John Patrick Shanley is a playwright, but is best known for his Academy Award-winning screenplay, Moonstruck, in 1987. Shanley is the youngest of 5 children. He grew up in the Bronx, New York in the 50- 60’s; the son of an immigrant meat packer. He lived in a very violent neighbourhood and Shanley was constantly involved in fighting, much to his dismay. Though he has become quite a successful playwright and screenwriter, Shanley had not been inside a theatre until his high school production of Cyrano de Bergerac.
To date, Shanley has written at least 24 plays and worked on a number of motion pictures. Doubt, a parable is his first production to be produced on Broadway, and has recently been made into a feature film. Shanley has never been discouraged by his lack of acclaim in New York. His plays have been translated into 15 languages, performed in 17 countries and receive about 80 productions a year in the United States and Canada. Shanley does not censor his work to ensure its appeal to a wider audience; he writes as a means of creating, and he wants to put meaningful work forward.
Shanley has been married and divorced twice and has two adopted sons, Nick and Frank, named after his parents, Nicholas and Frances. He now lives in Brooklyn Heights in a modest apartment building. In 2005, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Doubt, a parable.
The premise of John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Doubt, is this: In 1964, the principal of a Catholic school, a nun, suspects and accuses the parish priest of having molested an eighth-grade boy; the priest emphatically denies it. Shanley's theme surrounds the concept of doubt—how it can be an agent for safety, for growth, or, at the very least, for genuine discussion. By the end of the play there is no real answer to the priest's innocence or guilt. (This, at any rate, was the playwright's intention, though some productions may seem to take sides.) The audience is meant to struggle with the question "Whom should I believe?"—taking its own doubt out of the theatre and beginning its own discussions.