“Moonstruck”? “Joe Versus the Volcano”? “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea”? “Alive”? “Dirty Story”?
Most people would never guess the same author wrote each of these vastly different titles. A Brooklyn widow torn between her fiancé and his brother? A dying hypochondriac who agrees to throw himself into a lava pit? A borderline psychotic who collides with a damaged fatale in a bar? A planeload of rugby players crashes in the Andes, so they resort to cannibalism?
And, in the one that particularly shook up the Denver Center Theatre Company, an aspiring novelist enters a sadomasochistic relationship with her mentor?
Yes, John Patrick Shanley wrote them all, and a whole lot more.
“I’m just telling the story that is in me to tell at the time,” said Shanley. “The key for me is when I do a play or a film, once I’ve done it, I’m like. ‘OK, time to move on.’ I would find it imprisoning to have to re-create the world of say, ‘Danny and the Deep Blue Sea’ a second time. It is what it is. I said everything I had to say within that particular lexicon.”
However, you will find a common thread throughout nearly all of Shanley’s 12 films and more than 30 plays: Differing forms of very powerful romanticism, he says. “People rediscovering the need to experience romantic love is in everything I write,” he said.
Wait, what about those cannibal rugby players?
“Well … just about everything.”
And one common image Shanley frequently turns to in sometimes surprising and unconscious ways: the moon.
“I wrote a play called ‘Welcome to the Moon,’and I thought, ‘That wouldn’t be a bad title for my autobiography,’ because the moon crops up in many, many things I do.”
Here are just a few:
“Joe Versus the Volcano”: “There’s this gigantic moonrise when Joe is lost at sea on a raft made of trunks,” said Shanley. “And for him, it’s a reminder of the godhead, and he prays. He comes back to himself through that image.”
“The Italian-American Reconciliation”: It has a moonlit balcony scene comically reminiscent of “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
“Danny and the Deep Blue Sea”: “The key image is an electric light across the way from this girl’s apartment, and she thinks it looks like the moon,” Shanley said. “But it’s on a timer, and at a certain point, it goes out.”
And, of course, “Moonstruck”: “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s … “ the lunar pull drawing in lovers played by Cher and Nicolas Cage.
Ironically, two titles you won’t find on this list are Shanley’s two most recent plays: “Defiance” and the Tony-winning “Doubt.”
“After making that statement,” Shanley says with a laugh, “I actually don’t think either one has the moon in them anywhere!”
