Doug Wright

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

NYS Writers Institute, Monday, October 30, 2017
4:15 p.m. Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center
8:00 p.m. Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center
Also, screening of the film 'Quills' 7:30 p.m. Friday, October 27, 2017

Albany, NY – Doug Wright, playwright of Quills and the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning one-person play, I Am My Own Wife, will hold a seminar at 4:15 p.m. Monday, October 30. Later the same day, Wright will read from his work at 8 p.m. Both events, free and open to the public, will be held at the Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, on the UAlbany Uptown Campus.

A screening of QUILLS (2000), the screen adaptation of Wright’s play, will be held at 7:30 p.m. Friday, October 27, at Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, on the downtown UAlbany campus. QUILLS follows the last years of Marquis de Sade’s incarceration in an insane asylum. The film is rated R for violence and adult situations and is not suitable for children. The screening is sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and the UAlbany Theatre Program.

I Am My Own Wife, based on Wright’s conversations with Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transgender woman living in what was then East Germany, received the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for Best Play, the Drama Desk Award, and the GLAAD Media Award, among other honors. Wright also won an Obie Award for outstanding achievement in playwriting and the Kesselring Award for Best New American Play from the National Arts Club for Quills. He also adapted the Disney film The Little Mermaid for the Broadway musical, which opened in 2007. More recently, Wright wrote the book for the hit 2017 Broadway musical, War Paint, the recipient of four Tony Award nominations. Starring Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole, the musical presents the rivalry between cosmetics empire-builders Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein.

His other plays include Posterity (2015), Unwrap Your Candy (2001), and he wrote the book for the Broadway musicals, Hands on a Hardbody (2013), The Little Mermaid (2007), and Grey Gardens (2006), nominated for 10 Tony Awards.

In an interview with New York magazine published in 2009, journalist Boris Kachka asked, “Should playwrights get out more?” Wright’s reply: “I do think affluent people in well-appointed living rooms dramatizing their problems for affluent people who have left their well-appointed living rooms for the evening has perhaps finite aesthetic returns. Theater is the only form where you can slap up a hand-painted sign that says POLAND on a bare stage, and 800 people sitting in the dark will go, ‘Oh, we’re in Poland.’”

In a 2015 interview with Julie Krug in The Writer magazine, Wright said: “Playwriting is less akin to being a novelist or poet than it is to authoring cookbooks. A script is a set of detailed instructions, which other people execute to make the final product. It’s a ‘recipe,’ if you’ll forgive the cloying metaphor, for a three-dimensional event. Its chef is the director, and the cast, design team and crew make up the ingredients. That’s why most playwrights don’t consider a new work truly ‘finished’ until it has weathered at least one full production. Martha Stewart wouldn’t release a cake recipe without baking it first.”

Born in Dallas, Wright earned his bachelor's degree from Yale University and his Master of Fine Arts from New York University. He lives in New York City with his husband, singer/songwriter David Clement.