12.6.7

Walter---
I've been a bit crazy with THE LITTLE MERMAID: you sent me an e-mail a few weeks back.  Was it for a quote for your CD?  If so, I offer the following:

"Walter Newkirk's fascinating interview with Edie Beale contributes immeasurably to the legend of GREY GARDENS, and is a welcome listen for anyone intrigued by her singular, eccentric life."

Thanks.
Doug Wright

Doug Wright is a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winning American playwright, librettist, and screenplay writer.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.

He adapted the Disney's film The Little Mermaid for Broadway.Wright's play Quills  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 which starred Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet.

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 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.

Wright lives in New York City with his partner, singer/songwriter David Clement.

Quotes by Doug Wright:

"No human appetite is too base, no idea so holy, no institution so revered that it should be spared art's scrutiny."

"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..."

"We write in hopes of discovering that the nightmares that taunt us are shared ones."