This piece is only tangentially related to the world of film — it's an interview I did for SEE Magazine with playwright/TV scribe Craig Wright as a preview for a local Edmonton production of his play Grace — but Wright had so many interesting things to say that I thought some of you might enjoy reading it anyway, even if you'll never see the play he's talking about. Plus, maybe the fanboys out there will be interested in his comments about the upcoming movie version of The Flash, whose screenplay Wright worked on. The rest of you, don't worry: I'll be getting back to the movie stuff tout de suite.* * * * *
At the end of my interview with playwright Craig Wright, I can’t resist asking him about The Flash, the big-screen adaptation of the DC comic book whose script he worked on, along with The Dark Knight's David S. Goyer. It certainly seems like an anomaly in his list of credits, which include such plays as The Pavilion, Orange Flower Water, and Recent Tragic Events and episodes of the TV shows Six Feet Under and Brothers and Sisters — dramas about unhappy marriages, infidelity, and complicated family relationships among aging Generation X-ers, without a single caped hero or insane supervillain anywhere in sight.
Wright admits he’s not an aficionado of superheroes — unless you count Jesus, whose exploits Wright became very familiar with during his years as a divinity student at St. John’s University in Minneapolis — but says that wasn’t what drew him to The Flash. “I’ve always been interested in time,” he says. “And the thing about The Flash as a hero is that because his superpower is speed, it throws him into a very complicated relationship with time. As we all know, E = MC squared, and time is linked to speed, so the faster we go, the slower time seems. So that throws someone like The Flash into a disjuncture with the people closest to him, and if he tries to live as a human being in the meantime, that makes things very difficult for him. That’s what interested me in the story.”
Wright’s no longer involved with the project, he says — these blockbuster film projects routinely go through screenwriter after screenwriter — so who knows how much of Wright’s concept will survive when the film hits the screen in 2010, but for now, he’s actually got me interested in The Flash.
And come to think of it, the characters in his play Grace, which opens this week at Edmonton's Shadow Theatre, have an unusual relationship with time as well: the violent first scene, in which a would-be hotel magnate named Steve shoots his wife and then himself, even takes place in reverse, with the dialogue going backwards and dead characters coming back to life and popping back up on their feet. They have a strange relationship to space as well: the play takes place simultaneously in two identical Florida condominiums that are represented onstage by a single set. In other words, we see what’s happening in the two rooms at the very same time — imagine one scene being laid atop the other, like two transparent sheets of plastic on an overhead projector.
But Grace has more on its mind than theatrical gimmicks: it’s really a play about faith, and four people whose belief in God is tested in various ways. At the centre of the play are Steve and Sara, a Christian couple who have come to Florida to start up what Steve predicts will be the next big thing in the hospitality industry: a nationwide chain of Christian hotels. But as the financing for the project falls apart, Sara finds herself drawn to Sam, the occupant of the neighbouring condo, who has lost his wife in a gruesome car accident. And lurking on the periphery of the story is Karl, an exterminator bearing horrible emotional scars from World War II, and whose rejection of God serves as a powerful rebuke to Steve’s blithe belief that the Almighty is always up there looking out for him.
I spoke to Wright last week over the phone from his home in Los Angeles as he prepared breakfast before heading off to the set of Dirty Sexy Money, the nighttime TV soap he created and runs for ABC.
Q: You’ve been heavily involved in writing for TV over the last six or seven years, but you’ve also kept a hand in the theatre world. How does your time break down, percentage-wise?
Craig Wright: I guess it’s probably about 60/40 — 60 television and 40 plays, with movies getting the additional 10 per cent over 100. [Laughs.]
Q: Was that always your goal, to move into television? Or were you sort of recruited at some point?
CW: I was recruited, I’d say. I mean, I was always interested in TV, but I was never dying to break into it either. But then my theatre agent asked if I wanted her to send a play of mine to some agents in Hollywood, and I got a call one day from this agent saying they thought I might be right for Six Feet Under and asking if I wanted to meet Alan Ball. And I was working in Minnesota at the time, working at a church as an assistant minister. Now, the offer didn’t come out of left field — I had authorized my agent to send the scripts out, after all — but I certainly wasn’t about to go out to L.A. looking for work either.
Q: You studied very seriously to become a minister and presumably have spent a lot of time thinking about the Bible and your relationship to the Creator. And between that period of your life and the writing of Grace, you spent several years in godless Hollywood. Have your ideas about God changed during that time?
CW: Well, not much. I don’t agree with this notion of “godless Hollywood.” That’s not really the way the world is, as far as I’m concerned — and that’s really what the play’s about. Whenever you concoct these dichotomies... I mean, you could say that God isn’t in culture, that culture represents all the worst forms of human endeavour and that God resides over there in religion, apart from culture. But I think that’s an inaccurate dichotomy. Religion itself is just as culturally proscribed as any Hollywood movie. The activity of the divine is always delivered, so to speak, from within a cultural context — whether it’s the context of religion, or Hollywood, or science. You can’t get to the divine without culture. You can’t have an experience of the divine without accessing it within a cultural context. So my views about God haven’t really changed. But I will say that my willingness to experiment boldly with theatrical convention increased the longer I stayed in Hollywood. The more writing I did in Hollywood, where I had to deliver naturalism, the more experimental my writing for the theatre became.
Q: And that’s certainly the case with Grace, where you have the action taking place in two locations at once. How early in the writing did that idea come to you? Was it a solution to a staging problem, or was it all bound up with the themes you wanted to explore?
CW: I always tell young writers that as you get older, you don’t get better at getting ideas, but you get better at knowing when they’re bad. As I began thinking about this play, I think it took me about 13 seconds to realize that alternating between two rooms would rapidly become a tiresome binary rhythm. So I thought, “Well, let’s put everybody in the same room” — and lo and behold, things got really, really interesting, because now Sara could be talking to her husband about the guy next door and the guy could be sitting on the sofa right there between them. It became a very vivid metaphor for this idea that we’re really not separated at all. There are no secrets; we’re all in the same room, theologically speaking. It’s all cause and effect, and no walls can stop it from happening.
Q: It’s such a tricky convention to explain to someone who hasn’t seen the play. Was it a challenge to find an elegant way to establish this convention for the audience right at the top of the play?
CW: I think people are very confused at the beginning of the play, but if they look back and remember, I think they were probably very confused when they were born. You know, life is confusing. I’ve written plays that start other ways — at the start of The Pavilion, I explain everything to the audience. But I think Grace is about a different experience of life, a confusing experience of life — Steve, who’s at the heart of the play, finds life absolutely baffling, so I think it’s good to start the play that way.
Q: The play is very sharp about a certain kind of American religious entrepreneurialism, where faith in God is all bound up with a kind of boundless capitalistic optimism. He’s not a phony. He’s very sincere.
CW: I love that phrase you used, “religious entrepreneurialism.” Another way of talking about it is “manifest destiny.” How can I put this? If it weren’t sincere, it wouldn’t have worked so well for so long, you know? It isn’t until chance fucks you over and suddenly you get a few bad rolls of the dice that you begin to question your reasoning.
Q: There are so many great details to the character: the way he says “Dog!” instead of “God!” when he wants to swear, the way he has a sales pitch ready to refute any possible argument against the existence of God. It feels like there had to be some real-life models that went into writing Steve.
CW: Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I just made it all up. Now, I was a born-again Christian for quite a while, and did spend a lot of time with people who had their pitch and who could just launch right into it. By the way, I find Steve’s argument kind of interesting — you think he’s going to start from a place of judgment, but in fact he starts from a place of pretty deep theological reasoning. He says there’s nothing in the world that could have made the world, which is like something from the ninth century, like something from St. Anselm. His argument is actually pretty good! And he’s also pretty accurate about Sam’s emotional state, when he says, “You’re mad. You’re mad at God.” Like most of us, he’s absolutely right about everybody else and absolutely wrong about himself. H. Richard Niebuhr had a great quote that I like to think about a lot: he said, “Most people are right about what they affirm and wrong about what they deny.”
Q: Are you at all conscious when you write about the attitude your audience, which is probably going to be pretty secular, is going to come in with when it comes to an overtly religious character?
CW: I’d say yes and no. I’m not oblivious to the habits of the theatre audience. But I still pretty much write what interests me. That said, I’m not that different from the average left-leaning theatregoer. I will say that if there’s anything that offends me, it’s the sophomoric dismissal of religious people — and I mean that in both ways. I don’t like it when religious people sophomorically dismiss culture, and I don’t like it when secular people sophomorically dismiss religion. It always amazes me: you can be with people who are so intelligent... I have a friend in Hollywood, and I mentioned Catholicism to him and he said, “Oh, aren’t those the people who worship Mary?” The idea that this person with a college degree, who’s very, very intelligent, that this could be his bumper-sticker understanding of the Catholic faith... We all have the worst possible stereotypes of other people’s religion, we have no information, and we have no interest in getting it. It seems so apparent to me, given the state of the world, that every elementary school student should be given a little primer in Islam. I mean, don’t you want to understand the rest of the world?
Q: Grace has a lot of religious themes running around it, and there’s more than one scene where the characters debate their faith with each other, but I don’t think it seems didactic. Did that take some doing in the writing of it? Is there a trick you’ve found to keeping those scenes from bogging down and making them dramatic rather than thematic?
CW: Well, I’d never write a scene just to make a point like that. But the people in my plays have ideas. And the things they’re doing to each other, the way they’re treating each other, are because of the ideas in their head. In Grace, it’s their ideas about God that bring them into conflict. In The Pavilion, it’s their ideas about time. In Recent Tragic Events, my play about 9/11, it’s their ideas about America and free will. I’m always aware of my characters having ideas, but I don’t write to explicate the idea. So I don’t create a scene to make a point; if anything, I find myself gradually making better points because it makes a better scene.
Q: Do you think a chain of religious-themed hotels is a good idea? Would you have invested in this project?
CW: I think it’s a tremendous idea! I wonder why nobody’s started it yet! I mean, if you were on the road with your hard-working family, and you have a certain set of values, and you knew there was a hotel where there wasn’t going to be a bar with a bunch of drunks or hookers wandering around the lobby, and you knew there would be a chapel on site... I think it’s an amazing idea! Of course, inevitably, those hotels would wind up having just as much drinking and just as many hookers as the normal hotels. But business-wise, it’s a fabulous idea. I’m not sure why it hasn’t happened.
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