TALKING WITH GOD

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable” and Brooklyn Laundry.”

-  VINSON CUNNINGHAM

It’s been a good few months for catching up on the work of the playwright John Patrick Shanley. Last fall, the Lucille Lortel Theatre put on a revival of Shanley’s seedy, stormy, aggressive love story, from 1983, “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea”—a production most notable, thinking back on it, for its announcement of a new level of ambition on the part of Aubrey Plaza, who starred as the tough, lost Roberta.

Now, this spring—the Lenten timing is appropriate, perhaps, for this God-haunted writer—there’s a Shanley double bill. “Doubt: A Parable,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, from 2004, about a fraught episode at a Catholic school and parish, is in revival at the Todd Haimes Theatre, produced by the Roundabout and directed by Scott Ellis. “Brooklyn Laundry,” Shanley’s newest play, a tragicomic romance about the excruciating fickleness of fate, is at Manhattan Theatre Club’s New York City Center Stage I, under Shanley’s own direction.