WRIGHT, Doug

PERSONAL:

Born in Dallas, TX. Education: Yale University, B.A., 1985; New York University, M.A., 1987.

ADDRESSES:

Office—c/o New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East Fourth St., New York, NY 10003.

CAREER:

Playwright. Member of board, New York Theatre Workshop.

MEMBER:

Dramatists Guild, Writers Guild of America, Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

AWARDS, HONORS:

William L. Bradley fellowship, Yale University; Charles MacArthur fellowship, Eugene O'Neill Theater Centre; Alfred Hodder fellowship, Princeton University; Off-Broadway Award for outstanding achievement in playwriting, Village Voice, and Kesselring Award for best new American Play, National Arts Club, both for Quills (stage play); Paul Selvin Award, Writers Guild of America, 2001, and Golden Globe nomination, both for Quills (screenplay); Pulitzer Prize for drama, and Tony Award, both 2004, both for I Am My Own Wife.

WRITINGS:

PLAYS

The Stonewater Rapture, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1990.

Watbanaland, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1995.

Unwrap Your Candy, produced Off-Broadway, 2001.

I Am My Own Wife: Studies for a Play (produced in Chicago, IL, 2003), Faber and Faber (New York, NY), 2004.

Quills (screenplay; adapted from his play), Fox Searchlight, 2000.

Other produced plays include Interrogating the Nude; Buzzsaw Berkeley; Quills; and Not Suitable for Children. Work represented in The Best Short Plays (three editions); contributor to periodicals, including Paris Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

The Book of Joe (screenplay), Warner Brothers.

SIDELIGHTS:

Doug Wright had written a number of successful plays before he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for I Am My Own Wife: Studies for a Play. His first major awards were for the play and screenplay adaptation titled Quills, which chronicles the imprisonment of the Marquis de Sade and his efforts during that time to have his work published. Wright again received accolades for his adaptation of this play as the film starring Geoffrey Rush as Sade. It was the first screenplay Wright had ever written.

Quills is a statement for freedom of expression. The screenplay received the Paul Selvin Award, presented to the script that "best embodies the spirit of the constitutional and civil rights and liberties, which are indispensable to the survival of free writers everywhere, and to whose defense Paul Selvin committed his professional life." The film, which was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, was chosen as best picture of the year by the National Board of Review.

Sade, who had earlier been convicted of abusing a servant, and who was imprisoned because of the influence of his mother-in-law, was later declared insane and confined at the asylum Charenton, where Quills is set. The institution is managed by a liberal priest (Joaquin Phoenix) who provides Sade with comfortable accommodations, good food, fine wine, and paper and quills. Sade is allowed to express himself through his writings as a means of release; what is not allowed is the distribution of these works, which is accomplished when a laundress (Kate Winslet) smuggles them out of the asylum. When a copy of Justine falls into the hands of Emperor Napoleon, Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) is ordered to suppress Sade. The writer pens a comedic spoof about the doctor's sex life, and the doctor then takes away the writer's privileges, and his writing quills. Royer-Collard, who believes he is acting on behalf of God, goes to extreme lengths, including torture, to silence Sade, who finds new methods of documenting his thoughts.

James Greenberg wrote in Los Angeles that Wright and film director Philip Kaufman are "less interested in the historical Marquis de Sade than in giving him contemporary resonance. For them, Sade's voice is a cry against the whitewashing of our culture; they don't care whether the marquis's work is really art. In fact, his actual writings are filled with descriptions of pedophilia, bestiality, and necrophilia. Whether the work deserves to be published and read is a choice for a free society."

David Steinberg noted in Gay and Lesbian Review that Sade "hated nothing more than the pious moralism he knew to be a veil for cruelty and hypocrisy. In his novels, it's always the paragons of society—the priests and the pious aristocrats—who perform the most despicable acts, sexual and otherwise, from behind their sanctimonious facade. Sade believed that those who deny their own vital nature—particularly their sexual nature, complete with its darker and more devilish impulses—are the people who are truly unnatural and therefore dangerous to themselves and others.… It is refreshing to enter a world of alternative morality in which the smug gladhanding of preachers and politicians is turned on its ear."

Among Wright's successes is Unwrap Your Candy, a collection of four short plays within a larger framing drama. It opens with the cast presented as an audience facing the audience. The five cast members share their thoughts with the actual audience as they talk on their cell phones and consider their unwrapped candy. The final vignette, in which a woman's unborn fetus speaks to her, first by demonstrating its knowledge, then with violent obscenities and a recitation of the birth defects it claims to have, was described by Variety's Charles Isherwood as "too intrinsically sad to be made fodder for black humor."

In reviewing Unwrap Your Candy in Back Stage, David A. Rosenberg wrote that with Wright "obsessions and abnormalities go hand in hand. There is no home, no retreat in our search for 'the root of who we are.' The conflict between outer actions and inner insecurities on stage is meant to stir similar doubts in the audience."

Wright first met the subject of his Pulitzer Prizewinning I Am My Own Wife while in Berlin after the fall of the Wall. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (1928-2002), was born Lothar Berfelde, a young man who knew he was gay at an early age. His lesbian aunt encouraged him to live life as a transvestite, which von Mahlsdorf did, through two of the most repressive regimes in history, those of the Nazis and the Communists. When he was fifteen, he beat his cruel Nazi father to death with a rolling pin as he slept. He was convicted of the murder but was freed when the prison in which he was incarcerated was destroyed by a Soviet bomb. Later, as he faced a firing squad, he was given a reprieve by a kind-hearted S.S. officer. The title of the play comes from von Mahlsdorf's response to his mother, who tells her cross-dressing son that it will be difficult for him to find a spouse.

As an adult von Mahlsdorf restored furniture and presided over a museum that collected furniture, clocks, and gramophones. In the basement, she ran a secret club where the gay community gathered and found refuge. Von Mahlsdorf was considered a heroine and was awarded the Medal of Honor after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but then it was learned that she had been an informer for the East German Stasi police and probably responsible for the imprisonment of gay collector Alfred Kirschner. Von Mahlsdorf said that Kirschner told her to turn him in, because he felt he would be caught anyway. Allen Ellenzweig noted in Gay and Lesbian Review that "in a country where informing on one's neighbors was widespread, if not universal, the aging transvestite is now roasted over the coals in the media."

Wright corresponded with Von Mahlsdorf until her death. In the play, she, as well as dozens of other characters, are played by a single actor, Jefferson Mays. Bruce Weber noted in the New York Times that "directed by Moises Kaufman with heartbeat precision, the play is, on the one hand, a fascinating and beautifully written character study of Mahlsdorf, whom Mr. Wright, who is gay, initially viewed as a hero and an inspiration but whose story turns out to be much more complicated than a mere profile in courage."

Isherwood wrote that "Wright himself plays a role in the story, which is presented in pseudodocumentary fashion, as if to underscore the authenticity of its details. After meeting von Mahlsdorf, Wright sends a letter proposing to write a play about her. 'I grew up gay in the Bible Belt,' he says, 'I can only begin to imagine what it must have been like during the Third Reich. The Nazis, and then the Communists? It seems to me you're an impossibility. You shouldn't even exist.'"

New Republic's Robert Brustein called Wright's writing "spare, elusive, and highly literate," and added that like noted American playwright Tony Kushner, "he has found a way to use his gay identity as a universal criticism of life."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Advocate, December 19, 2000, Gerard Raymond, interview with Wright, p. 58; May 27, 2003, Cathay Che, interview with Wright.

Back Stage, October 19, 2001, David A. Rosenberg, review of Unwrap Your Candy, p. 37.

Daily Variety, May 28, 2003, Charles Isherwood, review of I Am My Own Wife: Studies for a Play, p. 4; December 4, 2003, Charles Isherwood, review of I Am My Own Wife, p. 64.

Gay and Lesbian Review, March, 2001, David Steinberg, review of Quills (film), p. 47; September-October, 2003, Allen Ellenzweig, review of IAm My Own Wife, p. 50.

Hollywood Reporter, December 4, 2003, Frank Scheck, review of I Am My Own Wife, p. 25; April 6, 2004, "Jones, Wright nab Pulitzers," p. 8.

Los Angeles, November, 2000, James Greenberg, review of Quills (film), p. 54.

New Republic, July 21, 2002, Robert Brustein, review of I Am My Own Wife, p. 25.

Newsweek, December 4, 2000, David Ansen, review of Quills (film), p. 67.

New Yorker, June 9, 2003, John Lahr, review of I Am My Own Wife, p. 106.

New York Times, May 28, 2003, Bruce Weber, review of I Am My Own Wife, p. E1.

Variety, October 22, 2001, Charles Isherwood, review of Unwrap Your Candy, p. 43.*