 Welcome, everyone. My name is Faye Shalaton. I'm the Ohio Regional Rep, actually Northern Ohio. The South is seated from the North in the last year. And it is my joy to be here today with Doug Wright. And I can't imagine there's anyone in the room who doesn't know who he is, but I'll give you the thumbnail sketch. A Dallas native who rose from president of the Highland Park High School Thespian Club. And I think his kindergarten teacher said he played well with others. To Yale and NYU trained playwright. He subsequently gave the world dozens of theatrical works, including Unwrap Your Candy, The Stone Water Rapture, Interrogating the Nude, Quills, I Am My Own Wife, and the book for Grey Gardens, The Saw Berkeley, The Little Mermaid, and Hands on a Hard Body. Along the way, he collected the Kesselring Prize and OB, Tony Pulitzer, Lambda Literary Award, multiple fellowships, and countless friends and admirers. After you hear him expound for the next 45 minutes on the three things every playwright needs to know, talking about creativity, craft, and career, I expect you'll join his legion of fans. I bring you Doug Wright's most unforgettable character, Doug Wright. Thank you, Faye. So, let's begin with creativity. What do you identify as your greatest motivation for writing? And how does this square with your notion of the purpose of art? It's a great question, Faye, and that intro is hard to follow. I guess I write, I think, and this is a very bold claim, but I think that artists are responsible for curating the collective conscience of a people, and I think that that's a powerful incentive to write. Now, that also presupposes that you think of yourself as an ethical, moral person. One hopes. But I often think that the thing a theater most resembles in form is a church, and I think when it comes to preserving the enduring human verities of kindness and truth and compassion and empathy, I would even be brazen enough to suggest that I think artists as a collective have maybe functioned more efficiently than the clergy. And so I think it is, as Teresa so beautifully said in her talk, I think it's a noble calling and a necessary calling. So I think a lot of us write out a sense of inequity or rage or disenfranchisement or feeling like we're on the outside looking in. As artists, we kind of willingly cast ourselves as outsiders in the culture. And that is what gives us the requisite distance to write about it. So I think rage is a great motivator for creating work. And I also think you write, I write, out of a desire to see my own experience reaffirmed in the human sphere. I think any time you write a play, you're sort of saying, this obsesses me. This concerns me. This freaks me out and worries me a lot. How do you feel? And if 500 people sitting in the dark go, it freaks me out too. You know that you're all engaged in the same endeavor, which is living among fellow human beings. So I think we do it for that kind of affirmation. And on a far more pragmatic level, I think the most potent news is always affirmed deadline. You spoke about rage, but where are you emotionally? Describe where you are when you generally sit down to write. Usually a place of anxious frustration, because I feel like I overwhelm myself with too many commitments. And so I say yes to too many things. And so I'm always writing down with a sense that I'm woefully behind. And this will be the latest commission in the history of the American theater. And I need to finish it so I can get on to the next thing. And then you start writing and you just pray for that ineffable click where what the characters are saying to each other and what they're facing is more compelling than the vagaries of your own schedule. And hopefully that happens. And then you're off to the races. On subject matter, where are you if there were a continuum of write what you know and write what you don't know? Where do you fit? I mean, emphatically, emphatically in the write what you don't know category. I think you should write about the things that vex and confuse you. You should write about the things for which you have no answers. And in the search for them, you might write something meaningful. I think if you're writing what you know, it's usually less dimensional because if you have the answer and you're dispensing the answer, there's really no mystery. And so I think you have to write to the core of those things that confound you. Your characters are most often what we would charitably call marginal. Outcasts, outsiders, subversives, iconoclasts, take the Marquis de Saade, who is not only an unrepetent sinner, he's positively unredeemable. What makes you gravitate to the likes of the Marquis de Saade or, for that matter, Charlotte Van Maalstor for the Beals? I think that marginal characters or characters who exist on the fringe are extraordinarily useful figures in drama. And we tend to think of them as the other, but they're not. They're really us distilled. There are obsessions and our worries and our eccentricities polished to a high sheen. We can look at the Beals and we can say, that's not me, but we all have that drawer in our desk that we won't open because it's so full of things we're terrified to confront. We all have that. They're just that writ large, the same way I think a character like the Marquis de Saade. One of the greatest mysteries on the planet, one of the most savage, amusing, infinitely varied activities we have is sex. He was simply interested to what most of us would consider a fairly pathological degree, but we're all interested, right? So I think in these characters we can see our own foibles with a kind of clarity. So it's not writing about other people. I think it's about putting ourselves under the microscope when we tackle figures like that in our fiction. So I also think that again, as I was saying that outsiders tend to be the artist in a culture. I tend to write about outsiders and I just think that's historically true. Like if you want to know about the history and the institution of say marriage, ask a gay person in a state where it's not legal. Chances are they're preoccupied enough with it to have done pretty rigorous homework and be able to tell you about an institution that you might just know experientially. They can probably fill you in historically because they're excluded. And I think as artists we do that again and again and again. We're pressed against the glass looking in and that gives you a sharper sense of vision. And so I think as artists we're outsiders and I think writing about outsiders is instructive and yields very particular, very human dividends. And you've articulated that if you want to go a little further about how do these outsiders serve art, the purpose of art. Oh that's fantastic. I think I was just at a theater retreat in New Hampshire with a bunch of Dartmouth students. And we were talking about the role of art in the culture and we were talking in particular about how art is always under assault in the public school system. And that made me think and it made me think that when you're a kid the first way you start to experience and learn about the world is bedtime stories. So from our very first sense of consciousness and communication with our parents we're learning about the world through narrative. And if mommy reads to us that Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water and Jack fell down, if we have fallen down, if we have skinned our knee, we instantly feel for Jack. That's not fun. And then as we get older we go into say high school. We can be an African-American student in an urban school and we can read Diary of Anne Frank. Maybe we read it aloud in class. Maybe we do it as a school play. And suddenly this African-American student can claim to know something about the experience of the Holocaust and can have walked in Anne Frank shoes. I look at a play like my dear friend Moises Kaufman's Laramie project. Kids all over the country was the most produced play in high schools for almost three years in a row. I don't think we'd be where we are in terms of gay culture and gay politics if a lot of young people hadn't grown up on that play and know regardless of their own sexuality what it means like to be gay in a rural setting. So I think now you know we can go to the theater and see Mary Queen of Scots you know battling for her life and we can connect to it and know something of that experience. So art's role in the culture is to teach us empathy. It's to teach us to bridge the superficial differences of creed or ethnicity or philosophy ideology geography and connect to what it means to be universally human. And anytime I maintain I really believe this you start to strip or reduce art in the culture. You are pushing the culture towards sociopathology. You are stripping it of its capacity to learn experience and act empathetically. And I think if we can look at characters as marginal as the Beals as eccentric as are a lot of on Maldsdorf and rural Berlin or as seemingly reprehensible as the Marquis de Sade and some tiny voice in us can say I get it. I know what it must have been like to be them than art is fulfilling I think its cultural function. And then you wrote 10 characters in search of a Nissan pickup with hands on a hard body. Two years ago when we had our conference in Virginia you were still you're coming out of that research time. Now you've spent three years with these characters who are not the Marquis de Sade. They're much they're marginal but in their own way. Do you want to talk about what compelled you to spend three years with 10 people who were willing to be part of a marathon to win a truck. That was an amazing experience and one that I so deeply value. I saw the documentary and as many of you may know it's a documentary about a contest that took place in rural East Texas where contestants were invited to stand in a parking lot and place their hand on a pickup truck and whoever could remain standing the longest won the truck. And it sounds absurd and it sounds simple but in it I thought there was a really great metaphor for American striving. And the contest organizers thought it would last for 36 hours. It lasted for five days. People needed that truck and they needed it for very very emotional and compelling reasons. And so to me it epitomized the American dream because on the one hand this country promises us that if you work hard you get things and underneath that is the darker more Darwinian truth survival of the fittest and where do those two things come together in our culture because they seem irreconcilable but they're two sides of the same dream. So I thought this would be a great piece to use as a template to write about the recession to write about income inequality to write about the problem of immigration and to take all those sort of front page stories and refract them through this crazy contest. And so the documentary is about 15 years old and the filmmaker was very young when he made it and failed to get releases from the contestants. So the first thing that my colleague Amanda Green and I did was to hire a private detective in East Texas and say here's the movie find these eight people. These are the stories we have to tell. So the private detective found them and we flew to Longview, Texas with a list of addresses and a list of releases and we started knocking on doors and saying you know we're from New York and we write for the Broadway theater and you were in a movie 15 years ago and we got invited in for chicken salad and it was amazing it was just amazing and we became really attached to these these remarkable people and their stories and we contracted them all and gave them all a piece of the property in the hopes that it could change their own fortunes because they were a pretty hard to scrabble group and one of the most glorious nights in my career was the opening night of the show when our producers very generously flew them up from Longview, Texas for most of them the first time in New York City for some of them the first time on an airplane and each of them got a curtain call with their doppelganger the actor who played them in the show and it was profound and it was profound and I think that as someone who spent I came from Texas and I've had a love-hate relationship with my home state for a very long time and in this piece I was finally able to make my piece with a very problematic and challenging area of the country and my own heritage there so it felt like the whole act of writing it was healing in a way so its fortunes on Broadway were devastatingly it was a devastatingly brief run and all of us I think are still sorting through our PTSD in that regard but as a career experience for three years of my life I got to wake up every morning thrilled about the prospect of sitting down at the computer and that's a pretty precious gift so you've shown from these plays what it is that makes you hang on to something like a dog with a bone for those years what would make you abandon a project that's a great question you know it's tough because I tell my students I say it's a terribly presumptuous thing to say to a room full of strangers listen to me for two and a half hours and pay me 150 bucks maybe that's good and don't interrupt and sit quietly and don't talk to me about it go home after that is so presumptuous and so I tell my students if you expect strangers to listen to you for two and a half hours about something it better be an obsession or an interest that can fuel you for about five years less than that and don't don't take my time you know and and so I have tended to get pretty insanely obsessed with my subjects and and this is perhaps a death knell to admit this but I never in my adult life as a kid I I messed around with drafts but I haven't abandoned to play yet and that may or may not continue I've also to earn a living I've written many film scripts that proudly line some of the most prestigious filing cabinets in Los Angeles but but that's different I like to think those projects abandoned me but I play so far I haven't now that's not to say it won't happen but I think if you're gonna I'm not I'm not the most prolific writer I don't turn out to play a year as many of my colleagues do and many brilliant plays I'm slow I take three to five years to write a play and and I think it's because I have to feel that degree of maniac passion about it which moves us very conveniently into craft to what extent for example since you described your research for hands on a hard body or hard buddy hard buddy if people get so confused I think that was one of the not selling points because nobody knew whether it was a sex show the your process is it this pretty much the same does it begin with a ton of research or is every project its own journey I think every project is its own journey although I've realized there are certain truisms that I can count on like research is obviously essential if you're writing about a historical subject it's also the best procrastinatory device in the world so you can be midway through a first act and go I don't know something I better go check that book but you don't have to have read every book before you start and it's taken me a while to learn that and it's the act of writing a play that teaches you the research it's not something that they aren't separate steps of the process so I think I've learned that over time and that's been really really helpful because in the past I've used it as a vehicle to not write and the best way to write is always to actually dare one say it everybody hear that many people speak about finding the truth of a play since you tend to write about real people in events tell us what you're willing to sacrifice in order to tell an honest story well that's a great question I like that you like the question no I have a I have a very movable conscience in this regard when I wrote quills it's a historical play it's about the marquita sod but it's also an allegory about the nature of free expression and I sort of read all the requisite biographies I read everything sod wrote which I would not recommend I became something of a garden scholar on the man and then I said okay I'm gonna construct a narrative and I said to myself sod is more than a man he has become iconic he is an enormous symbol of a lot of things and other writers far greater than I from Yukio Mishima to Peter Weiss have appropriated sod's mythology and placed him in their fiction I looked at the library shelf and I saw there are 20 really readable scrupulously researched biographies about the marquita sod available the historical record the biographical record is there anyone who sees my play and wants to know what was true what wasn't true when did you take license when did you not has a wealth of resources to draw upon in addition anytime you write a play about a real figure there are thousands of frustrated academics who are experts on your topic who see their first chance to get a piece of the New York Times about what you got wrong so there are a million police out there to correct you so with sod I felt like I could take extraordinarily at license with his life because there are plenty of people out there ready to correct me and the public record and the volume of information on him is vivid and clear I don't know if any of you saw the movie of quills it was adapted from the play but sod's dying moment is when the priest played Joaquin Phoenix is trying to administer the last rites and sod bites off and eats the crucifix on his rosary and then he dies and the actual marquita sod had a great fondness for bonbons ate far too much and died as a result well I maintained that I was telling the larger truth because on set that crucifix was made of chocolate but more seriously when I wrote I am my own wife that's a play that was about a marginal figure that was completely unknown certainly to American culture she had some celebrity in Berlin but none no currency in our country and if you wanted to learn what was true about her and what wasn't after seeing my play you couldn't go to the library you couldn't check out a book there are no academic experts on the life of Charlotte of von Malstorf so even though I wanted to tell specific truths about the nature of curatorship and the recording of history which are sort of the themes of the play I felt like to invent outright scenes that never occurred people or characters that she never met would be dishonest because the play was the world's introduction to her in a way so I felt that I couldn't engage in the same kind of overt license that I did with the marquita sod I think all of us as writers have to make decisions about what's moral and what isn't certainly with hands on a hard body I'll never forget I was in La Jolla and one of the real-life characters this wonderful man from Gladewater Texas named JD Drew was in town and he and I went out for a beer and I said now JD I just want to tell you about the play you get a pretty upset in act two and you say a couple of curse words and I want you to know that now because I know you and your wife are are good Christian people and I don't want it to come as a shock when you see the play and he said well Doug what do I say and I said well JD you say son of a bitch and he said who the hell hasn't said son of a bitch I got no problem and then I said so you're okay with hell too and he said yeah that's not not a problem and I said and late in the second act you say goddamn and the color drained from his face and he said anyone who knows me knows I would never take the Lord's name in vain and that phrase would never pass my lips and so I as a writer have to make a judgment call how essential to understanding JD and his experience as represented in the play distinct from life was goddamn to me as a writer and in that instance it was a very easy call I knock on Keith Carradine's dressing room and I say cut the goddamn piece of cake piece of cake but you have to in when you're writing about real-life people you have to engage in those kind of negotiations because it's their truth you're trying to represent and so anytime we deviated from the experience of these ten people and hands on a hard body we would engage in conversation and and sometimes more often than not they actually wanted the play to work they had a vested interest in it and there was one character Benny Perkins who was had a history with issues he was racist the guy was racist he just was we didn't want to eliminate that from our play because we'd be eliminating a core truth about that culture it is oftentimes a very racist culture so we had to sit down with JD and we had to say we're presenting this it's a part of your journey in the play we'll give you an 11 o'clock redemption but we have to show that aspect of your nature and and JD was like hey if I get redeemed and maybe I'm doing better on the stage than I am in life and maybe I need to work on that so you know they were willing they were willing but you have to have that you have to have that interaction great what's the best play writing advice you ever received a wonderful artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and chair of the Yale Drama School I did not attend there but he was the man who produced my first two full-length plays with Lloyd Richards and he said something that I just if I were into tattoos I'd have a tattooed somewhere and it was right for an audience that is smarter than you are and that has served me again and again and again writing for the theater even if it's just your name on the script is by definition a collaboration because got partners everywhere name some of the or a memorable moment that came out of collaboration with a director drama drama drama performer designer that would be my dear friend Moises working on I am my own wife Moises had worked a lot from transcript with plays like gross and decency and the Laramie project and I had about 500 pages of transcript my interviews with Charlotte of on Malzdorf and I was really stymied so in our very first rehearsal at the Sundance Institute Moises said let's just pick three moments of transcript that compel you and we'll just play with them so I picked three moments and one was a tour Charlotte gave me of the furniture in her museum one was the first time she ever put on a dress and the third time was her first trip to West Berlin after the wall fell to see Boys Town to see the big gay neighborhood that she'd never seen from behind the Iron Curtain and so Moises took those pages of transcript gave one to Jefferson Mays our actor one to me and he took one himself and he said so tonight let's all go home and let's let's do a little theater piece based on this page of transcript that we've each been assigned and we all went home and the next day we came in and Moises had gotten the transcript about the first time Charlotte put on a woman's dress and because Charlotte was a biological male but identified as female and so Moises simply put two chairs on the stage and draped a black dress over one stood by the first chair and slowly took off his own clothes and folded them very neatly on the chair then walked over to the second chair and simply put on the dress and that was his piece it was over and then my piece was about Charlotte's first trip to West Berlin to see the gay clubs and I had found an old German guidebook that had these sort of campy outrageous descriptions of each club and I simply read them aloud each description and finally Jefferson who is unbelievably inventive had stayed up most of the night with shirt cardboard from his dry cleaning and had created with a pen knife absolutely beautiful pieces of miniature furniture and he got the museum tour and he just placed the miniature furniture on a table and described each piece all three of those moments wound up in the finished text of the play so it was revelatory great your book writing credits are stacking up and for those who are viewing this on your computer you might have heard that this was going to be about book writing for a musical and that collaboration so we'll address that for just a couple minutes so you don't throw anything at your screen talk about the special challenges in being part of what is essentially a writing group in musical storytelling how do you know for example when dialogue is better song than spoken it's a great question and I first want to just say that I am my own wife was obviously a watershed moment for me and very very thrilling and it was my last straight play that was 2004 musicals have been a thrilling place to hide because there are more people to blame which is also to say there are more people on the dark days to stimulate you to excite you to get you to recommit to the project and to make you look 30 times smarter than you are because of their own magnificent talents so I'm I have two more musicals that I am excited to finish and I'm also for the first time in about ten years working on a new play and being alone in a room with it is the most delicious and extraordinary thing so musicals in a way have been a place to hide out for me I think I'm extraordinarily proud of the work I've gotten to do and I've worked with remarkable people and created shows that that I'm proud to be associated with but it's in the collaborative nature of it has been what's made it a safe escape and yet it's also a form that offers very particular pleasures and dividends and if you want a character to get overtly emotional in a play you usually need to nurse them along for two or three scenes till you create enough sufficient conflict and anxiety that they can burst into that explosive and beautiful monologue that you that you're aiming for well in a musical you just need about three bars of music and you can get them there it's a whole additional language that you can use as a writer to accelerate and redefine the emotional journeys of your characters and that's thrilling because you can cover such expansive emotional terrain because you have that form and music is almost wholly emotional right it takes you places instantly the chime of a bell or the strum of a harp or the sound of a guitar chord and instantly you go someplace and that's fantastic and I found with almost all my collaborators that sometimes you write more for a musical than you do for any other piece because again and again Michael Corey or Amanda Green will say to me I don't quite get what this number supposed to be would you write the monologue so you write a monologue and you give it to them and it becomes a song or you write a love scene and you give it to them and it becomes a duet and those things happen you steal their text for a good joke they steal your text for a good song and it's it's highly collaborative and every lyricist and composer I've ever worked with the initial job of structuring the piece and finding the song moments is the three of us together in a room with notes and index cards and research and that sort of mad cross-pollinization that happens and I really believe too when you're working in that kind of environment you have to honor everybody's impulse even if you don't understand it like I remember Michael Corey came in during the writings writing of Grey Gardens and he was so excited he was almost trembling and he said I have it I have it there's gonna be a song in the second act where big Edie cooks corn and I thought well that's leaden and I don't know what to do with that dramatically that's probably the worst idea but let Michael so passionate about it let him work through it in his own idiot idiot somewhat way whatever he does behind closed doors and and and you'll eventually talk him out of the corn song but he's so hot to write it you just have to let him write it so get out of his way and he came back with a song called Jerry likes my corn which is one of the most haunting and beautiful songs really not about corn at all but about the nature of motherhood and nurturing something that big Edie can do for the homeless Jerry but that she can't seem to do for her own daughter and it's one of the most extraordinary numbers in the show and so when you are working with collaborators if someone in the room is so passionate about an idea they simply have to try it even if it doesn't fit the cosmology of what you've created you have to say yes because chances are if they're that consumed by the idea they're gonna give you something that's gold so so that kind of flexibility I think is is crucial because it's all about serving serving the work ultimately and on the career no matter what success that we enjoy over the years we're always it seems that it's our most recent project that is where everybody places us and so getting back to the PTSD on hands on a hard body the critics like the audiences I mean we were just thrilled with the show describe the roller coaster ride a little bit because our most of us in this room have not had work on Broadway talk about where that put you during the ride and also I want to know who got to keep the truck the truck has been rented out to resident theater productions so there is a lot for it used to travel thank the truck is okay even if the show is not I can't that doesn't make sense well you know it's going from resident theater to resident theater we don't have a Broadway tour okay but I'm still sorting through it and I can't lie it was probably I cared so much about that piece and that piece was I watched the movie I thought of the idea I called Amanda we went to Texas and we didn't have Broadway producers involved till a certain juncture but I think there were a lot of things that I've learned about Broadway I've been a little spoiled because I am my own wife had moved to Broadway great gardens had moved and of course little mermaid which was classified in Disney's cosmology as a disappointment it ran two years which is the longest I've ever had anything run on Broadway so their disappointment was my great victory but I would say with what I've come to think about hands on a hard body it was an eccentric title and an idiosyncratic subject and I think the public at large lot people standing around a truck that's pretty static and of course the job of theater artists is to liberate the static to make what's a movable move to make what sedentary fly that's what we do and we knew that truck was gonna move like a mofo and there would be dance and movement and energy in the piece that was the glorious challenge of it but audiences we didn't communicate that I think and in addition when you have a piece that's idiosyncratic and perhaps different off Broadway and and and institutional theater in New York is your friend because it creates a conversation about the work among the New York theater going community and if you have a show running for eight weeks at playwrights horizons or the Atlantic theater company and no one can get a ticket but at dinner parties around town people are saying it sounds crazy but it's kind of good you should go see it you start to build momentum so then when a show transfers to Broadway the audience has spent a lot of time educating itself a play about an obscure German transvestite behind the iron curtain that's not an easy sell but eight weeks at playwrights horizons when it was being talked about at dinner parties all over town you create appetite in a way that press pieces cannot do and if I could do it all over again I would not have dropped a sort of delicate Texas blue bonnet like hard body in the hot crucible of Broadway which in some ways you still have to earn unless you have name recognition or a subject that already has caught the public's fancy and then you have to deliver but but for us I think it was incredibly difficult to sell the show without any pre-existing conversation about it and I also think again we were using the show to talk about issues like income inequality the recession the immigration issue and when we opened on Broadway the stock market turned up the housing market started to come back and there was an immigration bill before both houses of Congress and I think a lot of people thought to pay 150 bucks a seat to see a show about the have-nots was not your first choice for Mother's Day and I think that we missed the zeitgeist and that's something you can't control I still believe in the piece enormously it's one of the favorite things I've ever worked on but you have to catch the popular imagination and at the time we came along all of those arguments that played out in the election the election had concluded a man was in office and those voices went silent and and suddenly we were saying don't you want to talk about these front-page issues don't you want to talk about them well the nation was exhausted from talking about them so I think that and these are things that as a writer you can't control you're just trying to tell the truth of that one East Texas guy who's got his hand on that truck at 4 a.m. on the third day and you can't control those other variables but it was one of the most profound and happy and joyous working experiences of my career and I can say that I got some terribly fancy hardware that graces my mantle for for I am my own wife and now I'm on the wall at Joe Allen so my career is run the spectrum that wouldn't put you on the wall oh it did oh no well I'm going somewhere else what's on the drawing board you said you have two musicals on the drawing board and a straight play anything you want to do you want to do you want to talk about it sure there is a musical there there are four projects right now that are making me a little crazy but there's a musical that I'm extravagantly excited about that is hopefully headed to Broadway with the illustrious producers David Stone and Mark Platt and I've been sworn to secrecy but we had a 29 hour reading of it in June and it seemed to go well and we're doing a workshop in December so hopefully that will stay on track sounds like a passion play you said 29 hours oh it's an equity rule although those things are frequently confused but and then I'm working on a play of the place for the Atlantic Theatre Company I was in I'll curse it now I'll tell you what it's about and then I'll never finish it but I was in Oslo Norway and I was at the studio of this renowned sculptor a man named Gustav Vigeland who was a sculptor at the turn of the last century and it's not well known outside Oslo because all of his work is there and they've never released it so he doesn't have work in museums internationally but there was this incredibly compelling series of busts that were in a row in the studio and one was a sort of puffy man with giant mutton chops and this kind of furious expression very dramatic plaster cast and then next to it it looked like the same man but his hair was gone and then next to it his cheeks were sunken and his eyes were set back and slowly as I looked at these six plaster casts it was the same man but increasingly emaciated and I was really haunted by it so I started to read about these these studies and it turned out that Gustav Vigeland had been commissioned by the cultural ministry in Norway to complete a bust of one of its most famous citizens but after his first sitting he had a very serious stroke and every time he returned to sit he was so diminished physically that Vigeland had to throw out the previous study and began anew so he never completed the bust but he got a remarkable record of a man dying and the sitter was Henrik Ibsen so the play imagines those sittings so it's a piece called posterity and it's for the Atlantic so we'll see Teresa said that she doesn't know she's gonna finish a play till she's on page 62 I'm only on about page 22 so it's anybody's guess so I'm gonna jump to my last question so we allow some time for questions in the audience you have such a list of achievements but we can celebrate that you're too young for a lifetime achievement award so as an emerging playwright what do you still hope to do oh that's such a great question I turned 50 this year and depending on where you are you know that's it's so young but it feels like it feels like a landmark age regardless and it does make you aware of time in a new way and I don't think it's any when I say write about what Vex is or confuses or confounds you so I'm 50 now and there's a time clock that there never was before it's not a pressing one it's not an urgent one but it's there and I never heard it ticking before and I hear it ticking now and I'm writing a play about a playwright facing his own mortality and taking stock as he's being committed to portraiture and I don't think that's a coincidence so I think that I think this is a dream that we all have I think what I'd like to do is have that one project that is enough of a populist success that I am liberated to sit in my own room inside my own free verse tortured little brain and write whatever I want to and I haven't achieved that yet I've had some wonderful opportunities and some remarkable experiences but I haven't found that one elusive work that will actually pay the bills so I still hold out hope that that will happen and in it I'll find my Medici that lets me paint crazy things on the ceiling for the rest of time so that I never again have to worry about a piece's economic success or failure would you like to contribute to the dialogue yes I'll repeat the question rather than worrying about a mic and I know that you know that and my question is how would you approach it? I think that we're pulling this gap off of a 50-year-old woman in fact when we were workshopping the piece there were African-Americans who said that they were not able to talk about it or was it a tragedy that people couldn't talk about so we're hoping that 50 years it can come through the theater cut part I absolutely applaud you for doing that I think it's thrilling because what could be our representative from the Dallas-Fort Worth area runs a theater that is about to do presumably provocative and exciting new play that deals with the Kennedy assassination and issues of race incendiary issues in Dallas and have been for 50 years and she's asking how to control the controversy and I say stoke it baby and I say what you do it's going to happen anyway so I think what you do is you sit down with your funders and you brace them for the fight and you educate them about how to sensitively respond to questions and concerns about the piece that push it toward a positive place arrange public forums around the piece so that people who are enthusiastic about it and bothered by it feel like they have an opportunity to express that range of feeling so arm yourselves in smart ways so that you don't undermine yourself and your institutional health because you're doing something provocative but in a way you've got a lit stick of dynamite and you're about to throw it and so now's not the time to say oh you're going to hurt anybody I mean you're poised to go right and I think it's fantastic and I think it's a debate that Dallas needs and I think you're courageous to take it on so educate your funders talk to your board make sure that any conversation that could happen outside the theater has been rehearsed inside the theater but embrace what you're doing because you know you're scared to death but there's some impish artists provocateur part of you that is thrilled you're about to do this and embrace that self and you'll be pleasantly surprised people can take a lot more than we give them credit for what was your first break? Where did you really begin? What was your first production? Well my first break was having parents who on a rainy Saturday afternoon thought it would be worthwhile to take their 8 year old son to the Dallas Theater Center to see Life with Father by Howard Lindsay and Russell Krause and that was my first break because that wedded my appetite and pointed me on a direction that kept me safe in Texas helped me find a peer group let me feel like I had worth in the world because I was good at it and it wasn't football all those things so that was the most amazing break more pragmatically and in career terms I wrote a play as my graduate school thesis at NYU that was accepted by the Eugene O'Neill Playwright Center and happily then went on to production at the Yale Repertory Theater. Which one was that? It was called interrogating the nude and it was about the artist Marcel Duchamp and so it was Lloyd Richards production and that's when he gave me that glorious advice right for an audience that's smarter than you are. Yes. Just along those lines I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about your sort of fixation on artists that are not writers, would you accept I guess of Marquis de Sade? You just seem to always be drawn to these people who are sort of interpreting the world and the experience of it though not necessarily the direct way that you're doing it yourself and I was just wondering if there's something you think about in terms of that or something you don't even think about? Oh it's a great question and maybe I don't have a good answer. I know I've always been really obsessed with visual art and I was an art history major in college and also visual art is exciting to realize on stage because you can explode it in certain ways and I guess I'm also really fundamentally interested in how artists place themselves in opposition with the dominant culture in order to teach or instruct or serve as the cultural conscience to that society. So I think because that's the role I'm sometimes with disastrous results I'm trying to play out in my own life I guess I examine it again and again in my fiction. Well I'll tell you it's been a lovely session and for those of you who can't get enough of Doug Wright stay in the room because there's another panel coming up in this room. A friend once told me it's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice. In Doug Wright we have the whole package. So do stay around.