If you know Craig Wright’s name it’s most likely because you’ve run across it in the credits for Six Feet Under, Lost, Brothers & Sisters, or Dirty Sexy Money—he wrote and produced for all four TV shows and created the last. Michael Shannon you’re more likely to recognize on the street; his performance in the film version of Revolutionary Road got him nominated for best supporting actor at the Oscars. Both men have succeeded in electronic media, but both have also been attentive to Mother Theater, coming back to visit her regularly even though they could be doing other, more lucrative things. And they often visit together: in 2006 and again the following year, for instance, Shannon appeared in successive Wright plays, Grace and Lady, both directed by Dexter Bullard at Northlight Theatre.
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Felix Artifex—the name means “happy artist” in Latin, and it’s no end of ironic—is a producer who works out of a shabby New York office where the decor includes a framed headshot of Larry Hagman, the chairs are piled high with scripts (Felix keeps dumping them off so he can sit down), and lunch comes wrapped in silver foil out of a brown paper bag. During his downtime, Felix lectures and compulsively overfeeds an enormous goldfish named Denise. There’s not much of that today, though: he’s furiously, ferociously working the phone, attempting to put together a package that will result in a Broadway run for a new script about the French Revolution by a midwestern playwright named Stephen Nelson. The title: “Mistakes Were Made.”
And things are looking up, sort of. Felix has managed to reserve a Broadway house, he’s negotiating for a hot movie star to put on the marquee, and if a certain Middle Eastern sheep-dipping operation comes through as planned, he’ll have all the backing he needs.
Which is why Wright is wrong to pull us away from the burning issue at hand by giving Felix a domestic catastrophe to deal with. Clearly he wants to humanize Felix by showing us another level of suffering. But the actual effect is to flatten him out. Oh, we’re invited to think, so that’s what’s making him so intense. That’s why this deal means so much to him. It’s just displaced pain. Case closed. Felix would be much more interesting, more various, more mysterious, more real if he were allowed simply to love the volcano.
