This fall, audiences will get their first look at Craig Wright's Orange Flower Water, directed by ensemble member Rick Snyder. This Midwest premiere, set in the small town of Pine City, Minnesota, tells the story of two families torn apart by love and betrayal. Literary manager Ed Sobel caught up with Wright on the deck of an aircraft carrier (which is the setting of a new movie he's writing), to talk about Minnesota and affairs of the heart.
Ed Sobel: This is one of several plays that you refer to as a trilogy, and they are all set in Minnesota. What is it about this part of Minnesota or the people that you find there that makes you want to write about them?
Craig Wright: First of all, the kind of city in Minnesota that I write about is only marginally a real town. It's just as much a landscape inside me. The reason I write about Pine City is that there's an emotional lexicon, a philosophical lexicon, that I only have access to when I go to that place. It's a free, but contained, imaginative state in which I am able to operate, all about the beauty of the world and the complexity of peoples' behaviors within. How the natural beauty of things draws us towards actions that have less than beautiful consequences. The constant correlation between beauty and pain.
ES: It seems to me that the theme of romantic love is always present in your plays, regardless of what else you're writing about. What is it about the subject of love that compels you as an artist?
CW: While I do write a lot about love, you don't see a lot of "family" in my plays, and that's because my family ended at a very early age. So most of my life has been about what I would call voluntary affiliation, or romantic love if you like. Romantic love is all about people that aren't our relatives, for whom we elect to have affection. If you're not going to write about family, then you have two other options: you can write about politics, or you can write about love. Also, my favorite kind of scenes to write are courtships. I love watching people get to know each other, and awake to each other, and investigate the possibility of feelings they have. I love watching people open up in the light of each other's company, like little flowers. Orange Flower Water is more about the after effects of that moment, but it is in there all the same.
Committed to the principle of ensemble performance through the collaboration of a company of actors, directors and designers, Steppenwolf Theater Company's mission is to advance the vitality and diversity of American theater by nurturing artists, encouraging repeatable creative relationships, and contributing new works to the national canon. The company, formed in 1976 by a collective of actors, is dedicated to perpetuating an ethic of mutual respect and the development of artists through on-going group work. Steppenwolf has grown into an internationally renowned company of thirty-four artists whose talents include acting, directing, playwriting, filmmaking, and textual adaptation.