How He Got That Story
In a One-Man Show, Lawrence Wright Reflects on 'My Trip to Al-Qaeda'

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, September 19, 2007

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."

Round House Lessons

"I believe really strongly that theater is not an end in itself," says Round House Theatre Artistic Director Blake Robison. Hence his decision to launch the company's first mainstage show of the season, "A Lesson Before Dying," with a week of panel discussions, starting tonight and culminating with a post-matinee symposium Sunday titled "Race and the Justice System."

The play, which runs through Oct. 14 at Round House's Bethesda stage, was based by Romulus Linney on Ernest J. Gaines's 1993 novel about the revelatory relationship between an African American teacher (played by KenYatta Rogers) in 1940s rural Louisiana and a young black man (Shane Taylor) sentenced to die for a murder he didn't commit.

Robison has made literary adaptations, including "Camille" and "A Prayer for Owen Meany," a Round House specialty. Gaines's book is in the Montgomery County school curriculum and Robison hopes students who see the stage adaptation will get hooked on theater. "Seeing the story in a theatrical context instead of reading it in your living room -- it's a different experience," he says. The outreach aspect of the production extends to ticket prices -- an anonymous underwriter has made it possible for the theater to offer a block of $10 seats at every performance.

Guest director Timothy Douglas believes the story transcends race. He's philosophical about the fact that, though his credits range from Shakespeare to modern Irish writers, people will assume that because he is an African American he views the play as race-centered.

"I don't approach this as a play about race," he says. The play "leaves a lot of room for the allegory of the challenge of understanding the relationship between the races . . . how we still are not doing the most honorable things toward each other as humans," Douglas says, but it also asks, "How are you going to live your life and where will you be when you face death?" It starts with the specific, then offers "a way into a bigger, more existential story."

A former actor who began his directing career in Washington with a 1995 production of "Richard III" at the Folger, Douglas recently directed "Insurrection: Holding History" at Theater Alliance. He was associate artistic director at the Actors Theatre of Louisville from 2001 to 2004.

"If we've done our job, by the end, everyone is in the same place about human dignity . . . about when do I speak out about injustice," Douglas says of "A Lesson Before Dying."

"That's how I approach any play. You can look at a script and go, oh, I know what this is, but . . . if you look closer, inside of it, there are many, many possibilities."

Follow Spots

¿ Synetic Theater will offer a late-night ghost story for grown-ups, "Last Tango With Rosie," written and directed by Ben Cunis, as an aperitif on Thursday through Saturday nights after its new adaptation of "The Fall of the House of Usher" (Sept. 22-Oct. 31) at the Rosslyn Spectrum. Visit http://www.synetictheater.org or call 703-824-8060.

¿ VSA arts, which enlists teens to create plays about disability, will present the world premiere of "Izzy Icarus Fell Off the World" on Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Center. The Playwright Discovery Award winning play, by 15-year-old Aliza Goldstein of Jacksonville, Fla., is about a teenager with autism and the young photographer who befriends him. Visit http://www.kennedy-center.org/tickets.