Actors Theatre

The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2007 Humana Festival

THE UNSEEN
There are very few things that Wallace and Valdez know for sure. They’ve been imprisoned by a totalitarian regime whose aims are unclear. They’re in a prison that’s entirely confounding—perhaps labyrinthine, perhaps very simple. They’re tortured mercilessly and just erratically enough to keep them disoriented, even after their ten years of incarceration. In the humiliation and confusion of their days, they don’t even have the simplest comfort of human connection: They ’re held on the same hall, with an empty cell between them. In their decade of incarceration, they ’ve never seen each other. In fact, they ’ve never seen another human face except that of the low-level guard who brings them food, mild physical abuse and occasional inadvertent news from the world, for which he in turn is ruthlessly tortured by agents of this same anonymous power structure.

Each man takes to this radical uncertainty differently, and their different stances are thrown into relief when Valdez believes that a prisoner’s been put in the cell between them. As the two men debate what’s out there in the darkness, what it might mean, and what, if anything, they might do with that understanding, Craig Wright spins a contemporary and darkly humorous story on the nature of faith and of human connection in The Unseen. Ultimately, both Valdez and Wallace have to conjecture about the world they live in; there’s not enough incontestable information to construct an entire world. Wright reflects: "Wallace says, ‘All that’s plain as day is that we’re brought here against our will, and we’re continually tortured and starved.’ All that’s plain as day in this life is we’re here and we die. Everything else is a story. Like Joan Didion says, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’’ So it’s not that stories don’t matter, it’s not that they’re small potatoes, but other than we happen to be here and we don’t get to stay, Idon’t know what else conclusive there really is to say, other than ‘Do you need help?’’ or ‘I’m scared.’’

And beyond the world of the prison and torture, the meaning or non-meaning of the person who may be in an unseen cell, it’s these human-sized concerns that lie at the heart of Wright’s work. The world of The Unseen, much like the contemporary world, is a harsh one; it’s enough work to take care of ourselves, much less to reach out to people who structure the world in a fundamentally different way. As Wright puts it: "In a multicultural, religiously diverse world where there’s no way to ignore the fact that there are billions of people who don’t think what you believe is true, it becomes radically obvious that the work of being human together suddenly has less to do with proving our claims and more to do with listening to each other’s claims, and looking not for the truth in any of it, but looking for that moment of awareness where we realize we’re on the same journey. That’s the trick: It’s not that we don’t have the same answers; we don’t even have the same questions! But we do have a few things in common."

We live in a world of unclear signals, missing facts and conflicting visions of God. Craig Wright leaves us with the twin impulses of storytelling and compassion as we orient ourselves towards each other and the unseen, unknowable world beyond. "I don’t know what divine means, " says Wright, "and Idon’t know what secular means. Every time you break it into these dualisms, all of a sudden you’re barking like a dog and taking sides. I don’t believe in another life after this one. I believe pretty firmly that there’s only one thing happening here and there’s only one material —it’s not that that we’re flesh and also spirit; we’re all one thing—I think if we start with those beliefs and walk out in any direction, the world makes a lot of sense all of a sudden."

—Adrien-Alice Hansel

CRAIG WRIGHT
"I’ve always been fascinated with rock bands where you realize that the last song on the record was a good clue to what the next record was going to be like," says Craig Wright. Likewise, Wright sees each of his plays as an answer —or challenge—to his last. "I tend to start plays with a question I don’t see an answer to, or a complexity or paradox I don’t see as resolvable, and then I just try to articulate that irresolvability. Hopefully with each play, the question tries to get a little bigger." Wright’s latest play, The Unseen, takes up lingering questions left by Grace, which premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in D.C. in the fall of 2005: "Grace was a play about evangelical Christianity specifically and people’s various interpretations of it. After Grace I wanted to do something that was about faith and belief but not about any specific tradition. "

Wright’s playwriting career, like his plays, began with a challenge. While performing at the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company, a fellow actor suggested that he write a play and submit it for a prestigious Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center, a Minneapolis-based organization that funds and supports playwrights. Wright took him up on it and won, becoming (at that time) the youngest person ever to receive the honor, leading him to his career as a playwright: "It was very good for the theatre because i would have ruined a lot of plays by acting in them, far more than I’ve ruined by writing them." After he had written several plays, Wright’s Molly’s Delicious was finally slated for production at a major regional theatre.

When the production of Molly’s Delicious was suddenly canceled, Wright decided to be realistic: "This is never going to work, I need to do something else …I guess I could go to seminary and be a minister." Wright’s pragmatism gained him a degree from the United Theological seminary in the Twin Cities. Ever responsive to any answer with another kind of question, Wright turned his experience in seminary into a play. The Pavilion is set in Pine City, Minn., the same fictional town where Molly’s Delicious took place, and is concerned with a very human fumbling towards connection that marks all of Wright’s work.

The Pavilion was nominated for the American Theatre Critics’ Association Best New Play Award and has had over 40 productions since its premiere in 2000, including a 2002 production at Actors Theatre. This was followed by Recent Tragic Events, which premiered in 2002 and won the ATCA award, and Orange Flower Water (the third in the Pine City series).

As Wright’s playwriting career picked up speed, he was presented with a challenge in a whole different medium —a job as a writer for the HBO series Six Feet Under. Rather than compartmentalize his work in popular television, Wright allows it to inform his plays: "My plays have gotten more and more theatrical as I’ve worked in television. I’ve gotten more specific about what i want to do with plays, what I can’t do anywhere else except in front of a live audience."

With a procession of plays asking courageous, expansive questions about faith, one might suspect that Wright is proceeding to a point, or is expecting a revelation. Wright refutes this. "There’s no philosophical answer; Idon’t pretend to have any access to answers that the great minds of the past 3,500 years haven’t found. But if you’re writing a play, you have to find the dramatic answer to the questions you pose. And lo and behold, the dramatic answer usually has something to do with making a human connection."

—Cara Pacifico