Category Archives: John Patrick Shanely

Interview with Peter Allas, Director of Danny and The Deep Blue Sea

The Modernist Beathad the opportunity to interview Peter Allas (perhaps most famously The Calzone Man from Seinfeld) who is directing John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and The Deep Blue Seaperforming this month at The Loft at the Davenport Theater. He is in New York from San Francisco, where he holds the post artistic director of the Firescape Theatre. His directorial resumeis a who’s who of the leading American playwrights of the past quarter century. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

MODERNIST BEAT: Hi, Peter. Before we dive in, I noticed that you have just directed a production of Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat. Just as an aside, I saw the production at the National in London a few years back. And I was standing on que for my tickets at the box office, and there was a man in front of me who was very much the cliché of the English toff. He wanted to find out about the play, but he didn’t want to say the title out-loud in public, so he ended up asking, “Could you tell me about The Disagreeable Gentleman with the Hat?”

PETER ALLAS: That was a fun show to direct because I grew up blocks from where it takes place in the late 70’s early 80’s and I was a DJ in may teens so I loved adding a whole soundtrack to really bring the audience in to that “Latin” world and NYC. Funny thing EVERYONE asked for my “SOUNDTRACK” because it was so memorable and colorful, but then again so is NYC!

MB: You’ve directed works by some of this country’s most important living playwrights. What would you say are the joys versus the challenges of directing a work by Shanley as opposed to Guirgis, Hwang, or Mamet?

PA: Every play I direct is a challenge! Because like Elia Kazan would say “shock yourself”, as an actor, and I do so as a director as well.  If it’s “too easy” I don’t want to do it!  The joy to me is the words and style.  I love Shanley, David Mamet, Guirgis, Theresa Rebeck, Nilo Cruz,and William Mastrosimone of the modern day writers because of their Love of language and character rich dialogue/story. But I also love Clifford Oddets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter and of course Chekhov, because they are great story tellers who have rich characters and a great sense of humor in the face of tragedy!  I’m partial to Mamet because I was born and grew up South Side Chicago like he did. I became “the kid” to my mentors of the “Mamet Mafia” – Jack Wallace, J.J. Johnston, Mike Nussbaum, amd especially Joe Mantegna whom I later worked with as well – to name a few.  The challenges are to make the street style dialects authentic, real, and flow while maintaining the integrity of the story itself.  Too many actors and directors miss the boat with these writers because its colorful, funny, or edgy but the miss the humanity, or “music of the people” and soften it.

Which leads me into why I like directing as opposed to acting. My goal as a director is first, to awake the audience; most are sleeping and come to just to be entertained…..hmmm well, not in my theatre, and certainly not with these authors.  Then I have to “wake them up’” and “enlighten them”, and finally get a visceral response to the art!  I’d like them to leave having “real thoughts and feelings” about what they just saw and stir up conversations at the dinner table or at home two hours later.  For instance, when I directed Neil LaButte’s Reasons To Be Pretty, I wanted the audience to be right in the thick of it and be emotionally invested in every scene so I had the actors break the fourth wall and speak there monologues three-to-five feet away from the audience.  In the end, I used Robert Flack’s “The First Time Ever I saw Your Face” to emphasize and evoke deep regret yet change by the lead actor for not telling his girlfriend Steph…”You look pretty”….!  Well, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house at curtain!  Audiences were having real discussions about communication in a relationship and images of beauty that are damaging!…… Mission accomplished!!!!

MB: Your resume leans heavily toward Shanley. What is it about his voice that draws you to his work? Is there anything consistent in your preparation as you go into pre-production for a Shanley play?

PA: Shanley, or here in after I will say John, and I have had success because he speaks my language.  Some directors and actors worked together because of that exact reason such as Dan Sullivan and Don Margulies, Gene Saks and Neil Simon, Tony Taccone and Tony Kushner and my mentor the late Milton Katselas and Edward Albee to name a few.

MB: One aspect of Shanley’s work that continues to fascinate me is the moral complexity, emotional ambiguity, and flawed humanity he instills into almost everything he write. I’m thinking of that powerful scene in Doubt between Sister Aloysius and Mrs. Muller. Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is certainly informed by a flawed humanity. What are your conversations like with your actors, what is the rehearsal process like, to pull the play toward that grey rather than a stark black-and-white duality?

PA: What I love about John is his strong emphasis on characters from the street, their need to be heard, to feel, to connect and do it with danger, pain, humor and poetry.  The key is to be a specific as possible and true to the core (Bronx  vs. Little Italy).  John’s earlier works like Danny, Savage In Limbo, and Italian-American Reconciliationtend to repeat the same Catholic themes from the resurrection and guilt, to the seven deadly sins and redemption!  As I re-read this play for the umpteenth time I fell in love with the richness of John’s heart, much like Moonstruckand Italian American.  This is raw, unpolished, and lean, much like Mamet’s earlier work. As for Doubtand Defiance, I feel John changed his message to some degree, but he does have that “moral compass” issue you so eloquently put!  These characters struggle with that and have a need for “forgiveness of their sins”!!!!

Nothing personal but I don’t reveal my process. I will say that, I was blessed work with great directors as an actor from Milton Katselas, Joy Zinoman, Sharon Ott, on the television/film side, Patrick McGoohan, Leo Penn, Sydnie Fury and Martin Campbell just to name a few. And my early studies at Boston University and Fordham with David Wheeler, B. Rodney Marriott (later at Circle Rep).

MB: I see that you are the co-creator and artistic director of the Firescape Theatre in San Francisco. Tell me about that.

PA: Firescape Theatre Co in San Francisco came out of a dream I had to run my own rep company from the old “Circle Rep Co”. days as a young actor/director. I watched Gary Sinise and John Malkovich as “young unknowns from Chicago” knock me out with True West. Funny thing, who knew seven years later I would act with Sam Shepard in Defenseless.  Last year we had sellouts for ten weeks and one of our biggest hits, with the US premiere of Brilliant Liesby David Williamson (Australia’s most successful playwright) about sexual harassment at an insurance firm, and of course, right after we closed the Weinstein thing exploded! Sadly, we should have gone to New York instead of LA, and it closed quickly.  Perhaps next one.

MB: Are they any intriguing differences between directing in San Francisco versus New York?

PA: San Francisco is a funny market. It seems like a little New York, prides itself more cultural than LA, & Chicago, and has the 5th largest theatre Market in North America, but I feel, the bar needs to be raised.  Having been to over 65 plays in three year (if not more) I find the lack of quality, commitment to professionalism, and attitude  a bit “in the dilettante” phase.  Perhaps it the weather, the beauty of the lifestyle, or simply put, the “New York hustle and drive and strive to be the best” just doesn’t filter down.  I will say there has been some stellar work at Berkeley Rep and Amy Potozkin (the CD there) really knows truthful acting, and a handful of other theatre like Palo Alto Players (where I am directing the Bay Area Premiere of All the Waynext in November). New York has a hunger, a drive, an edge and most all, the best of the best come here to be actors, not STARS!!! Although it’s good to be a star, too.

MB: Anything you would like to add?

PA: In closing I’d like to say “please come and support live theatre and this heartfelt, rich local writer”.

MB: Well, thank you for your time. Break a leg with the show. One last question: do you still refuse to take loose change? 😉

PA: I promise to say at the box office, “You can’t pay in change…….You’ve got to have bills, paper money! THEN YOU GOT NO CALZONE!!!!!!!!!”

Danny and The Deep Blue Seastars Hannah Beck and Jonathan Crimeni. It opens Wednesday September 12 and runs to Sunday, September 23. For more information, follow this link: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3562037

 

 

 

 

“What to write about? This morning I remembered an embarrassing moment from my teens. I felt embarrassed all over again. There’s a clue here.”

“Keep going. If today doesn’t work, plow through it. If your angry, use it. There’s a revolution underway. Like it or not, you’re in it. Pow.” John Patrick Shanley

With Prodigal Son, Shanley is Our James Joyce

There comes a moment in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen Dedalus, the author’s alter ego states, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The novel chronicles how a young man creates himself both as an individual and as an artist. As he authors himself, he walks through the fires large — nationalism, religion — and small — the struggles of adolescence, a dysfunctional family. Last  month when I saw Prodigal Son, I came to the conclusion as the lights came up for the curtain call that, at last in John Patrick Shanley, we had our American Joyce.

Much can and has been said about Prodigal Son, but I want to here focus on that Joyce connection. Shanley, as with Joyce, has brought his adolescent self to life through words — through poetry and prose, through philosophy and theology — to be reconsidered, reexamined, to undergo catharsis as much for the audience as no doubt himself. His avatar, Jim, is truly a remarkable creation. And I should add that in Timothée Chalamet (famous for Homeland and Interstellar) Shanley has found the ideal collaborator. Actor and author do not shy away from Jim’s darkness — he says and does the stupid things teenagers often do as they wrestle with the twin tensions of childhood and adulthood — his brilliant narcissism, or his self-destructive impulses. He is not likable the way teenagers on television sit-coms are often likable. But he is engaging and endearing. His darkness is understandable, his pain a source of empathy, his yearning to connect with an world of ideas that he cannot yet quite touch remarkable. The play is no better than when Shanley lets Chalamet tear into a monologue, trip the light fantastic in a way that has the raw magic of stream-of-consciousness to find truths (human truths, perhaps, if not universal truths) in the most Joycean, or given the play’s setting in the 1960’s, Kerouacian way. The actor opens up to show us both the wonder and pain within.

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Stanley is at his most powerful when his flawed characters wrestle with faith and doubt (in reference to his perhaps most famous work). What intrigues here for Jim is the same that intrigues for Stephen: the temptation for sin he finds within and not from without. He recognizes the darkness in himself — the darkness that dwells within all of us — but he is intelligent enough (brave enough? foolish enough?) to address it and not ignore it as most do. What will win inside him? Will what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” eventually hold sway? Jim does not know. He wants to find the answer, though perhaps it too scares him.

Louise, the headmaster’s wife, tells him, “I think James Quinn is a fine outline, and it’s up to you to fill it in.” Shanley, I think bravely, undertakes the return to his tumultuous past (for the nation, for himself) to try and unlock the puzzle of his earlier life. Kudos to him for not giving us pat answers — for still not truly knowing what the answers are yet, though he surely has a better grasp of the questions.

Shanley, for me, became the American Joyce the day he decided to put Prodigal Son on stage. Here is the kicker. I do not believe he set out to do that. If he had, his work would have been derivative, pretentious, blah. He just sat out to write the most searingly honest play he could. In so doing, he stumbled onto something unintended and rare: a work uniquely specific and uniquely universal. Joyce writes of Stephen, “He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him.” Shapely could write the same of Jim.