Joe Versus the Volcano
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
2.
Primary Texts: Film
John
Patrick Shanley. Joe
Versus the Volcano.
(1990)
Supporting References:
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“Hanks, Tom
(1956—). One of only two men to ever win back-to-back Academy
Awards for Best Actor, Tom Hanks has proven that he is one of the
most talented and versatile actors of the twentieth century. From his
early days as cross-dressing Kip in the television show Bosom
Buddies, Hanks went on to win Oscars for two vastly diverse
roles. First, he won Best Actor for 1993's Philadelphia, in
which he played Andrew Beckett, a gay lawyer dismissed from his law
firm after being diagnosed with AIDS. In 1994, Hanks brought home a
second statue for his portrayal of the title character in Forrest
Gump, an amiable Southerner with questionable intelligence and
the good fortune to be present at a number of important historical
events. For his role as Andrew Beckett, Hanks lost so much weight
that he lent grim reality to the deteriorating physical condition of
the gay lawyer. In Forrest Gump, Hanks developed a slow drawl
that perfectly presented Gump's drawn-out mental processes and
childish naivete. Not one to be satisfied with making history, Hanks
followed up the two wins with an Oscar-worthy performance that
allowed him to bring a life-long dream close to reality by playing
astronaut Jim Lowell in Apollo 13 (1995). Hanks was also
nominated for his performance in 1998's Saving Private Ryan,
Steven Spielberg's gripping World War II drama.
“Tom Hanks was born July 9, 1956, in
Concord, California. When he was only five years old, his parents
divorced. Hanks and his older siblings lived with his father, while
the youngest child remained with his mother. The divorce was followed
by multiple sets of step-parents and frequent moves. As the perennial
new kid on the block, Hanks learned that people liked him when he
made them laugh, so he became a clown. In 1978 he married Samantha
Lewes, with whom he has two children, son Colin and daughter
Elizabeth. They divorced in 1985. In 1985, while filming the comedy
Volunteers, Hanks met Rita Wilson and they were married in
1988. Hanks and Wilson have two sons, Chester and Truman. While
accepting the Academy Award for Forrest Gump in 1994, Hanks
brought tears to many eyes with his acknowledgement of their mutual
love and respect.
“The years between Bosom Buddies
(1980-82) and his two Academy awards were full of both successes and
failures for Hanks. Director Ron Howard gave Hanks his first shot at
superstardom by casting him opposite mermaid Darryl Hannah in Splash
(1984). He followed these movies with comedies, such as The Man
with One Red Shoe (1985) and The Money Pit (1986), that
endeared him to fans but which were panned by critics. However, in
1988 Hanks won over the critics with the role of Josh Baskin in Penny
Marshall's Big. This story of a young boy who gets his wish to
grow up overnight was the perfect vehicle for Hanks because it
allowed him to combine his youthful appeal with a mature performance,
garnering a Best Actor nomination. Unfortunately, Hanks followed up
his success in Big with less successful roles in Punchline
(1988), Turner and Hooch (1989), and The Bonfire of the
Vanities and Joe Versus the Volcano (both 1990). His
return to critical acclaim came in 1992 with the role of Jimmy Dugan
in Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own. While the female
stars were the focus in this tale of a women's baseball team, Hanks
more than held his own as the bitter, tobacco-chewing, has-been
manager of the team.
“Hanks' versatility is the key to his
success as an actor. The physically and mentally draining role of the
gay lawyer in Philadelphia was immediately followed by a love
story that was to become a classic: Sleepless in Seattle
(1993). Sleepless drew on the earlier classic love story of An
Affair to Remember (1957) for its plot. Instead of star-crossed
lovers, Hanks and Meg Ryan play potential lovers who never get
together until the final scene, which takes place at the Empire State
Building in New York City. The phenomenal success of Forrest Gump
was followed by the Disney favorite Toy Story (1995). Hanks
lent his voice to Woody, a computer-generated cowboy puppet displaced
in his boy's affections by spaceman Buzz Lightyear (the voice of Tim
Allen). Even in this children's tale, Hanks presents a character to
whom his audience can relate and offers friendship as a moral lesson
and proof of character development.
“Adding producer, writer, and
director to his list of accomplishments, Tom Hanks created his own
movie with That Thing You Do (1996), a charming, simple story
of a one-hit 1960's rock band. From the Earth to the Moon, a
1998 mini-series, proved to be even more ambitious. In several
installments, the mini-series followed the entire history of the
space program.
“Tom Hanks has frequently been
compared to Jimmy Stewart, an actor who was so well loved that the
Los Angeles airport was renamed to honor him after his death in 1997.
Hanks and Stewart are, indeed, similar in their appeal to both men
and women and in their versatility. It is likely that Tom Hanks will
go down in history as the most popular and the most critically
acclaimed actor of the latter half of the twentieth century.”
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JOHN PATRICK
SHANLEY writes impressively if incongruously about the
brutality of love and human communication. Shanley’s two most
celebrated works—the play Danny and the Deep Blue Sea: An Apache
Dance (1984) and the Oscar-winning screenplay for the comedy
Moonstruck (1987)—are equally startling, but in radically
different ways: the former for its brooding mood and looming threat
of violence, the latter for its old-fashioned romance and robust
sentimentality. Both works typify the best of Shanley’s drama.
Stranded somewhere between heart attack and heartbreak, the mostly
blue-collar denizens of Shanley’s plays and screenplays find
themselves traversing a landscape of psychological extremes in which
the largeness of their emotions is gradually closed down by a world
of possibilities that is frustratingly small. By marrying a
vernacular flair rivaling David Mamet’s to a sense of local color
akin to Tennessee Williams’, Shanley’s work for stage and screen
is tragicomic, quirky, and endlessly inventive.
Shanley was born in the New York City
borough of the Bronx on October 13, 1950. His father was a meat
packer of Irish-American descent, and his mother worked as a
telephone operator. A poet at the age of eleven, Shanley later won
statewide essay competitions in his early teens. He was expelled by
no fewer than three Bronx high schools before a Roman Catholic priest
helped him enroll in a New Hampshire prep school. Shanley found his
way to New York University, but he dropped out after his first year
to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps. Following this stint with the
Marine Corps—which Shanley has described as “a continuation of
the Bronx—but more civilized”—he returned to New York City.
Dissatisfied with a series of low-paying jobs, Shanley decided to
reenroll at New York University. Although he had been away from
academia for five years, he graduated as class valedictorian with a
degree in educational theater and went on to pursue a master’s
degree. When Shanley characteristically dropped out of graduate
school to tend bar, paint apartments, and devote himself more
completely to his writing, the move paid off. Early works such as
Saturday Night at the War (1978), George and the Dragon
(1979), Ketchup (c. 1980), Rockaway (1982), and
especially Welcome to the Moon (produced in 1982, published in
1985) showed him to be a promising young playwright. In 1984 the
off-Broadway production of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea brought
him to a new level of success. Shanley’s reputation was cemented by
critically acclaimed productions such as Savage in Limbo: A
Concert Play (produced in 1985, published in 1986); Women of
Manhattan: An Upper West Side Story (1986); the dreamer
examines his pillow (produced in 1986, published in 1987); and
Italian American Reconciliation: A Folktale (produced in 1988,
published in 1989).
Though these plays
were critical successes, they were not financially rewarding, and
Shanley was forced to consider other means of earning money.
Disheartened by the idea of having to return to the mundane duties of
bartending and apartment-painting, he did what many of his
contemporaries from Sam Shepard to David Mamet had already done: he
turned to Hollywood. Page 316 | Top
of ArticleSources as unlikely as Oliver Stone’s
script for the Brian De Palma remake of Scarface influenced
his first original screenplay, Five Corners, which was
produced in 1988 (after the release of his second screenplay,
Moonstruck). With its beaten-down Bronx losers, urban
desperation, displaced penguins and bow-and-arrow assassinations,
Five Corners is the most uncompromising of all Shanley’s
screenplays, particularly in its comic mixture of pathos and
violence. Though not commercially successful, the film was critically
well received and went on to win a Special Jury Prize at the
Barcelona Film Festival.
Moonstruck began as a script
titled The Bride and the Wolf, which Shanley wrote for actress
Sally Field. Field passed on the project, but veteran director Norman
Jewison snapped it up, changing the title to Moonglow and
ultimately Moonstruck. Garnering Oscars for Cher and Olympia
Dukakis in lead and supporting roles, respectively, this whimsical
story of an Italian American bachelorette and the two brothers who
farcically woo her earned Shanley a Writers Guild of America Award as
well as the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Despite its promising start, Shanley’s
career as a Hollywood screenwriter peaked early. Six screenplays
followed, none equaling either Five Corners or Moonstruck
in critical reception. The January Man, released in 1989, is
an unconventional crime story featuring Kevin Kline. Joe versus
the Volcano, produced in 1990, is a big-budget, Frank Capra–style
fable with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. It was directed by Shanley and
produced by Shanley’s early champion Steven Spielberg. Alive
(1993) is Shanley’s re-creation of a true-life Andes plane crash
disaster. Also appearing in 1993 was We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s
Story, an animated movie for children. Shanley also wrote the
screenplays for Congo (1995), an adaptation of the Michael
Crichton best-seller, and the HBO teleplay Live from Baghdad
(2002), a dissection of the role of the American media during the
1991 Persian Gulf War.
Shanley’s profitable relationship
with Hollywood did not mean the end of his artistically rewarding
relationship with American theater. He has continued to write plays
and see them produced. His works from the 1990s and 2000s include The
Big Funk: A Casual Play (produced in 1990, published in 1991);
Beggars in the House of Plenty (produced in 1991, published in
1992); Four Dogs and a Bone and The Wild Goose (1995);
Missing/Kissing: Missing Marisa, Kissing Christine (1997);
Psychopathia Sexualis (produced in 1997, published in 1998);
Cellini (2001); Where’s My Money? (produced in 2001,
published 2002); and the Arab/Israeli allegory Dirty Story
(2003). Like his screenplays, Shanley’s earlier plays tended to
earn stronger critical receptions than his later ones. But Shanley’s
theater remains a compelling arena of love, violence, desperation,
and hope in which, as Shanley explains in the preface to 13 by
Shanley (1992), “All the really exciting things possible during
the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we
currently have.”
First presented by the Ensemble Studio
in New York City in the fall of 1982, Welcome to the Moon and
Other Plays is a suite of one-act plays showcasing Shanley’s
considerable linguistic and imaginative range. As an early work,
Welcome to the Moon and Other Plays provides a comprehensive
tour of an emerging dramatic consciousness. Themes that will come to
preoccupy Shanley—the redemptive power of love, the curse of the
imagination, the precariousness of friendship, the difficulties of
communication, and the rocky terrain of a borough named the Bronx—are
all on display in miniature here.
In the opening
one-act, The Red Coat, an abstracted seventeen-year-old boy
named John Page 317 | Top
of Articleconfesses his love to Mary, a
sixteen-year-old girl who has just arrived at a party. But the facile
declarations of teenage infatuation are instantly jolted by a lyric
sensibility. John is ecstatic with love, and Shanley’s dialogue—
poetic and heightened without becoming self-conscious or
precious—tags along. When Mary confides her attraction to John, the
moonlit exchange becomes charged with a poetry beyond the verbal
reach of the average teenage crush. This is Romeo and Juliet
in contemporary rhetoric—with a street-corner, unpretentious,
native-Bronx inflection. Revealing their feelings for one another
beneath “a street light that’s more beautiful than the sun,”
John speaks fondly of Mary’s red coat, and his poetic appreciation
of the item of clothing enables her to realize that he alone
understands her. In this funny valentine of a sketch—a
foreshadowing of Moonstruck, minus the Hollywood
trappings—love heightens all, and the dramatic language follows
suit.
In the hilarious allegory Down and
Out, thinly-drawn characters named Love and the Poet sit down to
a dinner of “water and beans” while a deathly “Figure”
demands the return of the Poet’s library card. After the heady
lyricism of The Red Coat, Down and Out offers a welcome
decompression. Shanley manages to parody the myth of the starving
artist—one to which he could clearly relate—while paying homage
to it. “I remember when the wolf was at the door,” the Poet says,
lamenting the loss of more important things than library cards, “and
I was not afraid.”
Fear is also central to Let Us Go
into the Starry Night, the title of which evokes the tortured
ecstasies of artist Vincent Van Gogh. The figure of a suffering
artist is also suggested by the startling opening image of “a
tormented young man” at a cafe table “surrounded by ghosts
and monsters” that “chew on his head, claw his stomach,
whisper in his ear.” Approached by a skinny woman with more
than philosophy on her mind, the young man banters with her
sophomorically about God. “I think there’s a sophomore in a lot
of people, just waiting to get out,” the woman quips, offering the
young man a glass of champagne. “It tastes like I’m drinking
little sparks,” he observes. Monsters banished, the two fall in
love. Like The Red Coat, Let Us Go into the Starry Night is
another unabashed valentine, but with monsters in the wings the
stakes are clearly much higher.
Out West, the fourth piece in
the suite, combines Wild-West rhetoric with the inflated romantic
diction of the opening sketches. Archetypes named the Cowboy and the
Girl are attracted to one another, but their romance is interrupted
by a bizarre cast of characters. Shanley sends up saddle-sore
sentimentality while allowing the Girl to display the occasional
flashy costume-jewel of dialogue: “I have fixed my heart with a
star like a pin to the bosom of the night.” Although the Girl is
killed at the climax in a tragic gunfight, the tongue-in-cheek
rhetoric of her dying words points the audience to a tragicomic
message about the redemptive power of love:
GIRL: I have been living in my room all my life waiting for the world ta notice me. I have been a slave to my parents. The only dreams I had were from lookin’ out at the prairie. I never was alive until I saw you. At least now I’m dyin’ after I was alive.
MIKE: Poor little thing. She’s dead.
Love also looms large in A Lonely
Impulse of Delight, the penultimate one-act about Walter, a
dreamy man who takes his skeptical best friend Jim to Central Park
Lake to meet Sally, the elusive freshwater mermaid for whom he has
improbably fallen:
WALTER: … Do you know what I’m talking about, Jimmy? You’re my best friend in the world. If Page 318 | Top of Articleyou don’t know what I’m talking about then there’s nobody.
JIM: I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
WALTER: Just wait a minute. Just one more minute. Sally? Sally? Please?
As much about the possibilities of love
as it is about the impossibility of communicating the possibilities
of love, A Lonely Impulse of Delight ends on a bittersweet
note when the unconvinced friend exits just as the belated mermaid
emerges. “Sally, why didn’t you come?” Walter laments. “He
was my best friend.” Love has survived, but a friendship is over.
Walter is less and more lonely than before.
Shanley rounds out this suite of early
one acts with the title piece, Welcome to the Moon. The most
grounded and realistic of the sketches, Welcome to the Moon
also boasts the distinction of introducing the most important
unbilled character in Shanley’s canon: the Bronx. “A lowdown
Bronx bar,” the stage directions read, and the verbal rhythms
and scenic touches of Shanley’s signature borough distinguish this
economic and tragicomic one-act. Gone is the inflated diction of the
previous five sketches. In its place is gritty verbal phrasing: “I
threw myself in front of the A train, but the fuckin’ thing broke
down before it got to me.” The Byzantine plot—which involves a
double-suicide pact, unrequited love, homosexual longing, and
Canadian bacon and cheese sandwiches—keeps twisting and turning
until, in an irresistible coup de théâtre, the redeemed hero
Stephen breaks into an Irish love song, and the girl of his dreams is
perhaps finally attainable. Simultaneously surreal and real, Welcome
to the Moon walks a profoundly thin line between dreams and
reality—a line Shanley will navigate to even more remarkable effect
in his breakout play, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.
“This play is emotionally real,”
Shanley writes in the stage directions to the work that would locate
him on the theatrical map, “but does not take place in a realistic
world.” Written and performed a year after Welcome to the Moon
and Other Plays, the psychologically perilous universe of Danny
and the Deep Blue Sea could not be any further from the
heightened romantic dialogue of its predecessor. In Danny and the
Deep Blue Sea, Shanley lowers the language in the most unsparing
way imaginable in order to capture the emotional realism of two
embattled, embittered lovers hurtling toward each other in a seedy
urban bar. In fact, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea picks up where
the closing one-act of Welcome to the Moon left off—with yet
another set of lower-class casualties dry-docked in yet another
“lowdown Bronx bar.” Unlike the promising ending of Welcome to
the Moon and Other Plays, here the promise of love comes across
more like a threat. Were this bar any lower it would be subterranean.
Roberta, a thirty-one-year-old unwed
mother in a “cheap dress-up blouse that’s gotten ratty,” is
nursing a beer when Danny—a twenty-nine-year-old whose “hands
are badly bruised”— enters with a pitcher and asks her for a
pretzel. She gives him one, reluctantly. But after listening to
Danny’s street-brawling braggadocio, Roberta’s response—“I
don’t get it”—elicits from him an explosion of profanity, all
in the opening moments of the play: “Who the fuck asked you to get
it! Ain’t none a 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!”
But Roberta does
cross Danny’s line, and with increasing fearlessness. After
confiding in Danny about the glue she used to sniff, the mentally ill
child she does not particularly want to care for, the husband who did
not bother to stick around, and the sexual encounter with her
Page 319 | Top
of Articlefather that has wrecked her life,
Roberta dares to join the hair-triggered loner at his table. Although
Danny confesses to a possible murder (“I think I killed a guy last
night”), Roberta invites him back to her apartment. His hesitancy
causes her to bait him even further. In one of the play’s most
nerve-wracking scenes, Roberta slaps the already wired Danny
repeatedly in the face while berating and emasculating him:
ROBERTA: You don’t scare me, asshole. I see worse than you crawlin around in my sink. You’re about as bad as a faggot in his Sunday dress! Your mama probably still gives you her tit when you get shook up! (She starts slapping him.) What’s the matter, badass? Somebody get your matches wet?
Danny’s response is to attempt to
choke Roberta to death. But when she fails to resist, Danny “Lets
her go in horror.” “Why’d you stop?” Roberta asks. “Don’t
talk to me,” Danny answers. Only in a Shanley play would a moment
so brutal be a prelude to a kiss.
Scene Two has Danny and Roberta naked
in bed in Roberta’s closet-sized apartment drinking red wine that
“tastes like piss” and planning, of all things, their wedding
day. The implausibility of this self-destructive duo plunging
headlong into plans for the future is overcome by the emotional
reality of their need, a desperation that causes them to spin out of
control in the one direction perhaps least available to them: hope.
The ugliness of the opening act is mitigated here by an almost
impossible romantic optimism. In one of the play’s more
affectionate exchanges, the lovers awkwardly catalogue one another’s
bodies. “You got friendly ears,” Roberta says. “You got a nice
nose,” says Danny. “It looks right at ya, your nose, and it says
Hello!” Discovering one another, these two are essentially
discovering themselves, and their hope, however pathetic, knows no
bounds. “It’s good. It’s good,” Danny says. “Maybe that’s
what we oughta do. Build a boat and sail the fuck away. Get married
on some island where everybody speaks Booga Booga. Are you asleep? I
love you.”
Although the lovers drift off to pipe
dreams of the future, the morning after paints a starker picture
altogether. Roberta rejects the promises of the night before and
dismisses Danny for being “all fucked up.” Danny protests: “Ya
kissed my hands. Ya kissed my hands.” In typical Shanley fashion,
the emotional lives of these eviscerated characters are richer and
deeper than the options life has made available to them. Realizing
the futility of their future together, Roberta hysterically orders
Danny to “Go beat up a wall! Go watch yar dishrag mother puke her
dishrag guts!” The confrontation ends as Roberta “collapses,
sobbing.” When she recovers Danny is right there waiting for
her, still intent on planning their wedding day. Danny’s hope has
miraculously outdistanced her despair. The closing exchange is
doggedly upbeat:
DANNY: … We can plan a weddin, an the weddin’ll happen the way we plan. …
ROBERTA: Yeah? You think so?
DANNY: Yeah. I do. I definitely definitely think I do.
Subtitled “An Apache Dance”—which
Shanley describes in the play’s opening notes as “a violent dance
for two people, originated by … gangsters or ruffians”— Danny
and the Deep Blue Sea portrays love as an embroiled psychic
battlefield, bruising to combatants already bruised and raw. But
however damaged they may be, and however tentatively healed, Danny
and Roberta, like all of Shanley’s couples, see love as the only
plausible option.
Receiving its first
full staging at the Double Image Theatre in New York City in 1985,
Savage Page 320 | Top
of Articlein Limbo shares with Danny
and the Deep Blue Sea the two common denominators of Shanley’s
early drama—the blistering exchanges of young men and women
attempting to communicate as lovers and friends and the humble
surroundings of the Bronx.
Set in the interior of yet another
seedy New York watering hole—this one outfitted with two dead
plants, a funereal bartender, and the symbolic name Scales— Savage
in Limbo is even more relentless than Danny and the Deep Blue
Sea. Undivided by acts, the play unfolds on an intensely lit
minimalist set that exudes the existential dread of dramas such as
Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Savage in Limbo presents a
turbulent world in which five dead-end characters rebound off one
another on an “emotionally real” plane. Individuals seem
incapable of any kind of small talk. Even the most seemingly trivial
exchanges come across as undisguised cries from the heart. As the
heroine Denise Savage announces to the bartender when she first
enters Scales:
I don’t feel like watching television once more for the rest of my life and I can’t sit in that apartment that smells like a catbox with my mother who looks like a dead walrus for one more second or I will die. I will. So I put on a dress and my black pumps and I got lotsa cash and here I am. What’s happening?
The plot involves the attempts of the
belligerent Savage and the “overripe Italian” Linda
Rotunda to win the affections of “the streamlined Italian stud”
Tony Aronica. Tired of his relationship with Linda—with whom he has
a son—and gun-shy as a womanizer, Tony is determined from now on to
sleep only with “ugly girls.” Tony is also intrigued when Savage
unceremoniously offers him her virginity, an offer that enrages the
recently jilted Linda, with whom Savage has arranged to move in.
Overseeing all of these developments are the stoic bartender Murk,
who insists that his patrons drink almost constantly, and his
favorite customer April, a former nun in an alcoholic stupor for whom
he periodically dresses up as Santa Claus in order to help her avert
a mental breakdown:
APRIL: Is that you, Santa?
MURK: Ho ho ho. It’s me, April. … Now promise me you’ll be a good girl.
APRIL: I promise.
MURK: And you’ll say your prayers?
APRIL: Yes.
MURK: And you won’t go crazy?
APRIL: No.
MURK: All right then. … Jingle bells jingle bells, jingle all the way.
Like Eugene O’Neill, Shanley prefers
extreme emotional states. And it does not take much to put his
characters there. When Savage tells a weepy Linda to do her best to
cheer up, Linda replies:
I hate that. … People tryin to cheer me up. Who asked you? I feel bad. … I got no friends. I got nobody who loves me. My future looks like shit. I’m gettin fat. … My life sucks. Your life sucks. … Don’t you tell me to stop cryin. You should start cryin. … Miserable buncha two-faced Doris Days.
Approximately the
same age as Shanley when he composed the play, each of the characters
in Savage In Limbo is thirty-two, in crisis, and determined to
get out of it. April says, “I’m only thirty-two. I’ve got too
much time to kill. I could live thirty, forty more years just staring
at the meter runnin.” In defense of his improbable marriage
proposal to April, Murk says self-evidently, “I’m thirty two
years old. Well?” Even the relatively unrefined Tony wraps up the
play’s longest monologue with the telling Page 321 |
Top
of Articleadmission: “I wanna look at
somethin else. I wanna know somethin else. I’m thirty-two years
old. I wanna change.” Savage, also thirty-two, is crippled by the
most profoundly radical doubt of all, and she is looking to escape
from it through the equally disastrous options of cohabitation with
Linda or marriage to Tony. She sums up the crises facing each of the
characters in an unforgettable speech near the close of the play:
This is not life. This is not life. This is not life. … God, gimme somethin else cause this is definitely not it. New eyes new ears new hands. Gimme back my soul from where you took it, gimme back my friends, gimme back my priests an my father, and take this goddamn virginity from off my life. HUNGER HUNGER HUNGER. If somebody don’t gimme somethin, I’m gonna die.
Shanley subtitles Savage in Limbo
“A Concert Play,” and the notes his tortured quintet hits
are consistently unharmonious and discordant. Every bit as dazed as
the punch-drunk lovers in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, their
narrowing options are perhaps even narrower, as they themselves are
the first to admit. “Opportunity knocks like almost fuckin never,”
Savage tells her betrayed friend Linda in the process of seducing
Tony. In one of the play’s most significant exchanges, the mentally
ill April asserts an agency Murk realizes she will never truly have:
APRIL: I like havin my options open.
MURK: Uh-huh.
APRIL: I like it that if we got somethin goin it’s cause we choose to have somethin goin, an it’s not outta feelin we should or somethin weird like that. Do you understand what I mean?
MURK: Yeah. You’re cut off. No more credit. No more drinks.
Where Danny and the Deep Blue Sea
opens up its lovers to the impossible option of solace through love,
Savage in Limbo shuts down this option altogether. “I. AM.
ALONE,” Savage says at the climax to the play as the dour Murk
cries out: “Closing time. Last call. Last call. Last call.” How
Shanley achieves this transition from unrelenting existential despair
to the unabashed romanticism of his screenplay for Moonstruck
is simple enough to understand: his miserable lovers have nowhere to
go but up.
“I came up with the premise of a
woman who makes the choice of marrying a man she likes but does not
love,” Shanley explains in the introduction to the Grove Press
edition of Moonstruck. “And once she agrees to marry him,
then have Mr. Right show up and claim her.”
The woman in question is Loretta
Castorini, a dutiful accountant played by Cher. When we first see
her, she is balancing the books at her client Zito’s store. Only
thirty-seven, her black hair is “flecked with gray.” Zito
offers her coffee; Loretta refuses and leaves. Dressed in “sensible
but unfashionable clothes of a dark color,” Loretta is next
pictured balancing the books in the backroom of a funeral parlor.
Loretta’s heart—Shanley argues in these few deft strokes, with a
screenwriter’s gift for the quickly telling detail—is slowly
undergoing a kind of full-embalming. Her prospects look progressively
grimmer at the florist’s shop where she is next pictured tabulating
figures. Filling “a long white box … with red roses,”
her cheerfully occupied client observes: “Very romantic. The man
who sends these knows what he’s doing.” “The man who sends
those,” Loretta snaps back, “spends a lot of money on something
that ends up in the garbage can.” The opening credits have yet to
finish, and Loretta has already earned the dubious distinction of
being one of Hollywood’s great romantic grumps. To revive Loretta,
Shanley will bury her in roses.
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At dinner that night with Johnny
Cammareri, portrayed with bumbling charm by Danny Aiello, Johnny
proposes marriage, and Loretta disapproves of the manner in which he
does it. Haunted by the memory of her late husband— who was hit by
a bus, one of many things Loretta obsessively attributes to “bad
luck”—Loretta superstitiously insists that Johnny propose
properly:
LORETTA: Right from the start, we didn’t do it right. Could you kneel down?
MR. JOHNNY: On the floor?
LORETTA: Yes, on the floor.
MR. JOHNNY: This is a good suit.
LORETTA: I helped you buy it. It came with two pairs of pants. It’s for luck, Johnny. When you propose marriage to a woman, you should kneel down.
MR. JOHNNY: All right.
Loretta feels jinxed by the death of
her husband; Johnny is concerned about the state of his trousers; a
diner confuses Johnny’s proposal for praying; Johnny, not
surprisingly, forgets to bring a ring: in short, the engagement is
doomed from the start. But desperate for romance, Loretta accepts
anyway. Johnny “stands up, brushes off his knees. … They
embrace. Loretta kisses him quickly.” In the quickness of that
kiss the relationship is over. Johnny leaves that evening by plane
for his Sicilian mother’s deathbed but not before extracting a
promise from Loretta to inform his estranged brother, Ronny, of their
impending wedding.
That evening at home news of the
engagement does not impress Loretta’s jaded parents, Rose and
Cosmo, played with deadpan gusto by Olympia Dukakis and Vincent
Gardenia. Cosmo dislikes Johnny and refuses to pay for the wedding.
Unruffled by Cosmo, Rose questions her daughter:
ROSE: … Do you love him, Loretta?
LORETTA: No.
ROSE: Good. When you love them, they drive you crazy ’cause they know they can. But you like him?
LORETTA: Oh yeah. He’s a sweet man.
Rose’s words have a deeper relevance
because she knows that her husband, Cosmo, is having an affair. This
places Rose and her daughter in heartbroken cahoots: Rose is deeply
in love with a husband who is fooling around on her, while Loretta is
clearly not in love with the fiancé she intends to marry. Both
retreat behind a cynicism neither one believes in. To be in love,
Shanley argues, is to be driven crazy: Rose is crazy in a sadly stoic
way, while Loretta, as her mother suspects, is too sane.
Enter Ronny Cammareri, Johnny’s
untamed brother, who is indelibly portrayed by Nicolas Cage. Loretta
meets him for the first time when she goes to inform him of the
wedding. Ronny is the script’s Mr. Right, and only a screenwriter
as playfully perverse as Shanley could picture him as an
opera-obsessed baker with only one hand—the other having been lost
to an automatic bread slicer. In fact, as Ronny informs Loretta, the
bread-slicer incident is the root of his long-standing grudge against
Johnny. He blames Johnny for his injury because the two were talking
when the accident took place. Ronny also believes that his brother
robbed him of a wife because “when my fiancé saw that I was
maimed, she left me for another man.” Loretta has a hard time
accepting this:
LORETTA: That’s the bad blood between you and Johnny?
RONNY: That’s it.
LORETTA: But that wasn’t Johnny’s fault.
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RONNY: I don’t care! I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice!
If not for the expert comic delivery of
Cher and Cage, we might be back in the grotesquely shaded territory
of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and Savage in Limbo: two
characters meet, both hopelessly mismatched, and find themselves
sucked into one another’s loony orbits. But Moonstruck uses
its characters’ hyperbolic frustrations in the seriously ridiculous
service of comedy. The sacrificial hand, the outsized emotions, the
fondness for Puccini—in short, all of the romantic aspects of
Ronny’s character make Loretta realize that she has chosen the
wrong brother. Because he is such a mess Ronny is Mr. Right.
“This is the most tormented man I have ever known,” Chrissy,
Ronny’s co-worker, confesses to Loretta, adding as an afterthought:
“I am in love with this man.” In Shanley’s algebra of romance,
torment equals love, and love equals torment.
Loretta follows the weeping Ronny up to
his apartment, where both drink whiskey and Loretta cooks a steak:
RONNY: Loretta. What’s that smell?
LORETTA: I’m making you a steak.
RONNY: You don’t have to help me.
LORETTA: I know that. I do what I want.
RONNY: I like it well done.
LORETTA: You’ll eat this bloody to feed your blood.
That last line, both poetic and
prosaic, suggests Loretta’s reason for fortifying Ronny is so that
he may finally overcome the hatred for his brother that is slowly
consuming him mentally and physically. But it also suggests an
ulterior motive: she wants to feed his blood so Ronny will seduce
her. Whichever its intention, the latter is achieved. Ronny accuses
Loretta of being a “bride without a head!” Loretta accuses Ronny
of being a “wolf without a foot!” In a scene that is
simultaneously comic and erotic, Ronny “stiff-arms everything
off the dining table and grabs LORETTA. They
kiss passionately. He pulls her up on the table and over the table to
him. They are in each other’s arms. They are on fire.”
Loretta breaks away shouting: “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!”
Then she “changes her mind and lunges into another kiss.”
Like a slapstick version of Last Tango in Paris, Shanley has
Loretta erupt in histrionic dialogue that, despite its hilarity, is
psychologically telling:
LORETTA: You’re mad at him, take it out on me, take your revenge on me! Take everything, leave nothing for him to marry! Hollow me out so there’s nothing left but the skin over my bones. Suck me dry!
RONNY: All right. All right. There will be nothing left.
On the evening that Loretta and Ronny
find one another, a fabulous moon hovers over the nightscape,
inspiring other couples—Rose’s brother Raymond and wife Rita
among them—to make love. Its effects are lost only on Rose and
Cosmo. Snoring after too much wine and satisfied by another lover
earlier, the oblivious Cosmo is kissed by Rose who “puts her
face in her hands and quietly cries.” Shanley understands that
the reward of eventually bringing Loretta and Ronny together—the
inevitable conclusion to this old-fashioned fairytale—must be
tempered by a harder look at marital reality: new lovers sleep while
old lovers cry.
As in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,
daybreak for Ronny and Loretta does not prove to be particularly
happy. “What have we done?” Loretta shrieks the next
morning. Failing to convince Ronny that the two of them should take
their indiscretion “to our coffins,” Loretta and Ronny engage in
the film’s most famous comic exchange:
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RONNY: I can’t do that!
LORETTA: Why not?
RONNY: I’m in love with you!
(Loretta stares at him in alarm, slaps his face, then studies his face to see the effect of the slap. She is dissatisfied and slaps him again.)
LORETTA: Snap out of it!
Unlike Roberta’s mistreatment of
Danny in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Loretta’s slap is
intended to bring the two back to their senses. She is striking
Ronny, but she is striking herself through him. Confronted by
a world that is too impossibly joyful, Loretta is in a state of
shock. Not Ronny: a romantic, he is totally in love and absolutely
ready for it.
The two agree to meet one last time at
the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of Puccini’s La Bohème,
then to never see each other again. There, Loretta discovers her
father with his mistress: both father and daughter are revealed as
unfaithful—Loretta to Johnny, Cosmo to Rose. Disturbed, but
enchanted by the pathos of La Bohème, Loretta sleeps again
with Ronny. The next morning in the kitchen at the Castorini
household, Ronny appears to claim Loretta’s hand. At that moment,
Johnny returns, shockingly early, from Sicily to announce the
miraculous recovery of his mother:
The breath had almost totally left her body. She was as white as snow. And then she completely pulled back from death and stood up and put on her clothes and began to cook for everyone in the house. The mourners. And me. And herself! She ate a meal that would choke a pig!
The recovery of Johnny’s mother
parallels that of Loretta. Both have been pulled from the brink and,
stronger than ever, are ravenously hungry.
Johnny announces he cannot marry
Loretta, Loretta feigns outrage and accepts Ronny’s proposal, Cosmo
agrees to pay for the wedding, Rose secures a promise of fidelity
from Cosmo, and the brothers ultimately resolve their differences.
The happiness of the ending would be unequivocal if not for an
incisive final exchange between Rose and Loretta:
ROSE: Do you love him, Loretta?
LORETTA: Yeah, Ma, I love him awful.
ROSE: Oh God, that’s too bad.
Somewhere Oscar Wilde would be smiling:
Shanley demonstrates, as Wilde does in The Importance of Being
Earnest, that love is the happiest and most inexplicable calamity
of all. The film closes with a shot of “red roses on the white
tabletop.” The grump has been trumped: Loretta has her bouquet
and gets to smell it, too.
Following the success of Moonstruck,
Italian American Reconciliation proves that the affectionate
free-for-all of Moonstruck was no happy fluke. The play is
warmly imbued with the movie’s rosy glow. Not only do Moonstruck
and Italian American Reconciliation complement one another, as
a pair they offset the darker duo of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea
and Savage in Limbo. It is almost as if Shanley had decided to
write his upbeat works to rescue his audience from the disheartening
spaces in which his early plays had thrust them. Italian American
Reconciliation features yet another boisterous set of
romantically challenged Mediterraneans who wear their hearts on their
sleeves and who like their opera loud. The mood in both is similarly
sunny, and the dialogue just as Wildean in its flair for the epigram.
As a benign cousin to
Savage in Limbo’s Tony Aronica, Aldo Scalicki of Italian
American Page 325 | Top
of ArticleReconciliation makes his grand
entrance wearing a sweetheart rose, announcing to the audience his
embarrassing tendency to sport erections, handing out quarters like a
flush uncle at Christmas, and gleefully smashing the fourth wall to
smithereens. “How you doin? How’s it goin?” he says, working
the crowd. Spotting a pretty girl, Aldo gives her his rose. “Watch
her like a hawk,” he whispers to her boyfriend. “A word to the
wise, man to man.” After informing the audience that his mom is in
attendance, and telling off an ex-girlfriend who is apparently
stalking him, Aldo gets down to the business of the play: “And what
I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna tell you a story. About my friend Huey
and me, and what happened to him. And from this story, I’m gonna
teach you something.” There’s a good reason why Shanley subtitled
the play “A Folktale.” Where Moonstruck was a fairy
tale, an elaborate excuse for an old-fashioned happy ending, Italian
American Reconciliation will teach, and Aldo Scalicki is
our unlikely instructor. “You wanna think of it that way, you’re
my class,” he matter-of-factly informs his audience.
Aldo introduces us to Huey, who is
involved in a relationship with Teresa but still in love with his
ex-wife Janice. Huey convinces Aldo—in classic Italian folktale
fashion—to help him win back the love of the hot-tempered Janice, a
prospect that does not sit particularly well with Aldo:
ALDO: It’s like you get the Hong Kong Flu, you get rid of it, now you want it back? … The woman shot your dog with a zip gun. … Why?
HUEY: Love?
ALDO: I’m listening.
Traumatized by an emotionally
unavailable father—a trauma that has led him to fear commitment to
women—Aldo underscores his desire to help Huey with a desperate
admission that makes for one of the most unique and moving exchanges
in all of contemporary American theater:
ALDO: I got things in me I gotta fix between me an men, before I even get to the women. Huey, we gotta be friends for each other! …
HUEY: What are you sayin, Aldo?
ALDO: That I love you. And I’m petrified to say that. … I love you, man to man, and I’m here for you. Alright?
HUEY: Alright.
Latter day versions of Antonio and
Bassanio in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Huey and Aldo
feel an affection for one another as deep as that of the despair of
Shanley’s earlier duos. Italian American Reconciliation is a
love story, but Shanley understands what Shakespeare understood: that
friends, like lovers, must declare their feelings, too. So as a
declaration of love to his heartsick friend, Aldo agrees to disarm
the zip-gun-toting Janice while Huey will break up with Teresa. But
before the plan goes forward, Aldo demands something from Huey:
ALDO: You know what I think, Huey? I think you should definitely tell me that you love me. If I am doing this, you should say it, you should carve it into a freakin tree.
HUEY: I love you.
ALDO: Don’t lie to me.
HUEY: I do love you, Aldo.
Scene Two begins with
Teresa telling her Aunt May that she plans to break up with Huey, but
she does not seem sure of her decision. Teresa and May have one of
the play’s many Page 326 | Top
of ArticleWildean exchanges (“Teresa: I want
your moral support. May: I don’t have no morals”), before Huey
arrives and tells Teresa he is going back to Janice. Thus, Teresa is
jilted by Huey before she can jilt him, and by the end of the play
Teresa has unexpectedly decamped to Canada.
Aldo, on the other hand, decides that
Huey is making a mistake in leaving Teresa for Janice. To stop that
from happening, he announces his plan to “go to Janice tonight, and
I am gonna seduce her. … In this way, I’m going to save my
friend.” But Janice is not so easily seduced, nor is she easily
disarmed:
ALDO: (Comes out from under the table.) You shot a gun at me.
JANICE: Don’t be obvious.
ALDO: You tried to kill me!
JANICE: I burned my finger. That’s what I get for usin zip guns. …
ALDO: I should come up there and give you a spankin!
JANICE: Oh yeah? Try it. I’ll cut your heart out.
Not surprisingly, Aldo and Janice
nearly end up in bed, but Huey arrives in the nick of time, woos
Teresa, and surprisingly succeeds. Shanley’s stage directions set
the winning mood: “He kisses her. The music swells. They break
apart and look at each other. He picks her up. The music! The music!
The music! Blackout.”
For all its brio, Italian American
Reconciliation ends on an abrupt, dark note. Teresa does not
return, Aldo and May make melancholy small talk about the differences
between the sexes, and Huey stumbles onstage after his romantic tryst
with Janice apparently longing for the AWOL Teresa. Aldo tries to
wrap everything up with the moral lesson he forecasted earlier: “The
greatest, the only success, is to be able to love.” Italian
American Reconciliation extends Shanley’s range while
confirming the sweet romantic promise of Moonstruck. The
pleasures here are manifold, and the playwright’s fondness for his
comic world and characters is contagious, even though the ending is
not a classically happy one.
Staged in 1986 at the Manhattan Theatre
Club—a company with which Shanley would have a long and mutually
profitable relationship— Women of Manhattan marks a
departure for Shanley. Focusing on the largely upper-class concerns
of three sophisticated women in a borough of New York that is a far
cry from the Bronx, this chatty, catty comedy is refreshing in its
presentation of a feminine point-of-view and an erotic interracial
relationship:
DUKE: I didn’t expect you to look like you look.
JUDY: I didn’t expect you to look like you. Look.
DUKE: You mean black?
JUDY: Yeah!
DUKE: Does it bother you?
JUDY: No! …
…
Do you go through a lot of women?
DUKE: Like a hot knife through butter.
Women of Manhattan
captures the social and sexual shenanigans of a set of New York women
higher up the social ladder than Shanley’s usual assortment of
blue-collar brawlers. Though the pace at first appears to be
dramatically more casual than that of the majority of his early
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its discussion of marital bedwetting and violence between a man and
wife—ups the dramatic ante in true Shanley fashion.
Even more true-to-form is the
dreamer examines his pillow, Shanley’s fascinating follow-up to
Women of Manhattan, staged at the Double Image Theatre later
that same year. Recalling in some ways the work of Sam Shepard in its
jarring dislocations of reality, this expressionistic play about
Tommy, a predatorial artist-loner, and Mona, the woman who loves him,
is dedicated to Shanley’s family. Punctuated by primal drums and
ominous refrigerators that communicate silently with its unhinged
hero (“O my refrigerator. Is my self in you?”), the dreamer
examines his pillow is the most experimental and opaque of
Shanley’s early works. Featuring a threatening father figure named
Dad who claims, “I hate kids. Especially my own,” the play
unravels in a Daliesque dreamscape of skewed familial and sexual
misalliances. By the end of the play, when Dad is sent by his
daughter Donna to rough up Tommy for sleeping with both her and
Donna’s sister Mona, things become aggressively surreal: Donna
materializes in a wedding dress, Dad puts the tux he is wearing on
Tommy, the newlyweds scream, and the play ends. With the pretzel
logic of a dream and the visual stab of a nightmare, the dreamer
examines his pillow is an oddly unforgettable work.
The Big Funk, which was directed
by Shanley, was originally staged at Joseph Papp’s New York
Shakespeare Festival in 1990. It anticipates the anxieties of Y2K by
a decade and was perhaps too far ahead of its time: it was received
with critical indifference on its release. The play is marked by some
singular moments, including a scene in which an Englishman covers the
character Jill’s head with gobs of petroleum jelly and another in
which Jill’s lover, Austin, treats her to a rejuvenating onstage
bubble-bath. The Big Funk traces the relationships of two
couples: the aforementioned Jill and Austin and the depressed
knife-thrower Omar and his pregnant wife Fifi. Shanley begins the
play by providing his characters with a series of extended monologues
and ends it by having them speculate on the sad state of the world,
which a nude Austin apocalyptically dismisses in a monologue that
closes the play with a whimper: “This is the big funk. The big
fear. The big before. … All we’re doing now is sweating. We can
hear our breathing. Everything is halted. We’re waiting for the Big
Storm.”
It is difficult to ignore the
autobiographical elements at work in Beggars in the House of
Plenty. The play includes an Irish-American father who works in a
slaughterhouse and its protagonist, John, is expelled from several
schools before eventually enlisting in the U.S. Marines Corps. In
some ways this is Shanley’s most traditional play, with three
definable acts and a reasonably realistic setting. On the other hand,
it is his most experimental work: A five-year-old character is
portrayed by a full-grown man, and an infernal basement doubles as an
oedipal war zone. The dialogue is filled with non sequiturs:
JOEY: … I fell in love with this girl. Nadine. Garvin. She was a Salvation Army lass.
JOHNNY: A lass? She was a lass?
JOEY: I’m gonna get a Jaguar XKE.
JOHNNY: We switched, right? We’re talking about a car now?
A dysfunctional
family in the tradition of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into
Night, Shepard’s Buried Child, and even George S.
Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It with You, the
Fitzgeralds display a bewildering array of eccentricities that keep
this troubling play forever on the edge. Pyromaniac Johnny begs his
mother for “breast milk” before routinely setting fire to the
house; Pop nibbles the teenage Page 328 | Top
of ArticleJohnny’s ears and calls him
outrageously “my little gossoon”; Johnny’s adult brother Jerry
offers to show the teenage hero his genitalia; and in a sacrilegious
parody of Catholic piety the Fitzgeralds recite a blasphemous prayer:
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord sides with you. Blessed art
thou amongst chicken houses fulla squallin women, and blessed is the
lucky fine fat of yer womb, Jesus.” The fearlessness with which
Shanley exorcises his family’s demons is reminiscent of O’Neill,
with less of the control. But control has never been a dramatic
priority of Shanley’s. His characters are often loose cannons, and
the family Fitzgerald is a loose nuke. When John rejects his father’s
love in the play’s climactic exchange, the language is poetic, the
emotions ferocious, and the pain as excruciating as anything in
Shanley’s entire canon:
I’ve stopped stealin and I’ve stopped settin fires and I’ve stopped breakin windows. And now, now I’m gonna stop waitin for you. To reach down to me. To touch my face. To kiss my wounds. There’s been a kinda silence fallen between us like a long drop onta sharp rocks. … I will never think of you without being shocked by your lovelessness.
An enigmatic and challenging play whose
reputation is only bound to increase over the years, Beggars in
the House of Plenty suggests the power and shape of Shanley’s
subsequent plays.
“Biting the hand that feeds you” is
practically a rite of passage for once-obscure American playwrights
who end up making a killing in Hollywood. In Four Dogs and A Bone—
Shanley’s trenchant satire of the movie industry, which had a
healthy run at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1995—the playwright
does more than bite Hollywood’s hand. Like a great white shark, he
goes after the whole arm.
Reportedly based on Shanley’s
experience turning his first original screenplay into Tony Bill’s
1987 independent feature, Five Corners. Four Dogs and A Bone
chronicles the Machiavellian moves one producer, one writer, and two
competitive actresses put on one another in their attempts to keep
afloat a low-budget film and the careers that may be dragged under in
its awful wake. Unlike Where’s My Money?— Shanley’s 2002
send-up of marital greed—or Italian American Reconciliation
—which lampoons marital loyalty—the greed and disloyalty on
display in Four Dogs and A Bone points to something darker and
more sinister altogether. As in the grotesque world of The Day of
the Locust (1939)—novelist Nathanael West’s last word on the
screenwriter’s nightmare in the Hollywood dream factory—the masks
these characters wear keep slipping, and what lies beneath is a
frightening sight.
Brenda, the ingenue who is conniving to
steal the lead role from her co-star Collette, trades on her
celebrity brother’s superstar status, pretends she was the victim
of incest to win sympathy, and chants a mantra (“I am famous”)
that sounds to everybody else like “Uncle Remus.” Collette
summarily informs Brenda that she walks through her scenes “like
Bambi with polio” and entertains the suggestion of performing oral
sex on screenwriter Victor to garner more screen time. Meanwhile,
Victor is trying to cling to what remains of his artistic integrity
and is too busy editing his overwrought screenplay to attend the
funeral of his recently deceased mother. Bradley, the predatorial
producer willing to sacrifice anyone and everyone for the sake of the
project, cannot seem to stop complaining about a “surface ulcer”
on his rectum “the size of a jumbo shrimp.” When these characters
speak frankly, they do so from a blasted ground zero of obscenity:
BRENDA: Fuck you.
Page 329 | Top of Article
BRADLEY: Fuck you.
BRENDA: Fuck you.
BRADLEY: Fuck you. Good. Now that we’ve established a common language, what do you think?
In such a profane world even attraction
is registered as the absence of repulsion. As the charmless Bradley
says, making a pass at the uncharmable Brenda:
BRADLEY: Do you find me repulsive?
BRENDA: Are you coming on to me?
BRADLEY: No.
BRENDA: I didn’t think so.
Uncoiling as it does inside the viscera
of Hollywood, Four Dogs and a Bone demonstrates all the comic
distance of a tapeworm. Thankfully, this world is as funny as it is
appalling. When someone finally expresses sympathy to the barely
grieving Victor about the death of his mother, the audience breathes
a sigh of sympathetic relief. But sympathy, even in this world, has a
price tag:
BRENDA: I’m sorry about your mother.
VICTOR: Thank you.
BRENDA: Please don’t cut all my scenes.
Four Dogs and A Bone is a
devastating and devastatingly funny insider’s portrait of a
ravenous community. And given the dark comedy of the works that would
follow, Shanley was just beginning to hit his stride.
Psychopathia Sexualis, which
debuted in 1998, set out to do what no Shanley play in over a decade
had attempted: strictly entertain. The title (with a nod to the
German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing) and the subject matter
(fetishism) are admittedly heavy, but unlike the black humor of Four
Dogs and A Bone, the comic delivery here is undeniably light. The
shaggy plot involves Arthur, a husband-to-be who can only have sex
with his Southern belle fiancée in the perplexing presence of his
father’s argyle socks. Arthur enlists the help of his best friend
Howard to rescue these socks from the evil Dr. Block, a devout
Freudian who has stolen the footwear to break Arthur of his
embarrassing fetish. Howard fails to convince the diabolical Block to
give them back, but when Howard’s wife Ellie informs Lucille about
Arthur’s neurotic dilemma, Lucille swoops down on Block’s office
like a Texas-sized tornado. Block is thwarted, the socks are
snatched, and all live happily ever after. The second scene—an
uproarious parody of psychotherapy in which Block decodes Howard’s
strange dreams—provides Shanley the opportunity for a comic field
day.
After the venom of Four Dogs and A
Bone and the dysfunctional family vertigo of Beggars in the
House of Plenty, the self-consciously silly Psychopathia
Sexualis was a more than welcome crowd-pleaser. With gimcrack
comic dialogue (Lucille on masculinity: “Don’t try and hide
behind your penis. It won’t provide enough cover”) and a
terrifically zippy pace, Psychopathia Sexualis played to
packed houses for over eight weeks at Shanley’s familiar Manhattan
Theatre Club.
Shanley set his
sights on a more ambitious story for his next play, Cellini,
which was produced in 2002. The author took five years to write this
hugely ambitious stage adaptation of John Addington Symonds’
translation of the autobiography of Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto
Cellini. The play feels like a dramatic summing up for Shanley.
Familiar themes reappear: the power of the imagination, the
consequences of human pride, the hunger of the artist Page 330
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of Articleto communicate a message that an
apathetic world refuses to hear. Cellini makes baubles for corrupt
kings and popes while contemplating the masterpiece that would prove
to be his legacy: the bronze sculpture of Perseus decapitating Medusa
for the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy. Instead of contemplating
love, friendship, and family—the usual terrain of Shanley’s
plays— Cellini is primarily about the challenge of
reconciling the artist’s vision with an uncooperative world.
Threatened with jail for his unflinching hubris, Cellini engages Pope
Paolo in one of the play’s testier exchanges:
PAOLO: Remember who I am.
CELLINI: … It is not for you to intimidate me … but to entice me with the possibility of achieving fame. Good Shepherd. I want a large commission. A sculpture of at least seventeen feet in height. I want to cast a giant man. A Zeus. A Hercules. Award me that which I crave or I go to serve another throne.
PAOLO: Are you insane? … You must go to prison. We will subtract your art from you and leave the dull remains to idle suffering.
Cutting a broadly historical swath,
which constitutes a real departure for this very contemporary
playwright, Cellini aspires to be Shanley’s theatrical
equivalent of Cellini’s Perseus: a masterpiece. Many critics
felt that it fell short of this task. The play seems too conscious of
its own history: “I hope I am not talking too loud,” the
boy-narrator shouts at the audience at the outset. “I raise my
voice because it is 1558 and you are 443 years away.” Also, Cellini
is too cursory in its psychology to attain the combination of
historical piquancy and artistic awareness that distinguishes works
like Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. In many ways, the play is well
crafted, but the cast balloons to Brechtian proportions. The most
provocative characters—a prostitute named Caterina and the affable
boy-narrator, both of whom serve Cellini in similar capacities as
models, confessors, and objects of desire—are obscured by the
comings-and-goings of too many blurry minor figures. Cellini himself
is a marvelous creation—vain, murderous, and forever alive to the
possibilities of art, whether they are found in his legendary
sculpture of Perseus or in the construction of a fantastic salt
shaker. But by the end of Cellini one longs for the artless
losers of Savage in Limbo, who slew their own Medusas just as
artfully as Perseus.
Where’s My Money? produced in
2002, lampoons the materialism of contemporary American culture so
mercilessly that lovers return from the grave to demand financial
compensation, and the ultimate expression of affection for young
couples is not sex or pillow talk but the consensual establishment of
joint checking accounts. The plot, an ingenious Rubik’s cube of
fidelities and infidelities, involves two second-rate matrimonial
lawyers, their wives and jealous girlfriends, and ghosts of lovers
past who steal scenes. Shanley’s dialogue has not been this
whip-smart since Italian American Reconciliation, but the
comic tone is decidedly more caustic than the previous play. He
skewers the superficiality of young New York marrieds who confuse
love for money and money for love:
NATALIE: Goddammit, I’m not some hustler trying to get over on you, Henry! I’m your fucking wife!
HENRY: Oh, you’re flashing the credential! … Why do you want a joint checking account?
NATALIE: So I can write checks.
HENRY: You tell me the check, I’ll write it.
NATALIE: I wanna write the check!
HENRY: What check?
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NATALIE: No check in particular. If you died, I’d get the money!
HENRY: So you’re fantasizing my death.
Death, love, friendship, fidelity—it
all comes down to dollars in Where’s My Money? Even the soul
is reduced to a wallet that has been pickpocketed:
MARCIA MARIE: I’m damned. Why shouldn’t I be? You stole my soul.
SIDNEY: Go ahead. Frisk me!
The New York hotshots of Where’s
My Money? are the antitheses of Shanley’s early has-beens:
financially alive, emotionally dead. But after the lofty historical
drama of Cellini, Shanley seemed back at home in the
contemporary world.
Indeed, Shanley’s next play—2003’s
Dirty Story, a politically loaded allegory of the Arab/
Israeli conflict staged at the LAByrinth Theatre—could not be any
more contemporary if it tried. The play received mixed reviews for
its attempt to offer a bracing perspective on the morass that is the
contemporary Middle East, but it revealed yet another aspect of
Shanley’s multifaceted career. Certainly, Shanley’s dramatic
universe is much broader and richer than the “lowdown” Bronx bars
of his earlier triumphs, but despite a broader canvas, it remains
just as rich and big-spirited, and essential.
“My work has saved my life,”
Shanley told American Film with characteristic frankness in
1989. “It has revealed to me that everything that I knew when I was
a child was true. And that we are in the grip of enormous powers and
beauty beyond our comprehension.” Though he has specialized in
characters who struggle with limited options, Shanley himself seems
unencumbered by boundaries. The dramatic possibilities of this
ingenious, prolific and phenomenally original American writer remain
decidedly open.
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