When I was planning a trip to New York to visit playwright Doug Wright, I asked him for some restaurant recommendations. The places he recommended turned out to be not at all where you'd expect an Off-Broadway playwright to eat. My wife and I checked out several of them and none of them were cheap.
We chose Charlotte, with elegant decor and excellent food. It's located in the Millennium Broadway Hotel, on 44th Street just off Times Square, one of the most attractive of all Manhattan hostelries. Charlotte is not overly expensive, but it was more upscale than the grungy hang-outs of most Off-Broadway writers, who have to pinch pennies.
The catch is that Doug Wright was paid to turn his play Quills into a Hollywood movie, and now that he's a screenwriter, he's learned how to live a more comfortable life.
"Yes, film is very remunerative," says Wright. "I enjoy making that kind of money, but I still like living in New York and writing for the stage. I'll fly to Hollywood whenever I get a job there, and do the meetings, but I come back and do most of my writing here at home. Some playwrights go to Hollywood and become disillusioned. Not I. It's important to realize the differences, which are a bit analogous to a playwright as an architect and a film writer as a contractor."
Quills is a story about the Marquis de Sade and his resistance to censorship. When it was produced by Philadelphia's Wilma Theater in 1997 it won three Barrymore Awards, including Best Production. Quills also earned Doug Wright an Obie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting. It then was developed into a feature film starring Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Michael Caine and Joaquin Phoenix. It received two Golden Globe Nominations including Best Screenplay for Wright, three Oscar nominations and was named Best Picture of the Year from the National Board of Review.
In 2001 Wright directed an evening of three one-acters and a brief curtain-raiser, jointly titled Unwrap Your Candy, at the Vineyard Theatre in downtown Manhattan. "If Quills was my attempt at a kind of banquet," says Wright, "then these plays are little poison hors d'oeuvres all laid out on the same tray. They are caustically funny and deeply sobering at the same time. They should amuse but they should also make people shudder."
The four small plays were written by Wright for various companies over a 12-year period, but they share a fascination with parent-child relationships. "They deal with horrors which we visit on the young and which they in turn visit upon us. My own parents are actually very supportive of me, but as a gay man without children, I am an observer of many children and parents. I also think that many of our fears, anxieties and pathologies are rooted in our childhood."
Wright describes himself as "about six feet tall, a few pounds too heavy, with a goatee and glasses. I usually can be found lurking in the lobby of my plays, looking nervous."
He says he "escaped" from his home in Dallas, Texas, "at the tender age of 18, never to look back." He earned a masters degree in playwriting at NYU and made his home in Manhattan. The WPA Theater produced his first play, Buzzsaw Berkeley Off-Broadway in 1989. It started as a cabaret show with song parodies by Michael John La Chiusa, who later won Tony nominations with his Wild Party. Wright says it was "a reckless, foul-mouthed and ill-behaved play. I remember one critic called it "vulgarity times velocity," which is one of the most thrilling things anyone said about my writing."
He is currently in the midst of an 18-month residency at Philadelphia's Wilma Theater, which mounted a great production of his Quills. It's due to a highly competitive Theater Communications Group National Theater Artist Residency matching grant. The residency began in April 2001 and will continue through fall 2002. (From 1997 to 1999, the Wilma had playwright Suzan-Lori Parks in residence.)
Blanka Zizka, artistic director of the Wilma, first met Wright when she directed Quills in 1997. Wright attended rehearsals and performances and was impressed with her work. It was the third or fourth production of the play, and Wright thought it was the closest to his vision. "He got excited by the production," says Zizka. "After that, he traveled to Philadelphia to see some of our other productions, and I asked him if he'd like to develop a new play for us."
Zizka was attracted to Wright's work "because of its wildness. He's humorous, but the humor is dark and twisted. He has a wonderful command of language, an amazing vocabulary, even in conversation."
During his residency, Wright commutes between New York and Philadelphia, reading plays and critiquing them for the Wilma, recommending new playwrights and plays, speaking at a series of "Wright on Writing" seminars and developing other new Wilma programs. For three months in 2002, Wright lived in Philadelphia, away from his usual diversions, writing a new play. Meanwhile he recently completed a screenplay called The Burial, based on a New Yorker article about a lawsuit in Mississippi against the funeral home industry.
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