Interview: Craig Wright and Scott Greer Discuss 'Mistakes Were Made'

By Toby Zinman

For the Inquirer

This week, 1812 Productions' season opens with Mistakes Were Made, a comic play by Craig Wright that was named "Best of the Year" by both New York and Time magazines in 2010. The producer, almost its only character, speaks the play's first line: "Look, here's the deal." And who should know the deal better than Wright, himself a successful producer as well as a successful playwright?

This producer, one Felix Artifex, is not like most producers - at least as they appear in plays about show business, where they're likely to be greedy, coked-up, fast-talking, backstabbing cynics.

Well, he's not entirely like that. Scott Greer, who plays him, described the character in a phone interview as "fatally flawed but pure of heart. I think a lot of us can relate to that. Mistakes are made."

Or, as Wright said on the phone from Los Angeles, "Everything is always somebody's fault, but rarely anybody's intention."

Felix Artifex (his Latinate name means "happy creator," Wright said) has produced plenty of schlock in his day, but he's currently working on a deal to secure a Big Movie Star - or even two Big Movie Stars - for a Major Broadway Show about the French Revolution written by somebody named Steven. We never actually see or hear Steven, or either of the stars, or any of their agents, or Felix's ex-wife, or some revolutionaries in a Middle Eastern desert, or a slew of other characters we get involved with through Felix's phone conversations. Mistakes Were Made, at Plays and Players Theatre, is essentially a 100-minute monologue (there is a walk-on secretary, as well as an endearing fish named Denise who is Felix's confidante).

How do you learn such a role? Little by little, says Greer, one or two lines at a time, over and over - several hours every morning before rehearsals begin at noon. Making this staggering memory task even more daunting was the week of overlap with Pig Iron Theatre Company's recent production of Twelfth Night, in which Greer played Feste, the Fool. (The roles, it turns out, are not dissimilar.)

One of the city's most impressive actors, Greer shows surprising range: Pangloss in Sondheim's Candide, Mitch in Williams' Streetcar Named Desire, the analysand in Conor McPherson's Shining City (which included a 35-minute monologue), to barely begin the list. He notes that one of the pleasures of having a career in Philadelphia is that he hasn't been typecast and so has chance after chance to "stretch his muscles."

Felix confesses to his fish, once all his deals have fallen apart, that when he was 6 he saw a puppet show in the library. "The lights went down. The little curtains opened. And there it was, Denise: a little house with a door that worked. And the whole house opened up, so you could see inside, it was the damnedest thing . . .. That's all I ever wanted to do. I just wanted to put on a show."

That puppet-show story comes from Craig Wright's memory. And the intense conversation between Felix and the playwright Steven is, Wright says, "my current self with all of its faults and gifts arguing with my self from 25 years ago."

Wright's career as a playwright was launched in Philadelphia, and local audiences over the years have seen The Big Numbers, The Pavilion, Molly's Delicious, Recent Tragic Events, Grace, Orange Flower Water, and now Mistakes Were Made. Wright, 46, doesn't write family drama, maybe, he speculates, because his own family drama was so bereft of family. He was born in Puerto Rico; with no siblings, his grandparents dead, his father gone when he was 5, followed by his mother's death, he left home at 14 to finish his "lousy childhood" in Minnesota. He is interested in what he calls "voluntary affiliation" rather than the involuntary affiliations of family.

His biography is a series of incongruent successes: a master's degree in theology, a fabulously successful career writing and producing in television (Lost, Six Feet Under, Dirty Sexy Money, Brothers and Sisters, The United States of Tara, the new MTV dramedy series Underemployed); screenwriting (the animated Mr. Peabody and Sherman due for release in 2014); songwriting (for his band, the Tropicals); and author of an essay on the limits of human freedom, just completed for a philosophy journal.

Talking about the differences between writing for the stage and for the screen, Wright theorizes that television is a more psychological art form and theater more existential; the trick is to "use the right tool for the right job." He adds, "There's a safety net of tone in a normal comedy that gives you the freedom to laugh, a chain of set-up and payoff. Here Mistakes Were Made] there's an endless chain of payoffs. It's about the creative predicament: you never know what's going to happen."

In Mistakes Were Made, the final lines reveal - spoiler alert! - that the play we've just seen is the play Felix is talking Steven into writing: "I'm thinking maybe just a guy at a desk? Just a ruined person - who's finally - maybe - I don't know, just something with a reasonably happy ending . . . something simple, you know?"

It's a moment for us, the audience, that's both playful and deeply moving, a moment Greer calls "chaotic optimism."