How He Got That Story

In a One-Man Show, Lawrence Wright Reflects on 'My Trip to Al-Qaeda'

"Looming Tower" author Lawrence Wright will debut at the Kennedy Center on Saturday. (By Bruce Glickas)

Lawrence Wright won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," a journalistic account of the rise of radical Islamism. A staff writer at the New Yorker, Wright says he remarked to the magazine's drama critic John Lahr, "I am so sick of writing about terrorists. I would really like to write a musical comedy."

Lahr had Wright meet with Andre Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. A musical comedy seemed unlikely, but Wright says when he told Bishop about "this notion of doing a one-man play about my experiences" researching the book, Bishop replied, "That's where your energy is. You should do that." And so he did.

Wright then turned for advice to fellow New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin, who had written a couple of solo shows himself. "Use props," Trillin said.

And so Wright uses video clips, photos, books and a desk in his one-man show, "My Trip to Al-Qaeda," coming to the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater for four performances Saturday, Sunday, Monday and next Wednesday.

Staged -- and shaped and edited, Wright notes -- by Tony-winning director Gregory Mosher (Bishop's predecessor at Lincoln Center), the show premiered during the New Yorker's annual festival and went on to run for six weeks last spring.

Wright's play doesn't boil down his prize-winning tome to a 75-minute chat. It offers instead snapshots and recollections of how he researched the book, with hundreds of interviews, much travel and meetings with some pretty scary people.

"I wanted to talk about what it was like to actually be in the company of some of these jihadis and how I reacted to them, how they reacted to me," Wright explains. He wants to "open up a dialogue with the American people about who these people are, what their goals are, and also how we've changed as a country," and, he says, "the theater was a natural place to have that kind of dialogue."

Performing his piece is very emotional. "It's sometimes hard for me to get through," he says. "It's one thing to write it, but it's another thing to say it."

The play opens by telling how Wright began work on "The Looming Tower" almost as soon as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks unfolded. The events of that day reminded him -- and many other people -- rather too much of a 1998 film he co-wrote, "The Siege," with Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis, about a series of attacks on New York City and the consequent martial law and harassment of Arab Americans.

Wright sees a genuine threat from Islamic jihadism and agrees with the decision to invade Afghanistan, but he thinks the war in Iraq was an error that gave terrorists "a whole new country to train in." He also worries about the loss of civil liberties in this country. The FBI paid a visit to his Texas home while he was writing "The Looming Tower," suspicious of his overseas calls. He was curious how they knew about them. That's in his play, too.

The writer says he has been eager to bring the show to Washington, "to present it to the policymakers and the intelligence community. I wanted them to hear it."

Wright loves the "immediate response" he gets from audiences. "You don't learn anything from watching people read your book."