'Prodigal Son'

It’s been my observation that playwrights who write plays about their own lives, autobiographical plays, nearly always indulge in the conceits, first, that they are unquestionably worthy of that focus and, second, that every iota of their lives is significant.  I think of Arthur Miller and After the Fall and A. R. Gurney and What I Did Last Summer—and now Prodigal Son by John Patrick Shanley (2005 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for Doubt; 1988 Oscar for Moonstruck).  When my friend Diana asked me after the show why a playwright would want to write such a play as Prodigal Son, I said that I always felt as if the writers had something they needed to write through, for their own benefit—writing, as I’ve noted before, can be cathartic—but that I also always wondered why they felt it was necessary to inflict it on the rest of us.  Shanley’s Prodigal Son, even at only 95 minutes, is an apt example of what I mean.

The world première of Prodigal Son, which Shanley, 65, wrote last year, started previews on Stage I at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center home on 19 January and opened on 9 February; it’s slated to close on 27 March (after a week’s extension).  Diana and I caught it on Friday evening, 19 February.  The play’s overtly autobiographical, as Shanley, who’s long history with MTC includes 10 previous productions, states in the program: “It’s a true story for the most part.  The changes I’ve made have been to simplify, or to make a point.”  Except for the young character who stands in for the author, Shanley affirms that “most of the names remain unchanged, or only slightly altered.” 

Prodigal Son covers the years 1965, when young James Quinn (Timothée Chalamet), then 15, meets Carl Schmitt (Chris McGarry), headmaster and founder of Thomas More Preparatory School in Harrisville, New Hampshire, at a diner in Keene for what amounts to his admissions interview, to 1968, the year Jim graduates from Thomas More at 17.  An Irish Catholic kid from a tough neighborhood in the Bronx, Jim’s a scholarship student at the boys’ Catholic prep school, after having been expelled from Cardinal Spellman High in New York City.  He’s an obviously extremely intelligent boy, and what Jesse Green in New York magazine called “a questing soul” (stop me if you’ve this before) with a head full of poetry who’s a voracious reader of such diverse authors as Heraclitus of Ephesus, Rafael Sabatini (Scaramouche), T. S. Eliot (The Wasteland), H. Rider Haggard (She), Siegfried Sassoon, Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), and others whose names and works get dropped throughout the play.  Jim displays a talent for writing and critical thinking.  But he’s angry and confused, picks fights with other students (often, apparently, the freshmen), drinks, steals (both from other students and local shops), lies, possibly smokes pot; except for his roommate, Austin (David Potters), the nephew of Headmaster Schmitt, Jim’s made an enemy of every student in the school.  Schmitt describes the boy as “the most interesting mess we have this year” and asks English master Alan Hoffman (Robert Sean Leonard, 2001 Tony for The Invention of Love) to befriend him because Hoffman’s so good with the troubled boys.  (Does that strike anyone else as ominous foreshadowing—or is it just me?)

I guess it’s no spoiler to say that Jim becomes a thorny problem for Headmaster Schmitt, who comes off as such a liberal-minded educator at that meeting in Keene when he answers Jim’s question about why he’d accept him at Thomas More with his academic record and his expulsion from his previous school.  Schmitt explains that he finds something in the boy and thinks he should have a second chance.   Now he seems to be looking for justification to expel Jim, whose escapades always leave no evidence even though everyone seems to know who the guilty party is.  (My own experience at private schools where the headmaster is also the school’s founder/owner is that court-worthy proof is hardly necessary to expel a troublesome student.  It didn’t help me.  Wait, did I say that out loud?)  Of course, if Schmitt, whose wife, Louise (Annika Boras), who teaches Jim and one other student (whom we never meet) honors English in tutorials at the Schmitt house, is an advocate for Jim, had thrown the boy out at the first—or even second—opportunity, there wouldn’t have been a play.  (Hmmm . . . .) 

At any rate, Jim survives at each juncture by swearing firmly that he didn’t do whatever he’s suspected of until just before graduation when he’s accused of having gotten drunk the night before a final exam for Schmitt’s religion class, causing him to miss the test because he was . . . er, sick.  The inquisition into this allegation goes on for several days during which he has a counseling session with Hoffman.  (Hoffman says he believes Jim’s denial of the drinking, but when the boy confesses, his teacher blurts out that he had figured that.  Really?  Is Hoffman a liar?  A vacillator?  Forgetful?  Has Shanley forgotten what his character’s said earlier?)  In the course of the session, Shanley reveals that Hoffman and Schmitt both have buried secrets, each hinted at once in an earlier scene (as if to justify the subsequent revelation) but dropped in here like little bombs, having only the slightest repercussion on the play’s dénouement but reverberating in the background as if to make the two teachers—and, by implication, Louise Schmitt—seem more complex. 

At one point, Hoffman suddenly reaches out and places his palm on Jim’s scalp in the most awkward bit of blocking I’ve seen in a long time.  (I whispered to myself, ‘Phrenology?’)  That gesture becomes an even more awkward feeling of Jim’s face, at which point Jim jumps up and shouts, “What are you doing!”  (Not an inapt question under the circumstances.)  Now, I know what was supposed to be going on—but this bit of physicalization Shanley devised (the playwright also directed the MTC production) was just plain weird.  That’s not even considering that it came out of nowhere (aside from the ominous hint back in the earlier scene).  I mean, who does that—feel someone’s scalp and then his face?  That’s not a pass, is it?  Maybe Hoffman was channeling Annie Sullivan!

I guess it goes without saying that Jim survives the inquiry and Schmitt’s self-examination and graduates.  We don’t see that because the last scene in the play, which starts off as a final showdown in the headmaster’s office the day before graduation, turns into a series of soliloquies by each of the characters recounting their futures.  It wraps up the plot, but it hardly concludes the drama.  Why does Schmitt let Jim off after he confesses to breaking Thomas More’s zero-tolerance no-drinking rule?  Why is Jim so angry?  It’s more than the fact that he comes from the Bronx, but we never learn what his trouble is.  What does Louise Schmitt (whom Shanley especially mentions in his author’s note) find in this difficult teenager?  We have to take it on faith that she sees something, but we’re not allowed to learn what. 

Schmitt tells Jim that he founded Thomas More because he wants to create “extraordinary young men.”  Beside being a little arrogant, are we supposed to then assume that Jim Quinn, AKA John Patrick Shanley, became one?  Maybe I’m alone in feeling that writing an autobiographical play in which you declare yourself extraordinary—we don’t see it; we’re simply left to believe it—takes a large portion of chutzpah.  (Okay, maybe that’s not the most apt word to use for a play in which all the characters are Catholic.  Hubris just seems so . . . tragically Greek.)

I guess you got that I have huge reservations about this play.  (ROTters may already know that I’m not Shanley’s biggest fan.  I think I made that clear in my report on Storefront Church, posted on 16 June 2012.  I didn’t see Doubt on stage, but I found the 2008 film pat and contrived.  Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, which I saw in Washington in 1985, also struck me as set up and artificial.)   There wasn’t one thing that went on on the MTC stage that Friday night that I believed for an instant.  I’ll accept Shanley’s word that the events in the play are real—at least as far as he can recall half a century back—but that “making a point” business he allowed himself to justify some alteration must have done him in.  Even the acting was unconvincing, a fault I lay directly at the feet of Shanley since he directed the cast—and I’m sure these actors are all capable of much better (especially Leonard, whom I’ve seen before to much greater advantage). 

I’m not sure what could have been made of the situation Shanley lays out in Prodigal Son; true or not, it’s such a cliché I despair that any dramatist could have come up with a truly engaging script.  Furthermore, despite the highfalutin language Shanley puts in the mouths of his characters—especially Jim Quinn, who speaks more like a 30-year-old grad student (and a pretentious one at that) than a teenage prep-schooler—he never gets beneath the superficial and obvious to let us in on what’s extraordinary about them.  Mr. and Mrs. Schmitt, Hoffman, and Austin are all ciphers about whom we learn almost nothing, and Jim’s little more than a mouthpiece for some empty verbiage from Shanley, what he would like to imagine now at 65 he ought to have said back when he was 16 or 17.  But the language aside, Shanley never shows us what his characters, these people the author tells us were the making of him, are capable of—he just tells us.  Shanley even has one character say of the dramatist’s younger self: “You have a remarkable mind”; I’m unconvinced.

As director, Shanley fares no better than he does as author.  I’ve voiced my problems with playwrights who direct their own work before, and the MTC staging of Prodigal Son fits perfectly into that category.  Shanley paid more attention to the words the actors are saying—that is, what he wrote—than he did to any believable characterization.  If his cast weren’t as talented as they are, the production would look like soap-opera acting at best.  Every character falls into the cliché or stereotype for his or her role.  (It’s coincidental that in his 1985 review of Deep Blue Sea in the Washington Post, David Richards wrote that “it is possible to believe the actors on a stage and not believe the play in which they’re appearing.” In the case of Prodigal Son, however, I didn’t believe either.  In fact, I didn’t believe the actors believed it themselves.) 

Just as I’m doubtful any director could have saved Prodigal Son from being unconvincing as drama, I’m also uncertain any actors could have made these puppet figures more believable.  The situations they’re in and the lines they have to say subvert any real chance at verisimilitude as far as I can see.  Shanley hasn’t given them an opportunity to redeem their roles.  No one fares any better than anyone else, but a great deal of attention has been paid to Chalamet as Jim.  Ben Brantley in the New York Times, for instance, says Chalamet has “enough easy charisma to confirm his status as a rising star.”  I barely remember his appearance on Showtime’s Homeland in 2012 and I never saw his other performances (Interstellar, 2014), but I found his work here unimpressive and unoriginal, using all the hackneyed behavior of every troubled, volatile teen since J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in 1951’s Catcher in the Rye and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).  If this 20-year-old actor is anywhere near as promising as his reviews suggest, then I have to blame director Shanley once again for sabotaging his performance at MTC.  (I’ve already mentioned the peculiarity of Leonard’s portrayal of the English master, Alan Hoffman.  It’s ironic that Leonard came to prominence playing another troubled student at an exclusive boys’ school in 1989’s Dead Poets Society.  I recall that being a poignant and daring performance.)

The technical production was fine, though given what I think of the whole megillah its kind of expensive gift wrap for a middling present.  Santo Loquasto’s fragmentary set, with sliding panels for walls and platforms for floors of different rooms, is swaddled in the branches of a copse of birches, lending the set the feel of a New England countryside.  The schoolhouse is a small, dollhouse-sized model way upstage, like a painting by James Kinkaid (if he painted large mansions instead of little cottages); the warm, yellow lights glow invitingly, despite the turmoil that we know goes on inside.  This is all washed appropriately by Natasha Katz’s mood-setting lighting, casting shadows over some scenes from the tree branches as if they were some kind of watchful spirit.  Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s late-’60s clothing, though unspectacular (it is a Catholic school, after all—no hippies or bohos here) was suitably unobtrusive.  Paul Simon (of Simon & Garfunkel back in the play’s period) provided music that, while unremarkable, set a nice atmosphere for the goings-on.

The press coverage was less harsh than my assessment, but generally put more store in the production and performances than in the script.  Elisabeth Vincentelli virtually dismissed Prodigal Son in the New York Post under a sub-head of “Skip It”: “‘Prodigal Son,’ is . . . vague. . . .  [E]verything about it is generic, from the by-the-numbers bad-boy rebellion to the young protagonist’s . . . poetic aspirations to the teacher with a secret . . . .  ‘Prodigal Son’ flirts with big themes—religion, sexuality, feminism, literature—but never ventures beyond a light make-out session.”  With a “Bottom Line” slug that included the characterization “bizarre vanity from Shanley,” Newsday’s Linda Winer opened her notice by stating, “Without identifying the 90-minute memory play as autobiographical, we could have been left to ourselves to fall in love, or not, with the troubled but brilliant 15-year-old protagonist from the Bronx and not have to deal with Shanley’s admiration for his fascinating, handsome, poetic young self.”  Winer praised Chalamet as a “gifted actor [who] is giving a breakout performance” and affirmed that Leonard is “so good . . . that we wince at the cliché Shanley’s memory forces him to become.”  She even asserted that Shanley “ably directs” the production. 

In the New York Times, Brantley characterized Shanley’s “painful” play, “a hymn to the impossible, combustible and brilliant young thing he once was,” as “the sound of a raw adolescent ego screaming for attention.”  Brantley applauds the playwright for not just recalling his teens “so vividly that he hasn’t just written about it; he has also rendered it as if . . . he were still writhing in the stinging throes of his midteens.”  The play’s “inescapably all about Jim” even though the other characters “are given problems and secrets of their own,” but the playwright “deals rather perfunctorily and inconsistently” with them.  A “subtle probing of mixed motives and shaky certainty . . . is seldom in evidence” in Prodigal Son, observed Brantley.  In the end, the Timesman pivoted and lamented that “the man that Jim would become seemingly has yet to achieve the distance to make this struggling artist-in-the-making worthy of a play of his own.”  Matt Windman, in amNew York, described Prodigal Son as “raw and choppy, with long gaps in time between some scenes, meandering discussions of philosophy and a heavy reliance on direct narration.”  Windman added, “At times, it resembles a heavy-handed takeoff of ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’” though in the end, “it is an engaging and candid coming-of-age piece.” 

The New York Daily News’s Joe Dziemianowicz, calling the Prodigal Son a “satisfying play,” noted, “Over an hour-and-a-half, themes that have occupied Shanley as an adult are seen emerging here.”  Dziemianowicz felt that Shanley’s direction “skillfully guides” the cast, whom the Newsman praised with special mentions for Chalamet and Leonard, though he had some reservations about the physical production.  In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout stated simply, “Finely directed by the author himself and exceptionally well acted by a five-person cast led by Timothée Chalamet, ‘Prodigal Son’ is a heart-sore portrait of adolescent turmoil that bears the stamp of hard-earned truth on every scene.”

In the Village Voice, Miriam Felton-Dansky described Prodigal Son as simultaneously “[h]eartfelt and frequently well observed” and “teeter[ing] between restraint and emotional overload, eventually (and unnecessarily) succumbing to the latter.”  Felton-Dansky found that the play’s final development “grows surreal, becoming a kind of stagy séance in which Shanley resurrects the dead so as to bare their long-ago souls.”  When Jim learns of Hoffman’s secret and demands details, the teacher refuses to tell the tale.  The Voice reviewer commented, “If only he (and Shanley) had meant it.”  In the “Goings On About Town” column in the New Yorker, the review-writer admonished that Shanley has painted his younger self “perhaps too admiringly,” though the capsule review dubbed Chalamet’s performance “incandescent.”  “But the playwright shouldn’t have directed his own work,” lamented the reviewer, the result of which is that “the pace is often stilted.” 

As if reading over my shoulder, Jesse Green of New York magazine warned:

A playwright enters dangerous territory when he attempts to dramatize his struggle to become an artist: a struggle that is supposedly resolved, or at least justified, by the artistry he now puts before us.  When the play turns out to be less than thrilling—as was the case, for instance, with A. R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer—the disproportion between the setup and the result risks bathos, if not ridiculousnsess.

Green continued that Shanley’s “propinquity to danger,” meaning his tendency to “take dramatic fiction as close to the electrified fence of narcissism as possible without getting electrocuted,” is what “animates and partly defeats Prodigal Son.”  “Trying to climb that electrified fence,” continued Green, “has apparently shorted some of Shanley’s circuits.”  On one hand, Green wrote, the autobiographical play “displays all of his mature talents for moral inquiry, rich dialogue, and compelling scene-making” and on the other “like its biblical namesake, is also a mopey and vexing testament to the confusions of self-regard.”  By the time Prodigal Son nears its end (I don’t say conclusion), Green complained that “the play has reached a murky depth of perplexity from which . . . it can’t seem to find its way back to the surface.”  The man from New York expanded on this deficiency:

I don’t even know whom I’m criticizing when I say, in teacherly fashion, that the work is promising but undisciplined; is that Jim’s fault, or Shanley the playwright’s, or Shanley the director’s?  (This is one of those cases that confirms the conventional wisdom of not directing one’s own work.)  Another intelligence, not so in love with the author’s, might have helped him prune deadwood, focus the narrative, avoid the whirlpools of narcissism, and possibly even eliminate the interstitial narration that too directly pleads for indulgence. 

Green’s conclusion is: “It seems that Jim and John [that is, Shanley] both take Thomas More’s example too much to heart, telling too much truth, or what they imagine to be truth, for their own good.”

Entertainment Weekly’s Melissa Rose Bernardo asserted that in Prodigal Son, “Shanley crafts a captivating warts-and-all portrait of not only a budding artist but also an average teenager struggling to find himself.”  The play, Bernardo states, “recalls all of our mouthy, insecure teenage meltdowns” and brings “us back—for a brief, but intense, emotion-packed 95-minute trip.”  In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney, calling the play an “unsatisfying new work” and a “wordy text,” characterized it as “an opaque portrait revealing little beyond the author’s romanticized self-image as an embattled hero.”  Though “beautifully acted,” Prodigal Son “lacks drama, and Shanley’s solution to that feels forced.”  “The writing doesn’t match the elegance of the production,” asserted Rooney, especially in that final revelatory scene, which the HR reviewer called “a mess.”  Praising the technical production, especially Loquasto’s set, Katz’s lighting, and Simon’s music, Rooney declared, “The chief reward is the acting.”  Time Out New York’s David Cote called Shanley’s play “a keen, passionate portrait of the author as a poetry-spouting romantic punk” and describes it as “pure, splendid Shanley: shaggily idealistic and always scratching a philosophical itch underneath jokes and banter.”  Prodigal Son “is lean and cool-headed,” wrote the man from TONY, “but it contains one or two emotional explosions that cast the previous action in a new light.”  Shanley directed “with a tender hand” and Loquasto’s set was “spare, efficient.” 

In Variety, Marilyn Stasio complained that Shanley “lavishes an inordinate amount of attention” on his stand-in, Jim Quinn, although the writer “has done an excellent job of directing.”  Despite the complexity Stasio found in the role of Jim, she felt that “Shanley makes little effort to delve deeper into such a troubled character” which is where she believed the “real but largely unexplored drama lies.” 

The on-line press was essentially an echo of the print outlets.  David Gordon of TheaterMania, after praising Chalamet’s “true star-is-born performance,” reported that the MTC production, while “still extremely moving,” “hasn't entirely realized its full potential.”  Overall, said Gordon, Shanley’s play, “both on page and in production, never completely rises to the level of curiosity we feel about its protagonist,” spending too much of its length on “exposition or . . . mood setting” so that “it doesn’t offer particularly new insights.”    On New York Theatre Guide, Margret Echeverria noted that Prodigal Son, which she described as “beautifully crafted,” asks if we “remember fifteen” and decided that “yes, we remember fifteen and, despite that warning, we’re charmed; we come willingly.”  BroadwayWorld’s Michael Dale drew a distinction between “coming of age stories where you identify with the awkward struggles of the protagonists and recognize a little of yourself “ and those “where you wish they’d just grow up already.”  Prodigal Son, said Dale, “leans a bit towards the latter.”  As director, Shanley treats the play “as a soft and sentimental memory,” wrote Dale, and added, “The action is sparse, the tension is mild and the plotting always seems more or less familiar.”  Citing the script’s line characterizing Jim Quinn as an “interesting mess,” the BWW reviewer declared that Prodigal Son “is neither interesting . . . nor messy enough to make an impact.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray described Prodigal Son as a “curiously cursory new play” in which memory “is at once crystalline and cloudy” and in which the playwright “discovers . . .  Well, not much, as it turns out.”  Acknowledging that the “dual portrait” of Louise Schmitt and Alan Hoffman “is not without merit,” Murray declared that “it’s tough to escape the fact that . . . Jim is not particularly interesting at the head of his own story.”  The development, however, in the supporting characters “doesn’t remotely feel like revealing anything.”  Shanley’s writing and directing, said Murray, are “formulaic” and it seemed to the TB blogger that the playwright “cares little for connecting” the separate incidents of the play.  The reviewer also missed the “crucial character points” that show Jim’s growth: “There’s something frustrating in watching a year pass by in a blink but no discernible change or growth appear in those who ostensibly endured much during that time.”  Murray asked, “What are we supposed to take away from this?”  “Nothing,” he answered.  Murray is the only reviewer I read who had reservations about Chalamet’s performance, finding that the actor “holds his anger too close to the surface, and draws upon it more readily than the other emotions that ought to be writhing inside Jim.”  Concluding that the play “doesn’t make for riveting drama,” the TB writer decided that neither the playwright nor his character were “able to convince us that their joint past is a puzzle we are, or should be, desperate to solve” and “like its central figure, Prodigal Son is forever striving to be more and having to settle for less.”

CurtainUp’s Elyse Sommer called Prodigal Son “a compelling, well cast memory piece” which “[w]hile not without humor, . . . is neither light entertainment or a romance.”  “Prodigal Son . . . is interesting and likable,” said Steven Suskin of Huffington Post.  “It is also uneven.”  “After an effective opening,” observed Suskin, the pace slackens until “near the midway point, the pace finally picks up.  Shanley gets back on track, and the rest of the evening is markedly more interesting.”  The HP writer gave a pretty cogent analysis of how I felt about this theater piece (including my feelings about playwrights who direct their own work):

The overall results are more than workable, but one suspects there’s a considerably stronger play in Prodigal Son than what we see at City Center.  The trouble with writing autobiographical plays is that the author can be overly concerned with what actually happened, the way it happened; this sometimes leads to accurate reporting but less-than-scintillating dramaturgy.  That’s where the director comes in.  It could well be that Prodigal Son would benefit from the prodding of a director other than the autobiographical playwright, who might be too rigidly staging the events just like they were lodged in memory—and rejecting cuts that would strengthen.

Most writers, dramatists included, use bits of their lives, families, backgrounds, and hometowns as grist for their writing.  Tennessee Williams did it all the time; Neil Simon did it a lot.  A. R. Gurney, David Henry Hwang, and Richard Nelson do it in almost every play, and Shanley has done it in Doubt, Defiance, and Storefront Church.  But the plots and characters, though drawn from real life, are fiction—some more than others, granted.  When the playwright needs to make a dramatic point, she doesn’t have to shoehorn it into a factual sequence, throwing everything out of balance.  In a fictional play, the writer is free move bits around and even cut them with impunity.  (Unless, of course, the writer is one of those who have trouble cutting anything they’ve composed.  Then he needs an editor or a dramaturg to help him be ruthless.  “Kill your babies,” one of my teachers admonished us.)  It’s ten times harder to do when the details are true and the subject is the writer’s life.  If it happened, the writer feels, it has to be in the play.  A couple of the reviewers of Prodigal Son thought that Shanley had fallen into that rabbit hole.

As for the playwright who serves as his own director—in my experience there’s no remedy for that.  Unless one or the other is a (certified) theatrical genius.  I believe that’s quadruply true when the play’s autobiographical: when the writer, the director, and the main character are one and the same, the playwright will always win disputes, hands down.  Then the audience (and sometimes the actors) lose.

"Storefront Church'

Over the years, I’ve been to shows I didn’t understand, whose points I missed. Sometimes I’m just not the optimum audience for the material (The Rug of Identity, a radical feminist performance by Jill W. Fleming which I reviewed in 1989); sometimes, I’m just not in a very receptive frame of mind (or I’m plain obtuse) and I miss it all (The Cezanne Syndrome, a French Canadian play by Normand Canac-Marquis I reviewed earlier the same year); and sometimes the production just doesn’t work for me (Energumen by Mac Wellman, on which I reported for an interested producer in 1985). In the last circumstance, the responsibility could be in the staging (that is, it’s the director’s and cast’s doing) or the play (the writer’s fault). Now, I’ll freely admit that I’m not necessarily the sharpest knife in the rack, but after sitting through the two hours of John Patrick Shanley’s latest, Storefront Church, at the Atlantic Theater Company’s newly-renovated Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea on Friday evening, 8 June, I’m pretty sure I just experienced one of those last situations again. Oh, I know what the plot is all right, and I can describe the characters and all—but I have little idea what Shanley’s trying to say or what we’re supposed to take away from the performance. And since Shanley also directed the play, and had a fine cast, I have to assume he got onto the stage what he wanted, so I can’t blame bad directing very much.

According to Shanley, the idea for the play arose from walking around his old Bronx neighborhood. “I kept seeing these storefront churches,” he recounted in a Playbill interview.

I thought it's just such an interesting idea to take a candy store or a laundromat and say, “Okay, this is going to be a church, and I'm going to name it whatever the heck I think a church should be named, and I'm going to preach whatever I think this church should espouse and hope to get some parishioners and make a go of it.” What an interesting thing! It's sorta the basic building block of religion. Rather than people who attend major faiths, this is the place—the primal soup—of organized religion. I thought the original impulse—the need for spirituality and community that this represents—was exactly the kind of thing that I wanted to talk about.
Originally titled Sleeping Demon, Storefront Church—an earlier working title which is much more straightforward—is the writer’s final play in his “Church and State Trilogy” following Doubt (2004; Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize, Oscar nom) and Defiance (2006). (Those two plays débuted at the Manhattan Theatre Club, the dramatist’s artistic home since the 1980s through Romantic Poetry, a 2008 musical for which Shanley wrote the book and lyrics and which he directed. Shanley moved to ATC for Storefront Church for reasons no one’s really discussing; he said he just wanted to try someplace different.) Set in December 2009 in the Bronx, it concerns Bronx Borough President Donaldo Calderon (Giancarlo Esposito) who steps in to help a homeowner, Jessie Cortez (Tonya Pinkins), and her husband, Ethan Goldklang (Bob Dishy), solve a mortgage problem that threatens to take their house. It happens that the bank that holds the mortgage is also the prime financer of a $300 million development project Calderon supports for his borough. Furthermore, Calderon’s mother, a close friend of Jessie’s, is the co-signer of her loan. After Ethan, an accountant, meets with the by-the-book loan officer, Reed Van Druyten (Zach Grenier), and suffers a heart attack in his office (flipping the loan officer the bird as he sinks to the floor!), Jessie goes to see Calderon at his mother’s suggestion. He’s reluctant to intercede because it might look like a conflict of interest and it might interfere with his dealings with the bank, but in a meeting with the bank’s CEO, Tom Raidenberg (Jordan Lage), Calderon mentions Jessie and Ethan’s situation, and Raidenberg immediately goes into action to see if he can manipulate the paperwork somehow to get the couple out from under the impending foreclosure. (Please observe: the director of the bank foreclosing on people’s homes while manipulating elected officials in pursuit of a $300 million deal, is named Raidenberg—as in ‘corporate raider’—and while he’s chatting, he’s demolishing a gingerbread house that was a gift for his son. Heavy symbolism much, ya think?) It’s clear that what he proposes to Van Druyten is quasi-legal at best. Though the loan officer, who’s already lost one career and has some prodigious personal baggage as well, demurs briefly, he ultimately shrugs his shoulders and does what he’s asked.

Jessie had taken out a $30,000 second mortgage, which she clearly couldn’t afford, Van Druyten points out to both Ethan and his boss. She has given the money to her tenant in the former laundromat beneath the residence to convert it into a Pentecostal church. A preacher, Chester Kimmich (Ron Cephas Jones) has no means to pay back the loan or to pay the rent and, we soon learn, is suffering a crisis of faith—he’s a Katrina refugee from New Orleans—which has left him unable to pray or to open his church. No prayer, no service; no service, no church; no church, no collection; no collection, no income. Calderon, paying the reverend a visit to see if he can shake loose 10 months of back rent so Jessie can pay down her arrears, points this out, but the BP’s presence, even as skeptical as he is, inspires Kimmich to offer a service the next Sunday and he invites both Calderon and Van Druyten to attend. At Calderon’s meeting with Raidenberg, the BP also mentions the coming service, and the glad-handing CEO insists on coming, too. If he’s going to do business in the neighborhood, he explains, he should meet some of the residents, shouldn’t he? So everyone gathers at the storefront church: Reverend Kimmich, with his spiritual blockage; Jessie, who plays the electric piano and has enough faith for everyone; Ethan, who declares himself a “secular Jew”; Van Druyten, who’s never been to a church of any kind, much less a Pentecostal storefront temple; Calderon, who admits he’s let politics crowd out religion in his life, and Raidenberg, the money-lender in the temple, as Ethan calls him. (With all those Christians of one sort or another on stage, Shanley puts this New Testament observation into the mouth of the sole Jew? Oy Gevalt!) The confluence of all these folks—Raidenberg has also brought along the papers forgiving Jessie’s loan—precipitates the crisis that’s Shanley’s central drama.

That dramatic crisis, which is pretty contrived in my opinion, arrives at the very end of the play. Everything else in the two-hour performance is set-up. (There are at least half a dozen coincidences and contrivances that have to be laid out, after all. The interrelationship among Jessie-Ethan, Calderon, his mother, and Raidenberg-Van Druyten is only one.) The theater promotes the play as an examination of “the relationship between spiritual experience and social action” and Shanley says the script “involves a mortgage crisis and—more directly, really—a spiritual crisis of which the borough president and the minister are two sides.” In a Back Stage interview, the playwright asserts, “Conscience is the most dangerous thing you possess. If you wake it up it may destroy you.” Well, that may be what he intended to depict, but the play offers a rather wan exploration of that theme, people faced with choosing between two unsavory actions in order to get through, and it takes the whole play to get down to it, leaving little time for anything but the most inorganic conclusion for Shanley to make his point. In an already talky play, the final scene, built around a preacher and a politician, is more so. I will say, however, that the final scene might stand alone as an interesting one-act if it could be extricated from the exposition and web of absurd coincidences and unlikely relationships that comes before. It’s the only scene with any potential for drama, but it isn’t enough to save the performance from being enervating in the end.

Diana and I saw the play three days before its press opening (Monday, 10 June), giving Shanley and the company 23 days of previews before we attended. (The play started performances on 16 May and will close on 24 June.) During the preview period, Shanley made many alterations, prompting the title change and including over 20 revisions to the last scene, arguably the most complex—with all the characters on stage, it’s the only scene with more than three characters—and momentous in the script. Yet, what seems to have happened is that the playwright never fixed the central dramaturgical problem: introducing his point early enough to keep from dumping the entire conflict into that final scene. He says he reworked the characters based on suggestions from the actors, but it isn’t the characters that are the issue—it’s the guts of the drama. Maybe if he hadn’t woven in so many little quirks and oddities to the plot and the characters—there’s a whole, intricate back story concerning Van Druyten, the loan officer, that has little to do with the actual point of the play except that it provides Grenier some emotional baggage to help explain some of his behavior—he’d have been able to get to the meat of the play early enough to get into it and then he wouldn’t have had so much trouble with that last scene.

The second (not necessarily in impact, just in sequence) problem I have with Storefront Church is that when Shanley does get around to concluding his play, after not coming clean about what he’s exploring, he cops out as far as I’m concerned. Raidenberg has manipulated the paperwork of the mortgage so that it’s now a small-business loan, which the bank writes off as a bad debt. There’s no payment from Jessie and she won’t lose her house. But Calderon points out that no loan is ever really forgiven, and Van Druyten backs this up. Money’s been paid out, so somewhere along the line it has to be paid back—just not by Jessie, Ethan, or Calderon’s mother. Some zhlub down the line will get the bill to subsidize Raidenberg’s gift to Jessie in Calderon’s behalf—but we don’t know that guy, so we won’t worry about it. (Little of this reasoning is laid out in the scene—I’m interpolating.) There’s an undercurrent from Calderon that maybe Jessie shouldn’t sign the papers forgiving the debt—he wobbles and sermonizes (because Kimmich can’t preach, but Calderon can—another convenient Shanley contrivance), but in the end, he shrugs and tells Jessie to sign the documents. So the play ends on a morally ambiguous note, not a fault in itself, but here it’s a cop-out and a convenience. This is the moral dilemma about which Shanley suggests he’s writing, but it comes so late and so abruptly and so without much heft that it has no dramatic impact. It ends the play—or, rather, stops the action—without really concluding it. I’m no playwright, but I wonder what might have happened if Calderon tells Jessie not to sign the papers. It’s wrong to pass on her debt to someone else just because it’s opportune for her. What if the BP explains this and advises her not to go along with Raidenberg’s iffy scheme? Diana said you can’t end a play that way, which strikes me as overly prescriptive. (I maintain you can always find a way to do something unconventional—you just have to be smart enough to figure out how to make it work. If I were a playwright, maybe I’d have an idea here, but I’m not, so I don’t. Still, I ask the necessary question.)

The performances are far better than the script deserves, in my opinion. Not that this cast of A-list pros would have shirked their professional duties under any circumstances, of course. By the same token, Shanley’s direction isn't especially striking, so he seems to have gotten good stage work from those pros just by letting them loose on the roles. (It’s an odd sort of paradox that while providing so much backstory and so many seemingly irrelevant details can be annoying for us viewers, it can give actors scads of great material to work with to animate their characters. In a Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, David Mamet, or Lanford Wilson play, say, the actors winnow out the snippets of background and history the writer drops in and then perhaps expand on that privately for their prep; Shanley puts it all in the script.) All the actors in Storefront Church give us terrific, quirky, and believable (if eccentric) characters. The very top of the chart is occupied by Zach Grenier, who appears weekly on TV as the opportunistic, self-interested, and ruthless domestic-affairs attorney David Lee on The Good Wife. His Reed Van Druyten, the most interesting role in the play both dramatically and theatrically (Charles Isherwood calls it “the play’s most touching turn” in the New York Times), is so emotionally damaged that he no longer can summon up the slightest sympathy or sense of humor. His face is half frozen from a gun-shot wound (part of his backstory—and I’ll never figure out how Grenier pulls this off physically without taking botox injections before each show) and he cites Quasimodo’s plea from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (which Van Druyten has read because Ethan Goldklang has left the book behind after his heart attack): “Why was I not made of stone.” Grenier could well have been, for all the expression he allows Van Druyten to reveal—until, that is, his marvelous melt-down in the last scene. It’s a tour de force and Grenier nails it gorgeously. I’ve never seen Grenier on stage as far as I can remember, but he’s a frequent performer on TV and in films and I’ve never seen him work like this. At least in those electronic media, he’s woefully underused.

Another actor whose work here is a happy surprise to me is Giancarlo Esposito, the conflicted and torn Bronx Borough President. (When was the last time any of you heard of a play—or any other piece of writing for that matter—with a New York City borough president as a lead character? How many people outside the city—and not a few in the city—even know what a borough president is?) He, too, has been on stage here and on the big and small screen a lot, and he’s always been an actor for whom I haven’t really cared much. It’s hard for me to put my finger on why, but his performances have always rubbed me wrong, like he’s outside the character watching how well he’s doing. But his Donaldo Calderon is more than just sympathetic—although he isn’t always so righteous, he tries to be—he’s honest, especially with himself. As Calderon struggles with the dilemmas he faces—that mall the bank wants to finance will bring many jobs to the borough, but they’re minimum-wage jobs; the mayor supports the development and helping the mayor would beneifit Calderon politically, but the mayor’s a businessman and looks principally at the bottom line; the building the development will replace is derelict and empty, doing no one any good, but it’s architecturally attractive and residents like it and want it preserved for community use—I could see Esposito weighing the consequences, both to his constituents and to himself. I could hear the disappointment in his voice when he knows he has to make a decision that isn’t as pure as he’d wish. At the storefront service, when he assumes the preacher’s mantle, the transition from practical politician to moral voice is nearly impossible as Shanley wrote it—it looks like a shift no actor could pull off cleanly. But Esposito makes it work—or seem to, at least—because he does it with absolute sincerity and commitment. That’s something no director can get from an actor on demand: it has to come from the actor’s soul and a hell of a lot of skill and well-honed technique.

The rest of the company executes their parts with verve and intelligence. Tonya Pinkins, who could be the Latina cousin of TV commentator Donna Brazile, makes Jessie at once soft-voiced and steel-spined. She may not always see the reality of a situation, but she damn-well knows what she wants. Ron Cephas Jones keeps Reverend Kimmich from being the cliché he could easily become by a truly honest and even vulnerable core, even as Shanley’s lines are predictable and platitudinous. For all the character’s foreseeable opportunism and manipulativeness, CEO Raidenberg receives a patina of humanity—just enough to make him warm-blooded rather than a cartoon—at the hand of Jordan Lage, and Bob Dishy, whom I haven’t even heard from much less seen for an age, injects considerable warmth and humor into the proceedings with his bemused approach to Ethan, the outsider in many ways (a Jew among Christians, a humanist among pragmatists and materialists, a white man among people of color, a bit of an imp among serious-minded folk) whose only interest is his wife’s welfare and happiness. All these characters have the potential to fall into cliché or stereotype, but the cast all find truth and humanity in what Shanley wrote for them and skirt that trap.

On the technical end, the sets from Takeshi Kata are thoroughly appropriate for the milieus he’s depicting, with the benefit of shifting easily, quietly, and quickly for the over-half dozen locales called for. (ATC’s reconstruction included installment of state-of-the-art tech equipment.) Lit nicely by Matthew Richards, the several spaces all do what they need to do, and the little storefront church, with the sunlight from the street shining through the single window painted with the temple’s name (and then barred against break-in with an accordion window guard) is downright evocative. Alejo Vietti’s costumes and Charles LaPointe’s wigs (for Pinkins, I presume) are entirely appropriate, and the dialect work (also for Pinkins) by Shane Ann Younts keeps things convincingly real. Shanley has written two wordless scenes on park benches which seemed largely unnecessary, but special mention must be included for the sound design of Bart Fasbender, who overlays those scenes with sentimentally atmospheric songs—I didn’t know the music, but I’ve learned they’re “Another World” by Antony Hegarty and the Johnsons, and Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms”—that allowed them to communicate without dialogue. (Nice work here from the actors, too. The scenes may be dramatically extraneous, but they are well done.)

This world première is the first production in ATC’s main home (they have another theater, Atlantic Stage 2, on West 16th Street) after a two-year renovation which involved the complete gutting of the space and even excavating some cellar space, now the theater’s lounge, bar, and restroom area, that was inaccessible previously. (Marilyn Stasio of Variety found Shanley’s play about church and state a “smart choice with which to reopen ATC’s “restored theater-in-a-church.”) The new theater is attractive enough, and as far as I could tell, its stage acoustics, as well as the sight lines, are fine. I did notice, though, when I arrived and was waiting for the performance to start, reading the program and just looking around at the new house, that the auditorium is very noisy, the sound of everyone’s conversation echoing through the room. (There was also a mildly annoying crackle from the sound system which was loudest when no one was talking on stage and then subsided when there was dialogue.)

In the press, Isherwood was a lot kinder to the play in the Times than I’ve been, calling it “unwieldy but affecting.” Isherwood did acknowledge that Storefront Church “sometimes bogs down in windy debates,” specifically criticizing the last scene as “an egregious example” which “surely could have been finessed into better shape” if director Shanley had been more distanced from writer Shanley’s “overripe oratory.” (I’ve observed this several times regarding playwrights who direct their own scripts. They’re too close to the words.) Yet Isherwood observes that “the more ponderous aspects of ‘Storefront Church’ are leavened by some of Mr. Shanley’s sharpest comic writing in years” and asserts that the dramatist’s commitment to his topic “remains distinctive and invigorating.” The reviewer’s one statement about the script with which I completely agree is that Storefront Church “is so stuffed with character, incident and ideas that not all of them feel thoroughly digested, even by the writer.”

Among the most positive reviews is the uncredited notice from the Associated Press, which calls the première of the “edgy” and “intense drama” a “quirky yet searing production” whose “outcome is not necessarily surprising, but it’s very satisfying.” Like all the other published reviews, the AP writer praises the cast unreservedly. Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post, describing Storefront Church as “a melancholy fable, or maybe a twisted fairy tale,” asserts that the dramatist is more interested in being Hans Christian Andersen than Michael Moore. Vincentelli concludes that though the play’s “a little clunky, a little obvious,” it’s “also earnest and generous. And that alone is praise-worthy.” But based on his Village Voice review, Michael Feingold seems to have seen a different play than I did. Characterizing the playwright’s dramaturgy as “simultaneously light and deep,” Feingold states:

John Patrick Shanley has the gift, always rare among playwrights, of writing scenes that convey both shape and spontaneity. You never feel with him that his characters are being shoved this way or that, for the sake of a previously worked-out agenda. Things happen in a Shanley play because they happen, not because the author nagged or nudged the characters into making them do so.

That’s precisely the opposite of my impression of Storefront Church. To be fair, Feingold does admonish that occasionally Shanley’s “characters are prone to let their talk wander from the point, and to settle their affairs all too conveniently when they remember to come back to it,” which is what I saw all through this play. But Feingold finds it an asset, and I didn’t. Furthermore, though he acknowledges that there’s a “plenitude of plot” which unfolds “in a loopy, half-coincidental way,” the Voice reviewer finds the “the characters' multi-accented cross talk” to be “far more interesting,” even comparing it to some of Shaw’s writing. I couldn’t agree less: the talk, especially the preaching (which mostly comes from Calderon rather than Kimmich) is, for me, pat and unconvincing, convenient and, from my perspective, insincere. (The characters may believe what they say, but only because Shanley wrote them to.) When Feingold lists the “for the best” outcomes at the end of the play (and his review), he seems to be seeing only one side of each result. For instance, Jessie won’t lose her house, Feingold notes, but he doesn’t remember that someone else down the line will be paying for the forgiven loan in order for the bank to cover the loss. Van Druyten, according to Feingold, “rediscovers his self-respect”—but at what cost (if, in fact, he even does)? He’s ripped out his own guts in front a roomful of virtual strangers, he’s exposed all his raw nerve endings. Of all the attendees of the storefront service, he’s the one who raises his hand when the preacher asks if anyone else feels dead. Is that really redemption? Looking beneath the surface of the benefits that accrue at the end of Storefront Church, it’s clear to me that everything isn’t entirely “for the best.” Now, that may in part have been Shanley’s point: that we all compromise, by will or by coercion or by circumstance, but the modern world requires it. But the playwright doesn’t actually make this point—he just lets it happen and then stops the play. So, I’m not sure where Feingold gets his “happy” ending.

In the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz writes that Shanley’s new play “is modestly intriguing but lacks the taut, fine-tuned storytelling” of his Pulitzer-winning Doubt and even chides director Shanley because “the production clunks from one scene to another.” The News review writer concludes that the production’s most serious deficiency is its “fuzzy focus”: “Like coins in a collection plate, themes are tossed out” but the director-playwright " doesn’t tie threads together,” resulting in a performance that’s “too vague to be all that gripping or satisfying.” In Back Stage, David Sheward characterizes the structure of Storefront Church as a “scattershot approach” and adds that Shanley “lays on the symbolism a bit too thickly,” citing, among other examples, the gingerbread house-devouring bit. Sheward, however, does affirm that the play nonetheless “has much to recommend it.” Variety’s Stasio calls Shanley’s play “wordy, unfocused and unresolved,” concluding that the final scene includes some nice theatrics by several characters (especially Grenier’s dead-pan loan officer), “but good luck finding the dramatic logic of it.” Matt Windman pretty closely echoes Stasio in AM New York, calling the drama “socially conscious but superficial” and contrasting the “too sentimental” last scene with the “confrontational scenes” of the rest of the play. “Shanley should not have directed the play, and it could really use some trimming and focus,” insists Windman.