Artistic Director's Update

John Patrick Shanley on Doubt …

Excerpted from David Drake’s Broadway.Com interview

How long did it take to write Doubt?
About a year. I was doing a play called Dirty Story on Theater Row, and in rehearsals one day—just out of the blue, apropos of nothing—I said, "Think I'm gonna write a play called Doubt." And someone said, "Well, what's it about?" I said, "I have no idea."

Do you usually start with a title?
Not often, but sometimes. That's the sort thing that collects stuff. You have this single image in your head—like a room, or a title—and then energy starts to collect around that point.

Was your own Catholicism a "point" for Doubt?
I think there was something in the air I was picking up. There was a quality of certainty being exercised around me that something in me was answering with something that felt very powerful called "doubt." Not a weakness, but in fact a passion to answer this certainty that was not as founded as doubt. Then at another point I started to think about black and white. And about those nuns. And their certainty. And that connected it to the past. Again, thinking again in black and white, I started thinking of a black woman—coming into a white woman's office, and talking about whether something was black and white.

And that helped lead you into the play?
To the scene with the black mother and the white principal. The black woman says to the white principal, "Some things are not black and white." Then the woman dressed in black and white says, "And some things are." [Laughs.] Sometimes that's the way my mind works, in some kind of graphic abstract way.

It seems Doubt's molestation narrative actually opens a whole Pandora's box of questions regarding the institution of the Catholic church. Was that intentional?
The title "Doubt" really had the power for me, not the Catholic church scandals. And so, yes, I meant that to be implied in a variety of ways as a powerful and useful tool to answer something in the culture. Whether it was the invasion of Iraq—and the certainty that that was the right thing to do—or people in the Democratic and Republican parties who, year in and year out, show up like convicts chained together—having the exact same positions on everything! They're just chained to it. I don't think that's "thinking." And that's what functioning, effective members of a culture do—say, "Look! I have doubts. And that's a good thing. You should have doubts, too. And if you don't, you're a hammer-headed clown!"

I see your your email address is listed in Doubt's program [shanleysmoney@aol.com]. Do people write you?
Oh, I probably get about 15 e-mails a day.

So what sorts of things do people say?
All sorts of stuff. They tell me about their experience in parochial school in the '60s. I got a letter from a Los Angeles prosecutor who saw the play and liked it very much because the principal employed the same tactics that she did—to get information out of suspects. I got an e-mail from a guy who wrote an entire alternate ending to the play.

No way.
Yeah, including light cues, which he thought I should change. And I got an e-mail from a woman who said she was tall, blonde and beautiful and lived near me, and that we should have a drink. [Laughs.] The whole gamut!