From a Place of Authority
Artistic Director Jason Loewith talks with Playwright John Patrick Shanley about writing from experience
Jason Loewith: When did you start writing Defiance?
John Patrick Shanley: Actually, I know the answer to when I finished it… it was the night before I won the Pulitzer Prize [for Doubt]! And that wasn’t accidental. I pressed hard to finish my next play, anticipating that if I won, I didn’t want to be sitting down the next day and thinking, “This is the next play after the Pulitzer.” So I had a first draft done that night.
JL: Like Doubt, Defiance is based on your own experience.
JPS: That’s right. I was a Marine in Camp Lejeune in 1970, ‘71 and ’72 - the same time period as the play - and it’s a place I knew very well. It was an era of great racial tension, and almost all the events in the play are fictionalized accounts of things that really happened there. It was an unbelievably violent time: there were a lot of murders in the town of Jacksonville and on base, a true breakdown in discipline, trash in the barracks on weekends, fistfights and worse. The world had come to roost, and the violence of Vietnam had transferred right to the base. A lot of Vietnam returnees were living there – I lived with 80 of them for a year in the barracks – and it felt like being in the jungle; these guys hadn’t come home in their minds yet.
JL: Did you feel isolated from the cultural upheaval on the base, or were you aware of what was happening outside?
JPS: It wasn’t outside, it was inside! We lived in a crucible of racial trouble, with a tremendous amount of confrontation. That’s when Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix died… and all of that news was coming into the barracks… all of their music was in the barracks, it was in the air. And in the PX, there were the books I’ve got Margaret reading in the play: Conrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon… those books, those ideas were floating around.
JL: In your original notes on Defiance, you wrote, “I feel doubt is an important and valuable exercise, a hallmark of wisdom. Defiance is a necessary step in the life of an individual and in the life of a nation, but it is an intermediate step – that’s why there’s going to be a third play.” At what point did you conceive of it as a trilogy?
JPS: I think when I started to write Defiance, I realized I was involved in a long conversation with the audience about institutions and authority in the different eras I’ve lived through, and how they reflected sea changes in the culture.
JL: So you know the next question I’m going to ask: what’s the third play?
JPS: I’m not going there yet! As Carl Jung said, “Every breakthrough leads to a major regression”! After Defiance I started work on the film of Doubt, and I need to go back and really live that world in a deeper way. The last two days I’ve been in the Bronx looking at these classrooms I used to be in, the churches I grew up in – my mandate at this time is to go back and more fully imagine the community surrounding the original play. After that, I’ll do a romantic comedy, because I can’t keep doing dramas, I’ll go stark mad. Then a vacation. And then, maybe, I’ll write the third play.