Doug Wright
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Doug Wright is an award-winning American playwright, librettist, and screenplay writer.
Wright’s play Quills premiered at Washington, DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre in 1995 and subsequently debuted Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop. The play recounts the imagined final days in the life of the Marquis de Sade. Quills garnered the 1995 Kesselring Prize for Best New American Play from the National Arts Club and, for Wright, a 1995 Village Voice Obie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting. In 2000, Wright wrote the screenplay for the film version of Quills which starred Geoffrey Rush.
Wright’s I Am My Own Wife was produced Off-Broadway by Playwrights Horizons in 2003. It transferred to Broadway where it won the Tony Award for Best Play, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The subject of this one-person play, which starred Jefferson Mays, is the German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf.
In 2006, Wright wrote the book for Grey Gardens, starring Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson. The musical is based on the Maysles brothers’ 1975 film documentary of the same title about Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”) and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (“Little Edie”), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s aunt and cousin.
As of 2007, he is adapting the Disney's film The Little Mermaid for Broadway.
Some of his earlier plays include “Interrogating the Nude,” “Watbanaland,” “The Stonewater Rapture” (about the sexual awakening of two Texas teenagers), “Dinosaurs,” and a musical, “Buzzsaw Berkeley” (with songs by Michael John LaChiusa).
For television, Wright worked on four pilots for producer Norman Lear and teleplays for Hallmark Entertainment and HBO.
In film, Wright’s credits include screenplays for Fine Line Features, Fox Searchlight, and Dreamworks SKG.
Wright has a bachelor's degree from Yale College. He was a member of the Class of 1985 and Wolf's Head. He earned his M.F.A. from New York University. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and serves on the board of New York Theatre Workshop. He is a recipient of the William L. Bradley Fellowship at Yale University, the Charles MacArthur Fellowship at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, an HBO Fellowship in playwriting and the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.
Quotes:
“No human appetite is too base, no idea so holy, no institution so revered that it should be spared art's scrutiny.” DW
“Being a playwright and being a novelist have precious little in common. In truth, playwrights are a lot like cookbook authors. I feel closer to Betty Crocker than I do Don Delillo or Joyce Carol Oates. What are plays, after all, but recipes for three-dimensional events? They're not written to be read; they're written to be realized...” DW
“We write in hopes of discovering that the nightmares that taunt us are shared ones.” DW
Contents |
[edit] Upcoming work
Stage adaptations of:
- The Little Mermaid, planned for a Broadway production in 2007.
[edit] Works on stage
[edit] Works on film
[edit] Awards and honors
- 2004 Tony Award for Best Play, I Am My Own Wife
- 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, I Am My Own Wife
- 2005 Lambda Literary Award for Drama, I Am My Own Wife
- 2006 KulturForum Europa, Toleranzpreis i.R. des KulturPreis Europa for Drama, I Am My Own Wife
[edit] External links
- Doug Wright at the Internet Broadway Database
- Doug Wright at the Internet Movie Database
- Production: Grey Gardens Working in the Theatre video by the American Theatre Wing, November 2006
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