John Patrick Shanley, Shanley, John Patrick

The Big Funk

Literature & Fiction

Shanley, John Patrick

John Patrick Shanley

Dramas & Plays

Dramatist's Play Service

A play for 2 men and 1 woman. The first scene of the play is a conversation between two lovers, Tommy and Donna, who broke up some time earlier but who are obviously still attracted to each other. Donna is enraged because Tommy, a would-be artist, is now having an affair with her younger sister, but Tommy, stretched out on his recliner (which, apart from a refrigerator full of beer, comprises the entire furnishings of his spartan apartment), is seemingly unmoved by her harangue. In the second scene Donna visits her father, a once successful artist who stopped painting at the death of his wife, whom he had bullied and betrayed despite his professed love for her. Combative and complex (but also very funny) the father sits and drinks and eventually gives in to his daughter's demand that he force Tommy to marry her or beat him up. Then, in the third and final scene, the father and Tommy confront each other, with results that are sometimes menacing, sometimes antic, with a lively discussion about art and women eventually leading to a sort of tenuous truce-and a grudging recognition of the responsibility that love, in its various guises, imposes.

The Dreamer Examines His Pillow

A comic folktale for 2 men and 3 women. Huey Maximilian Bonfigliano has a problem: While he is safely divorced from his shrewish first wife, Janice, who shot his dog and even took a bead on him, he feels he cannot regain his "manhood" until he woos and wins her one more time-if only to put his broken marriage behind him once and for all. He enlists the aid of his lifelong buddy, Aldo Scalicki, a confirmed bachelor who tries, without apparent success, to convince Huey that he would be better off sticking with his new lady friend, Teresa, a usually placid young waitress whose indignation flares when she learns what Huey is up to. In a moonlit balcony scene (hilariously reminiscent of Cyrano de Bergerac) Aldo pleads his lovesick friend's case and, to his astonishment, Janice capitulates-although not for long. However we do learn that her earlier abuse of Huey was intended to make him "act like a man" which, at last, he does. And, more than that, he (and the audience) become aware that, in the final essence, "the greatest-and only-success is to be able to love"-a truth which emerges delightfully from the heartwarming, wonderfully antic and always imaginatively conceived action of the play.

Italian American Reconciliation

Book by John Patrick Shanley, Shanley, John Patrick

Savage in Limbo.

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Welcome to the Moon and Other Plays.

Women of Manhattan.

Beggars in the House of Plenty.

Candlelight

Dramatists Play Service, Incorporated

Doubt - Signature Acting Edition

Now a major motion picture! Starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley from his Pulitzer Prizewinning play. The best new play of the season. That rarity of rarities, an issue-driven play that is un preachy, thought-provoking, and so full of high drama that the audience with which I saw it gasped out loud a half-dozen times at its startling twists and turns. Mr. Shanley deserves the highest possible praise: he doesnt try to talk you into doing anything but thinking-hard-about the gnarly complexity of human behavior. Terry Teach out, The Wall Street Journal.

Doubt: A Parable

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Books by John Patrick Shanley