is a celebration of ignorance that's built on the shoddy premise that foreignness-being foreign-is inherently funny. If you find the sound of a foreign accent hysterical, The Foreigner is for you. But if Mr. Broderick had swapped his Russianish accent for an Arab's, he couldn't have done much worse.

Set in a fishing lodge in hillbilly Georgia, Mr. Shue must have intended it all as a kind of madcap comment on the Cold War. Mr. Broderick is in nerd mode yet again. He plays a middle-class Englishman, Charlie, who's so painfully, anonymously shy that during a visit to Georgia, he pretends he can't speak any English. Much comedy ensues. Being Southern is also meant to be a riot, too. For example, Ellard, the village idiot, teaches Charlie English: "faw-erk" (fork); "layump" (lamp). There are also excruciatingly milked mimes when Charlie copies Ellard's eating habits and his laborious use of the faw-erk and other thongs.

It isn't exactly that Mr. Broderick is repeating his performance from The Producers , although it's exactly the same at center. It is more that this is the star's only performance. Mr. Broderick is forever the ingenue, the adorable innocent in over his head. He has all the moves-the fussy, mincing little steps and peculiar hops, the borrowings from silent movies, the cute, ingratiating smile-but he isn't innately funny. He's the straight man, not the comic.

When not speaking, when not "on," he lapses into a neutral blank-an attempt at Laurel without Hardy. There are long, leaden stretches during Act l when he doesn't have much to do except sit there. He could be asleep. It would be understandable. There's no inner vitality in him, no sense of the combustibly outrageous. A self-conscious puppy-dog charm is his calling card. Mr. Broderick is an earnest miniaturist playing the eternal naïf too much.

There's also Francis Sternhagen, of all wonderful actresses, playing an adorable old biddy who shouts at foreigners to be understood. There's the British Sergeant "Froggy" LeSueur, who dynamites things by accident. There's a threatening type with tattoos who's a member of the Klan and says stuy-uff like, "Why, last time I saw a foreigner, he was wrigglin' on the end o' my bayonet." And there's an evangelical priest (who's a secret member of the Klan) and his tarty but good-hearted wife, flashing her knickers in a miniskirt, who's also an heiress who falls for sweet Charlie, who-oh, skip it.

A farce about these weird people who come from other countries might be rationalized by some as a morality tale for our time. You can rationalize anything. The Foreigner is the wrong choice in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which reminds me of something. It's spinach, and the hell with it.

Ostensibly about love, literature, apartment-hunting and American involvement in the Israeli-Arab war, Mr. Shanley takes no prisoners on all fronts. Best of all, there's a swaggering Texan cowboy named Frank, who's sort of slow and perplexed and very dangerous, and doesn't understand why no one in the whole wide beautiful world loves him or wants to be like him. Frank-you've guessed it!-is Mr. Shanley's none-too-subtle emblem for George Bush's U.S.A. Gun-toting Frank's sidekick is a bartender named Watson, an English dope and stand-in for that little poodle, Tony Blair. Broad political cartoons aren't meant to be subtle or polite, of course, and in his outraged way, the cultivated Mr. Shanley is saying to us before, no doubt, jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!!!!"

Here comes the moment . For various reasons, we've already heard the rousing theme music from Lawrence of Arabia and Exodus during the show. But this is less exotic, homier and sweeter. It was the spectacle of Mr. Shanley's Frank and Watson singing "You Light Up My Life" together that sent me over the top. I can't help smiling now as I recall it-the farcical, painfully funny absurdity of it. At the same time: finally! An American playwright in these dreadful, unacceptable times has at last felt compelled to abandon what he usually does and come out swinging.

In his other life, Mr. Shanley is a smart dramatist of the sex wars, with plays like Psychopathia Sexualis and his screenplay for Moonstruck . His last play, Where's My Money , was about divorce. I don't quite know where he stands right now, except that he's half-mad with what's going on in the world. He doesn't list his plays in the Playbill to Dirty Story . Instead of humbly thanking even God for his career, he's gone on a rant. It's a first, in my experience. "John resides on Earth, in America," goes his bio, "a country where the Democrats lost not only the Presidency, the House, and the Senate, but also their integrity, their credibility and their balls. Where Hillary Clinton voted to invade Iraq and Tom DeLay is considered to be a respectable man …. "

More power to him, I say. Theater is no hushed museum-it's a forum for fierce debate, and Mr. Shanley's meltdown outcry is in a good, brave cause. He's brought rough political theater urgently back to a town that produces so many dead revivals it would test the patience of a necrologist. To be sure, Dirty Story isn't perfect. Its fury is a spontaneous improvisation in agitprop theater born from disgust. The second-act lunacies and metaphors buzz better than his wordier first-act set-up. But that he can have us both laughing and horrified at the world says a lot for him (and nothing for the world).

Dirty Story is another first-rate, well-acted production from the LAByrinth Theater Company, whose Our Lady of 121st Street by Stephen Adly Guirgis I rated last week as the best modern urban drama I've seen in a decade. They're on a roll! So is John Patrick Shanley.

"The streets have become politicized. Everything has political overtones. Whether you like it or not," he told The Times recently. "There's no other kind of play I could write right now. I can't write about how my mother wasn't nice to me right now."

Vincent in Brixton : Beyond the Trappings

To go from the impassioned heat of Dirty Story to the safer fare of Vincent in Brixton seemed almost comforting at first. Everything about its elegant staging is richly promising-until, alas, we get to the play.

Richard Eyre's fine, painterly production, which comes to Lincoln Center on Broadway via the Royal National Theatre, has an exceptionally good cast led by Clare Higgins and Jochum ten Haaf. Its 19th-century kitchen set by Tim Hatley is perfect, and his vintage costumes could scarcely be better. The lighting by Peter Mumford, Dominic Muldowney's lovely original music, the atmospheric ebb and flow of the evening's refined, gentle rhythm that is Mr. Eyre's specialty-everything is exactly right, exactly as it should be.

But the play! Perhaps I was in no mood for the romantic melodrama of Nicholas Wright's Vincent van Gogh biography. Loosely based on the painter's early days in Brixton, London, Vincent in Brixton won the Olivier Best Play Award. But the speculative tale of the 20-year-old van Gogh's slow-dawning love affair with his middle-aged landlady, the widower Mrs. Loyer, struck me as a curiosity piece-at best, a mild footnote to the artist as a young man. Mr. Wright, the engaging psychological dramatist of Mrs. Klein , has given us at the repressed heart of Vincent in Brixton an old-fashioned English potboiler.

The evening's treacly message is repeated by Vincent as if it contained the secret of the universe: "No woman is old so long as she loves and is loved." It's a drab Hallmark homily, isn't it? "No woman is old so long as she loves and is loved." It's the kind of patronizing greeting card someone might send to their lonely, pathetically grateful granny on Valentine's Day. Anyway, it irritated me, as you can tell.

Mrs. Loyer is depressed enough without Vincent's simpering love note. But why Mr. Wright chose to write a play about a chronic depressive and a manic nut is only of passing interest when we realize who the nut is. Vincent in Brixton 's plot is nevertheless slender. Landlady in widow's weeds meets naïve, odd young man with red hair yet to become Vincent van Gogh. He's currently working anonymously for a London art dealer. "You're like a mirror of my despair," he announces in the dawning of his desire for the stunned Mrs. Loyer. He also comes up with the clanger, "Art is a lonely road." Not that it seems a particularly lonely road. Vincent first fell wildly in love with Mrs. Loyer's daughter, Eugenie, from the moment he clapped eyes on her. But that's in the past; Eugenie is now committed to a house painter (who wants to be a real painter). Vincent and the resistant Mrs. Loyer fall tentatively, coyly in love. She changes clothes, becomes giggly. He suddenly leaves for two or three years. She goes back to wearing black again. Vincent, now on the verge of becoming a mad artist, briefly returns in a pair of muddy, worn-out boots that just might inspire a painting one day. End on picturesque van Gogh tableau.

Ms. Higgins is remarkable in her unostentatious portrait of middle-aged foolishness edging tentatively toward the folly of love. But she and the excellent, agitated Mr. ten Haaf need more than the play's repressed romantic agonies and nods to high culture if we're to become truly involved. Reticence is still an unshakable middle-class tradition, like the timelessly understated dramas of Terence Rattigan. Emotional subtext is all. "Shall I give you a tip?" goes another line from Vincent in Brixton , signaling another message. "Nothing in this house is what it seems."

The trouble is, more or less everything is exactly what it seems-down to the constant cooking, cleaning, washing and tea-making. Mr. Wright wants to ground his play in authentic social realism. But frankly, I haven't seen so much tea brewed since an episode of East Enders. The homey household chores represent a nostalgic throwback to the English "kitchen sink" school of drama from the 50's and 60's. But in the good old "kitchen sink" days, you could actually smell the play. They used to cook a real meal onstage that either had your mouth watering or had you running for the exit.

They cook a meal in Vincent in Brixton , too. Mrs. Loyer busily bastes and chops and spatters flour on something or other most diligently. But you can't smell anything. You can't smell the roast that's eventually produced with a flourish from the glowing oven and plonked on a platter. The air's too rarefied. But it looks good.

"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 set me thinking.

Is it his Florence or my Florence? Are we talking about the same Florence? Hey, Florence, it ain't over! To be sure, I love the ancient city of stone and New York City as much as anyone, but are they one and the same thing? They are to John Patrick Shanley. On the other hand, when I'm standing meekly in line at that Duomo of New York City, the fish counter in Zabar's, it all lacks a touch of the Cellinis to me. "Attention shoppers! The bagels are now on sale!" Call me an old cynic, but Benvenuto Cellini's masterpiece of Perseus holding aloft the head of Medusa that was unveiled in the Loggia dei Lanzi in 1554 doesn't spring immediately to mind during the stampede to the bread counter.

"Attention shoppers! Don't forget to visit our housewares department!" Well, let's face it, it's not the same as visiting Michelangelo's David , though I once admired an electric toaster there for $19.99.

When Mr. Shanley, the Academy Award–winning writer of Moonstruck , dedicated Cellini to New York City, his Florence, he must have had other things in mind. Could it be that he sees Renaissance Man as your typical New Yorker? It could.

"I know this guy!" Mr. Shanley explained to Time Out New York . He had come across a paperback copy of the autobiography of the histrionic, brawling Cellini at the Strand Book Store. "I thought the voice was utterly New York, and as time went by, I thought, This was the birth of the New York voice. It took place in the Renaissance, when the ego, like an explosion, was formed. These artists stood up and said, You know what-we're everything, we're the whole show…."

It's a misunderstanding, I think, to reduce the Renaissance to a night out with Julian Schnabel. Monstrous egos don't need yet another celebration; they need a slap in the kisser. But Mr. Shanley isn't the dramatist to do it. He exults in the excesses of Cellini as much as Cellini did. There's the uncomfortable suggestion that his portrait of the suffering artist might be something of an agonized self-portrait, too. It's hell creating a masterpiece in the quest for immortality, but- Madonna mia! as the Florentines in Cellini exclaim so exuberantly-someone's got to do it.

All dramas about The Creative Process are a dangerous business, particularly when geniuses are involved. Think of the agony and the ecstasy of Charlton Heston's Michelangelo, or Kirk Douglas' Vincent van Gogh lusting for life. The Reg Rogers Cellini isn't one for the ages, but it has been cast in the same Hollywood mold of wild romantic genius suffering for great art in the face of evil forces. "I curse God that he made me long for greatness so!" Cellini cries, wracked in manic creative agony as he dictates his blustering memoirs to a boy. There's a possibility of sodomia , but let's not go into that now.

Unfortunately, Mr. Shanley, who also directs the play, has everyone speak in Italian-English accents to make it more-'ow you say?- makita mora like a beeg pizza pie . It's as if Cellini has been dubiously dubbed. "You willa never-a die," Cellini exults to his male model. "You willa never-a grow old. You willa be Perseus. In-a the piazza. Forever!"

Mr. Shanley's voice of the Renaissance turns out to be the voice of Vinny. But not in France. Here it is more the voice of Inspector Clouseau as the willing cast, doubling up in various roles, switch from "Eccola!" to "Eez zère someseeng 'ere yew waaant ?" Cellini's mistress and main model, the saucy Caterina, is French. Jennifer Roszell gamely plays her naked or in nothing more than a very short nightie. A flighty cutie in a shorty nightie over-reaches the naughty-naughty. But oh, to be backstage when Ms. Roszell takes her bow.

Naturally, the scenes between our lusty hero and the slut Caterina are tempestuous. They make the ravenous love of wolves. "Yew weel nayvère be done weez me," she says, ever the temptress to art.

"Once-a mora, and then-a no mora," the voracious Cellini replies. But I didn't believe him.

Mr. Shanley's bloated prose in the midst of all this Cellini wankery proved toughest on the ear. "You have the sensibility of a Gorgon and your mother is a red-chaffed elbow of the Devil!" "By the face of Jesus! One more word, and upon the honor of my house, you will feed my blade!" "I see the stars in you, the black earth that feeds us, the soft milk of giving love. I will see your face as in a magic crystal on the day of my death …."

Stop! Basta .

The wordy Act I slogs through the story of Cellini's life and catastrophic ego, his battles with popes and Medici dukes, with ignorant patrons, rival artists as apostles of the average, and God. But in terms of ideas and the mystery of the divine, Mr. Shanley appears to be covering the familiar, far superior territory of Amadeus . The renowned line "Too many notes" has been changed, in effect, to "Too much bronze."

No noisier Act II is to be found anywhere, as Mr. Shanley shows us how the Perseus masterpiece was cast in bronze amidst frenetic cries from salty peasants of "Heave! Heave!" and "Si! Si!"

As documentaries on the kilning process go, however, it wasn't quite as thrilling as it may seem. There was thunder and lightning, though. " Madonna mia! " went the cry. " Che tempesta! " Our hero got hysterical. "By the gods who preceded Jesus, make it hotter, hotter, hotter!" Cellini screamed heatedly, peering frantically into a smoky hole in the stage. "More wood!" cried the peasants. "More wood!" "Si! Si!" "Fetch more wood!"

"I will not fail!" Cellini insisted, in the loud chaos of creativity and promptly fainted from a fever. "Perseus will not die even as he is born!"

And it came to pass that great art was forged in hellish fire and unearthly tempest, and Cellini's mighty Perseus was born. And after a moment's hesitation, the popes and the patrons and the people-unreliable critics all-acclaimed the masterpiece, calling out "Bellissima!" and "Magnifica!" and "Bravo!"