John Patrick Shanley Wrestles with God and Destiny

Shanley’s plays are, in some ways, perfect examples of the form. He does the classic thing: gets people into a room and makes them talk in ways that spark unlikely action. He often writes for pairs, forgoing party scenes or crowded rooms full of overlapping speech; instead, Shanley frequently has one person meet up with another, one couple at a time, letting the conversation become dialectical, almost boxerly, coaxing new situations, social and personal, out of head-on verbal confrontation. If Shanley’s people occasionally say or do unlikely or unrealistic things, it’s only because of their preternatural willingness to roll up their sleeves and talk rather than fight. There’s a hint of violence in much of his work, just as the possibility of bloodshed hangs over so much political rhetoric. The subtext in both cases: all this yapping is what we do to stave off war.