I Am My Own Wife (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Doug Wright was born in Dallas, Texas, and it has been reported that, in 2005, he still spoke with a slight Texan twang. He received his bachelor's degree from Yale in 1985 and then went on to New York University, where he completed his master's degree in 1987. When Wright was interviewed by Gerard Raymond for the Advocate, after having won the Pulitzer Prize for I Am My Own Wife, Wright stated, "I keep calling my boyfriend every two hours and saying, 'I still have my Pulitzer!'" In fact, Wright's play won a long list of prizes that year, including the Tony Award for Best Play, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Drama League Award.

Wright should be used to winning prizes. He first captured an Obie for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting and the Kesselring Award for Best American Play with Quills. This 2000 play focused on the subject of the Marquis de Sade and his time spent in prison. In this story, a friendly priest brings quills to Sade so that he can write. After the play was produced on the stage, Wright adapted this work as a screenplay. The movie version, which was Wright's motion picture debut, also won praise. It was given the Paul Selvin Award and received three Academy Award nominations. Other plays of Wright's include The Stonewater Rapture (1990), Watbanaland (1995), and Unwrap Your Candy (2001).

In the interview with Raymond, Wright talked about his attraction to Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the subject of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Wright told Raymond that when he first met Charlotte, he thought of her as a mentor to him. She had survived so much more than Wright had. "I thought that all the negative conditioning I had endured as a young gay man growing up in Texas," Wright said, was offset by Charlotte's extraordinary experiences of survival. In the early 2000s, Wright was at work creating screenplays for Warner Brothers. When asked by one reporter if he would return to the stage, Wright answered in the affirmative. He claimed to have stored in one of his desk drawers enough material to keep him writing plays for a long time.