Talk Bronx New York

Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius

  ‘Penmanship is dying!” lamented Sister Aloysius when she found a forbidden ballpoint pen in a classroom in the movie “Doubt,” set in a Bronx Catholic grammar school in 1964.

It came out on DVD last week, and to watch it was to conjure thoughts of growing up Catholic in the Bronx on the cusp of Vatican II.

It was a time and place that molded a population, and will never be seen again. Only those of us who went through it, like Marines who made it through Parris Island, can believe how it really was.

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                                                     Streep plays a strict nun who suspects a priest of abusing a child

 With a cast headed by Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman and another Oscar winner in the director’s chair, it is hardly surprising film drama Doubt has been showered with accolades.

Even more so when you consider the 2004 stage play on which it is based won four Tonys and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Small wonder, then, that when Streep, her co-star Amy Adams and director John Patrick Shanley were in London last month, the words “Academy” and “Award” were never far from journalists’ lips.

Their arrival in the capital coincided with the news that their picture had received three Bafta nominations to add to the five Golden Globe nods it received in December.

Since then Doubt has been shortlisted for five Oscars, with both Streep and Adams among those in contention.

Streep was also named best actress at the Screen Actors Guild awards on 25 January.

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WHEN John Patrick Shanley steps into a Midtown Manhattan hangout known for its theater clientele, few would guess how much he belonged.

There is little about his sure gait, workingman hands or no-nonsense affect that flicks at the artist within, let alone a playwright, often the more delicately wrought of the species. Only the eyes, weakened by glaucoma but working, suggest anything other than a tough guy from the Bronx. And in that gaze he is constantly calibrating everything around him, seeing a great deal and concluding not much.

“It’s an important part of my personality that I continually adjudicate, but I never reach a verdict,” he explains.

If Mr. Shanley, 58, more resembles a craftsman — the wizened, handsome contractor — it only makes sense. He builds stuff, including “Doubt,” a cultural artifact so sturdy that it not only became a Broadway achiever, winning a Tony for best play, but a film staring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman that is among the mentioned in this year’s Oscar race. By the way, he already has one of those for writing the 1987 film “Moonstruck.” He’s been building and telling stories for a while. Read more..

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