Doug Wright's Unwrap Your Candy
The Pulitzer Prize-winning pen behind the screenplay for Quills, The Little Mermaid, and The Grey Garden
What's not to love about savvy New York scribe Doug Wright? Not many playwrights have the brass cojones to write about audience etiquette!
Alas!
What's to be done about audience din?
It's either the familiar cell drone of Beethoven's Fuer Elise, the infernal slow motion crinkling and crackling of hard candy, purse rummaging galore, or endless fidgeting - and always during a crucial point in the show.
In Unwrap your Candy, Doug Wright actually writes about what goes through a typical theatre patron's head after the obligatory before-show announcement, honing in on the audience mindset as he gleefully nails all the usual suspects.
You see and HEAR them all the time - a woman who consistently mines the depths of her purse to grab that elusive well-wrapped sweetie, The Snorer, the Cell Phone Pest, The Chronic Cougher - even a surgeon wondering whether he operated on the right patient.
Suffice to say, no-one gives a damn about what they are watching.
That's the verbal overture to a strange and wonderful evening as these same five actors take the audience on a macabre sojourn with three disturbing plays. Think of Rod Serling meets David Cronenberg in The Bone Violin, Wildwood Park and Baby Talk - pieces Wright likes to call "macabre bedtime tales for adults".
It's no small wonder 2001 mind-twister Unwrap your Candy is a Halloween favourite.
Wright also delights in taking his audience on a merry dance and historical figures especially seem to fuel his fancy. He is known for his brilliant play and screen adaptation of the life of the Marquis de Sade in Quills, which garnered an Oscar nomination for Geoffrey Rush, who played notorious auteur Sade with such lascivious aplomb.
In 2004, Wright won the Pulitzer Prize for ground-breaking monodrama I am My Own Wife, based on the many interviews he had with German transvestite, antique collector and curator Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf.
Mahlsdorf survived both the Nazi and Communist regimes. Initially, Wright thought of this German transvestite as a hero and mentor for her famed Grunderzeit museum, and her unabashed gayness in such repressed environments. But Mahlsdorf did pay a price for freedom. Once Wright discovered her secret, he put himself into the play as narrator - a clever device to help himself and audiences understand this complicated icon.
Jefferson Mays also won the 2004 Tony for Best Actor playing over 40 roles in I Am My Own Wife, from Charlotte's cross-dressing lesbian aunt to Doug Wright.
Wright is currently working on an adaptation of The Little Mermaid for Broadway, and Grey Gardens, based on the story (and film documentary) about mother and daughter eccentrics Edith Bouvier Beale, aunt of Jacqueline Onassis, and Edie, Jackie O's first cousin. Once part of the Camelot set, "Big and Little Edie" ended up living in squalor at Grey Gardens -a decrepit 28-room mansion in the East Hamptons. There are plans for a film version with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore.
From demented talking babies to history's famous and blasphemous, Doug Wright's work continues to make its unrelenting mark on the consciousness of a global audience.
Jefferson Mays has toured I am My Own Wife from London's West End through Poland's Stary Theatre in Krakow, and is currently performing I am My Own Wife at The Melbourne Theatre Australia, to August 19.
Actor Stephen Ouimette (alias Oliver Welles in hit TV dramedy Slings and Arrows ) also donned Charlotte's simple black dress and pearls for Canada's I am My Own Wife, directed by Robin Phillips. During that performance, NO ONE in CanStage's sold-out Bluma Appel Theatre made a sound.
