(Professor Martin Andrucki interviewed the playwright in late March. What follows is the result of that conversation.)
Craig Wright, son of a constantly-traveling corporate executive, was born in 1965 in Puerto Rico, one of his family’s many temporary habitations. Mostly, however, the Wrights stayed on the mainland, their travels usually ending up in what the playwright calls “East Coast suburban megalopolis.”
Wright’s mother died when he was seven, which led his father to remarry—“a lot” as the playwright puts it. The ensuing combination of domestic and geographic insecurity soon became unbearable for the boy, and he fled home at the age of fourteen, headed for Minnesota—the one place among his family’s many brief encampments that he remembered with pleasure.
With his dead mother’s social security money in hand, he made a beeline for a small town called Detroit Lakes in search of the stability he could not find with his father.
He sought out some friends in the town, rented a room in their house, and put himself through high school. In moving to Detroit Lakes, he says, he experienced the “happiness of being launched into pastoral fields and farmland” after the physical confinement of the East.
After his high school years, Wright, as if following in his father’s nomadic footsteps, “just took off.” He boarded a train, and traveled around the country, doing odd jobs and soaking up experience. He then enrolled at St. John’s University in Minnesota. But college failed to interest him, and he dropped out after a single semester.
Next, he turned to theater. A friend who knew he had done some acting in high school suggested that he compete for the Jerome Fellowship, a drama prize sponsored by a playwrights’ group in Minnesota. With his first script he proceeded to win that prestigious award—at the age of twenty-one, the youngest Jerome Fellow ever.
Having found his calling, he continued writing, creating several plays which, though produced in regional theaters, failed to find a wide audience. They were, he says, works that dealt with “what I was right about, not with what I loved.” It was only when
he began writing about Pine City—a fictional town based on the Detroit Lakes of his youth—that he discovered what he “loved.”
Pine City is the setting for his three most recent, and most successful, plays: Molly’s Delicious (1997), The Pavilion, due at The Public Theater in May, and Orange Flower Water, to be staged at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in the summer of 2002. He considers these plays a trilogy, with Pine City as their unifying principle.
This imaginary community, says Wright, has come to provide “a particular place where I can explore a persistent world view . . . a sense that the universe is both totally beautiful and totally unjust—simultaneously, and irreconcilably.” He illustrates this by
noting that the world can contain “both the horror of the Holocaust and the beauty of the blue-flag iris.” Thus, in spite of the reality of evil, “We can’t let go of our love of the world. We have to keep watching, noticing that the blue-flag iris is always there, and that people are doing good things.”
In Wright’s view, contemporary art often fails to maintain this difficult paradoxical outlook. “Either art degenerates into images of unremitting pleasantness or unremitting horror," he says, "the latter being the hallmark of the avant-garde.” For artists to ignore or avoid the existence of beauty or goodness is “a token of laziness, an inability to deal with contradictions that muddy the waters of their simpleminded view of the world.”
He points to the “unbearable extensiveness of the universe” as an invitation to artistic despair, but believes that a work of art can “frame” that immensity, helping us to focus on a human-scaled corner of creation where we can make some sense of
existence. For Wright, that corner of the universe is Pine City, the setting for The Pavilion.
The play, says Wright, is about time—or, more specifically, time’s irrevocability. Two characters, Peter and Kari, meet at a high school reunion, twenty years after one has betrayed the other, thereby radically altering both their lives for the worse. Peter tries to fix what has gone wrong, but ultimately he cannot. Time has happened and it can’t be reversed.
Like Peter, says Wright, we all instinctively seek redemption from the mistakes of the past. But, he insists, “once the dominoes have fallen they can’t be put up again. We can never undo what has occurred.” But does that mean that Peter and Kari must simply surrender to unhappiness? Not at all. “Redemption is possible, but not by undoing the past,” according to Wright. Instead, we achieve redemption by learning to “understand the present in a new way.”
Rooted in reality, the play is based on the experience of a good friend. Like Proust and Kerouac, whom Wright claims as artistic forebears, he is interested in re-shaping and re-imagining events from his own life or from the lives of those close to him. Thus far, Pine City has yielded up a generous stock of such characters—some playing major roles in one play, only to move into the margins in another. As Garrison Keillor has done, Craig Wright, another poet of Minnesota, has discovered large storehouse of ideas in a very small town.
Craig Wright, son of a constantly-traveling corporate executive, was born in 1965 in Puerto Rico, one of his family’s many temporary habitations. Mostly, however, the Wrights stayed on the mainland, their travels usually ending up in what the playwright calls “East Coast suburban megalopolis.”
Wright’s mother died when he was seven, which led his father to remarry—“a lot” as the playwright puts it. The ensuing combination of domestic and geographic insecurity soon became unbearable for the boy, and he fled home at the age of fourteen, headed for Minnesota—the one place among his family’s many brief encampments that he remembered with pleasure.
With his dead mother’s social security money in hand, he made a beeline for a small town called Detroit Lakes in search of the stability he could not find with his father.
He sought out some friends in the town, rented a room in their house, and put himself through high school. In moving to Detroit Lakes, he says, he experienced the “happiness of being launched into pastoral fields and farmland” after the physical confinement of the East.
After his high school years, Wright, as if following in his father’s nomadic footsteps, “just took off.” He boarded a train, and traveled around the country, doing odd jobs and soaking up experience. He then enrolled at St. John’s University in Minnesota. But college failed to interest him, and he dropped out after a single semester.
Next, he turned to theater. A friend who knew he had done some acting in high school suggested that he compete for the Jerome Fellowship, a drama prize sponsored by a playwrights’ group in Minnesota. With his first script he proceeded to win that prestigious award—at the age of twenty-one, the youngest Jerome Fellow ever.
Having found his calling, he continued writing, creating several plays which, though produced in regional theaters, failed to find a wide audience. They were, he says, works that dealt with “what I was right about, not with what I loved.” It was only when
he began writing about Pine City—a fictional town based on the Detroit Lakes of his youth—that he discovered what he “loved.”
Pine City is the setting for his three most recent, and most successful, plays: Molly’s Delicious (1997), The Pavilion, due at The Public Theater in May, and Orange Flower Water, to be staged at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in the summer of 2002. He considers these plays a trilogy, with Pine City as their unifying principle.
This imaginary community, says Wright, has come to provide “a particular place where I can explore a persistent world view . . . a sense that the universe is both totally beautiful and totally unjust—simultaneously, and irreconcilably.” He illustrates this by
noting that the world can contain “both the horror of the Holocaust and the beauty of the blue-flag iris.” Thus, in spite of the reality of evil, “We can’t let go of our love of the world. We have to keep watching, noticing that the blue-flag iris is always there, and that people are doing good things.”
In Wright’s view, contemporary art often fails to maintain this difficult paradoxical outlook. “Either art degenerates into images of unremitting pleasantness or unremitting horror," he says, "the latter being the hallmark of the avant-garde.” For artists to ignore or avoid the existence of beauty or goodness is “a token of laziness, an inability to deal with contradictions that muddy the waters of their simpleminded view of the world.”
He points to the “unbearable extensiveness of the universe” as an invitation to artistic despair, but believes that a work of art can “frame” that immensity, helping us to focus on a human-scaled corner of creation where we can make some sense of
existence. For Wright, that corner of the universe is Pine City, the setting for The Pavilion.
The play, says Wright, is about time—or, more specifically, time’s irrevocability. Two characters, Peter and Kari, meet at a high school reunion, twenty years after one has betrayed the other, thereby radically altering both their lives for the worse. Peter tries to fix what has gone wrong, but ultimately he cannot. Time has happened and it can’t be reversed.
Like Peter, says Wright, we all instinctively seek redemption from the mistakes of the past. But, he insists, “once the dominoes have fallen they can’t be put up again. We can never undo what has occurred.” But does that mean that Peter and Kari must simply surrender to unhappiness? Not at all. “Redemption is possible, but not by undoing the past,” according to Wright. Instead, we achieve redemption by learning to “understand the present in a new way.”
Rooted in reality, the play is based on the experience of a good friend. Like Proust and Kerouac, whom Wright claims as artistic forebears, he is interested in re-shaping and re-imagining events from his own life or from the lives of those close to him. Thus far, Pine City has yielded up a generous stock of such characters—some playing major roles in one play, only to move into the margins in another. As Garrison Keillor has done, Craig Wright, another poet of Minnesota, has discovered large storehouse of ideas in a very small town.