Marquis Value

As a sixth-grader in Dallas, Douglas Wright fulfilled an art class assignment by drawing a baroque and bloody portrait of a decapitated Medusa. “That’s really lovely, Douglas,” Wright remembers the teacher telling him, “but I don’t really think it’s appropriate for the bulletin board on parents’ night.”

If the 32-year-old playwright tells the story with the relish of a kid with a peashooter, it’s because 20 years later he’s pushing the same limits. Wright’s play “Quills,” which opens the Geffen Playhouse’s inaugural season on Wednesday, is a baroque and bloody portrait of the Marquis de Sade, albeit a highly sophisticated and comical one.

When the play was presented last year at the New York Theater Workshop--followed by a then-obscure musical called “Rent”--it garnered excellent notices, winning an Obie Award and the prestigious National Arts Club Kesselring Prize for its young author. But most of the reviews came with caveats: “ ‘Quills’ is sensational,” Jeremy Gerard wrote in Variety; “smirky, gross-out fun . . . not for the faint of heart.”

Indeed, it is not. Wright’s Grand Guignol farce takes place in 1807 at the asylum at Charenton, France, where the notorious pornographer (played at the Geffen by Howard Hesseman) has been consigned by Napoleon for writing a pamphlet ridiculing the emperor and Josephine. His social-climbing wife (Margo Skinner) implores the new chief physician (Robert Dorfman) not only to keep him there but to silence him. His scandalous manuscripts are keeping her out of the best salons of Paris.

The doctor, for his own greedy reasons, consents and enlists the help of the Abbe de Coulmier (Martin Rayner), the asylum’s devout administrator, to censor their famous inmate through increasingly brutal means. Remove his quill, his hands, even his tongue, yet the irrepressible and cunning Marquis still devises ways to “spew his filth.” As De Sade says, taunting his persecutors: “In conditions of adversity, the artist thrives.”

Director Howard Shalwitz’s New York production saw camp as a window into the play’s themes, but Wright says the Geffen production, directed by Adrian Hall, will take a classical approach--more along the lines of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” say, than Charles Ludlam. However it is presented, the drama offers a catalyst for debate of such hot issues as pornography, censorship and an artist’s responsibility.

Wright is remarkably even-handed, expressing the conservative point of view through the person of the robustly intelligent and compassionate Abbe de Coulmier, who argues that society must establish equitable moral standards in order to avoid chaos. The abbe’s views are further substantiated when the marquis’ stories lead indirectly to the grisly murder of an innocent.

“The play doesn’t shy away from the potentially dangerous impact of controversial art,” says Wright, a cheerful fellow whose keen intelligence is immediately clear. “But it doesn’t endorse censorship as a way of controlling it either. I hope I plunge the question firmly into the gray area. There are no facile answers; the play tries to suggest that our own dark natures are a constant in our lives. They will seek and find expression, so we might as well accommodate them in art, a compelling cage for the beast within.”

Wright goes on to say that the responsibility of the artist is simply to tell the “full human truth.” He rejects as a dangerous premise that artists could be held culpable for acts inspired by their works--copycat crimes such as the torching of a New York subway token booth which followed the release of the movie “Money Train.” “Unstable minds can find inspiration for misbehavior from any quarter,” he says.

Furthermore, Wright argues, the risks we take in not censoring works which are perceived to be dangerous is offset by the fact that he believes that we are at even greater risk if we try to suppress those artistic impulses: “It is by turning a blind eye to our capacity for atrocity that we are most prey to it.”

The Marquis de Sade has been a dark polestar for writers and moralists navigating that capacity through the centuries. The French nobleman wrote volumes of pornographic stories interspersed with philosophy, most notably “Juliette” and “120 Days of Sodom,” which Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini made into a movie in the ‘70s. The marquis died in 1814, at 74; he was imprisoned for 30 of those years, but his name lives on, a part of our daily vocabulary in the word coined for him: sadist.

Wright knew little about De Sade when a friend gave him a copy of Maurice Lever’s biography as a Christmas present three years ago. He later read Yukio Mishima’s play “Madame de Sade” and Peter Weiss’ pivotal 1966 drama, “Marat/Sade.” The playwright was shocked--if eventually bored--by the extreme and repulsive nature of De Sade’s writings of mutilations and sexual abuse--enough so that he began to wonder if they truly deserved the protection and mantle of art. As he read on, he began to think of the savage erudite thinker as a mix of Al Goldstein, the cable and tabloid pornographer, and Jonathan Swift, the 18th century English satirist.

“I wanted to pick an artist who is still the subject of debate hundreds of years after his death,” says Wright. “But you can’t ignore the fact that as stunted and adolescent as he was, he wrote beautifully and eloquently. He does create a cosmology of evil in as comprehensive a way as the Bible defines our capacity for goodness. You can’t go through life defining only half the picture.”

Since Wright’s play also verges on the Theatre of the Absurd, he uses historical facts as a launching point to create his own wild fantasy. He balances the perversity of the material with high-flown and elegant speeches he puts in the mouth of the marquis. Even De Sade’s stories in the play are Wright’s invention, taken from fragments at the end of “120 Days of Sodom,” which remained unfinished at the time of the marquis’ death.

Surprisingly, Wright claims his models in life have been “much more in the mold of Ward and June Cleaver than De Sade.”

“You can understand the value and explore the nature of power, pain and pleasure without strapping on latex on Saturday night,” he laughs. “They exist in all of us.”

Wright is the middle son of three children born to a securities lawyer and a housewife who had once worked for a Minnesota congressman on Capitol Hill and later opened a children’s bookstore. Church life was not fire-and-brimstone but progressive Protestantism--”bean-bag chairs, guitars, Jesus as a favorite uncle.”

Growing up gay in the suburbs of Dallas, however, gave Wright an immediate point of identification with the image of the outsider. “I knew at age 5 or 6 that I was fundamentally different,” he recalls. “I had a secret life and secret body of feelings that I knew would be inappropriate to discuss. Growing up in an environment as hostile as Texas pushed them deeper and deeper down until I went to college. My youth was like being De Sade at Charenton. You’re the only one of your kind. You take refuge in your mind.”

Nonetheless, Wright’s liberal parents provided him with a safe haven, encouraging him to take kids’ classes at the Dallas Theatre Center. He’d fallen in love with theater at the local community playhouse, particularly Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, Joe Orton and “Life With Father,” as well as sharing with his siblings the Saturday afternoon horror fare--”House of Wax,” “Blood Feast”--which later, along with Ken Russell movies, would feed his love of excess. By the time he was in fifth grade, he was already a fledgling playwright, having written a play about rich English characters gathering on a country estate to kill each other. His mother dutifully typed it for him.

“I think having such a supportive and warm home environment gave me the courage to step out on a limb and express myself,” he says. “Had it been otherwise, I might have internalized the same impulses and become self-destructive.”

At Yale in the early ‘80s, Wright changed from acting to playwriting on the advice of a professor. He also discovered on his frequent forays into Manhattan the works of Charles Ludlam and his Theatre of the Ridiculous. “It was revelatory, like the first time I cracked open a Flannery O’Connor short story,” enthuses Wright. “You could say that I embraced a ‘gay aesthetic,’ one that could be stylistically bold and yet substantive as well.”

Wright’s coming of age as a playwright at the height of the AIDS epidemic was also to have a lasting impact on his work. “I think even though we’ve lost so many astonishingly gifted people,” he says, “the crisis has made us fiercely unapologetic and given us a kind of productive rush of anger that has given us the courage to talk about ourselves in an aggressive and powerful way. We no longer write about our experience as gay men and women in a codified or camouflaged manner. We’ve pushed beyond the ghetto.”

Wright graduated from Yale in 1985 and continued his studies at New York University, where he wrote his first mature play, a one-act entitled “Stonewater Rapture” about teen rape and a young man’s coming out. The work, which tries to reconcile stringent fundamentalist teaching with burgeoning desire, was presented at Yale Rep and the Edinburgh Festival and is still frequently done at college campuses. He followed that work with the campy cerebral thriller “Interrogating the Nude,” which would prove to be a precursor of “Quills.” Set in 1918 New York, at the time of the Armory Show where “Nude Descending a Staircase” is first shown, it has Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray brought in as suspects to the murder of an artist’s model. Pieces of her body are found scattered on a tenement staircase. “I wanted to explore if an aesthetic crime constituted a true crime,” Wright says.

Finishing his studies in 1987, Wright plunged into the New York theater scene with “Dinosaurs,” a comedy he describes as “Jimmy Bakker meets Dolly Parton,” in which a fundamentalist preacher, having discovered a dinosaur track embedded with a human footprint, bids for the Texas property against a country music star, called Candy Fay Kafka. (“She’s had so many plastic surgeries she no longer remembers who she is,” he says.) Well-received at Yale, the play led to two commissions at the WPA Theatre in Manhattan: “Buzzsaw Berkeley,” a spoof that melds slasher movies and Hollywood film musicals, written with composer Michael John LaChiusa, and “Watbanaland,” about a woman who compulsively adopts two dozen Third World children through late-night infomercials. Both shows received mixed but encouraging notices when they premiered.

It was “Quills,” however, that put Wright firmly on the map. It won numerous awards and acclaim when it was presented in November 1995, and Wright is adapting the play for Fox Searchlight, which is co-producing the movie with Addis-Wechsler production company.

He has also written a feature-length screenplay for Fine Line Features and is working on a commission from Talking Wall Pictures, developing a script inspired by the life of Salvador Dali. Apparently, just before World War I, the Surrealist painter, writer Federico Garcia Lorca and filmmaker Luis Bun~uel had all been sent to the same Spanish finishing school in their youth. “They quickly became enfants terribles of the academy,” he says. “It’s quite delicious.”

Since 1989, on the strength of “Dinosaurs,” Wright has also received periodic development deals from Norman Lear to write television pilots, but so far none has reached the small screen. He continues to slug away, nonetheless, writing on his laptop in a crammed East Village apartment where he lives alone.

“I think most people would recognize a uniform celebration of the absurd in my work,” Wright says. “The work is extreme and hyperbolic, but only by examining the most extreme factions of our culture can we really uncover ourselves. If we can figure out the psychology of a Marquis de Sade, then we’re one step closer to figuring out the psychology of someone who cheated on a test or robbed a drugstore, or ourselves when we hypocritically say ‘hello’ to someone we really don’t like. If we can crack and understand the preposterous, we’ll have no trouble figuring out the mundane.

“Besides,” he adds with a laugh, “the Marquis may not be as far away from us as we might like to believe. I think everyone who’s not utterly delusional will find a visceral pull toward the Marquis and his works. He unleashed his id. That can be really seductive.”

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“Quills,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Opens Wednesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Nov. 3. $32.50 to $37.50. (310) 208-5454.