 |
 |
Written By: Jami Attenberg
Craig Wright (Writer) has written numerous plays, including, Orange Flower Water, Recent Tragic Events, Molly's Delicious, The Big Numbers, John Dory, and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Craig also wrote The Pavilion, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the American Theatre Critics' Association Best New Play Award. He has received fellowships in playwriting from both the McKnight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Craig is a graduate of the United Theological Seminary. Executive Producer Alan Ball says of him, "His spirituality one of the things that really attracted me to his work, and why I felt like he would be a good addition to the staff." Besides writing "Twilight" (#38), Craig also wrote "Timing and Space" (#33). This is his first season with Six Feet Under.
In "Twilight," moments before Claire Fisher has an abortion, a nurse asks, "Did you pay for twilight?" She explains to Claire that it means sedation: "You're not really gone, but you're not really here." That theme reappears several times throughout the episode, starting with a tattoo design on Jessica Williman's legs, and ending with a fantasy sequence between Nate and Lisa, where she asks him, "Where are you?" And in the middle is the disappearance of Lisa, and Nate's ensuing visions about what really happened to her.
Writer Craig Wright discusses the creative process behind developing the theme of the episode, the episode's treatment of abortion, and the show's overall treatment of gender roles.
"The way I write is I kind of try to wait for something real and concrete to show up unannounced in the process," says Craig. "Once you set that beacon up at the end of the tunnel that you're walking through, some things fall into relief and are suddenly lit up very well, and other things vanish. And it sort of teaches you the forms and contours of the symbol you're pursuing, and how to write the scenes and organize the episode. I try and trust the symbol, that it will have a complexity and a wholeness that will help organize the shape of everything else."
In Craig's research about abortion - a predetermined plot element of the show - he learned about the "twilight" anesthesia. He saw it as a great metaphor for many of the characters' lives.
He says, "Many of the characters right now don't really know for sure where they stand with other people. There's Nate's lack of certainty about Lisa's whereabouts: she was in his mind, but she wasn't around. And it seemed like a great metaphor for the state of Nate and Brenda's relationship, and the state of David and Keith's relationship. David and Keith have existed for a long time - and certainly this season - in a kind of twilight."
As to the episode's treatment of the original inspiration behind the theme - abortion - Craig elected to take a non-judgmental position.
"Abortion is a part of life, and we just show it," he says. "I didn't want to portray it with any judgment or any position-taking. I think anyone who wants to degenerate the discourse about abortion into the claiming of binary positions, - yes, no, right, wrong - well, they can do it on another show if they want, they can do it in conversation with their friends, but it's certainly nothing I want to do."
He adds, "A lot of times Six Feet Under gets a lot of credit - or flack - for being edgy or out there but in this case, I think showing an abortion without any point of view is kind of a more out there kind of thing to do."
This unconventional strategy translates to representations of gender roles as well, according to Craig.
"What's fun about the show is that a lot of the gender roles and rules that are perpetuated with a kind of totalitarian regularity in the rest of our culture, don't always hold true on the show. If you watch a sitcom or a drama on another network, the female characters are usually the voice of conservative thought, and I don't mean that in the political sense. They are the voice of how to save civilization, how to conserve it. And the men are often cast as the ones who are always threatening to break the bonds of these things."
He continues, "But on Six Feet Under the women are not conservative. Even though we talk about Ruth being so old-fashioned, ever since the show began, she's actually been trying to break out of it. And Brenda is someone who is always going to be stretching the boundaries of what constitutes a life of integrity for a woman. She doesn't seem to be in a rush to have children, or to get married. Her concepts of where she gets her worth aren't tied in to anybody's old-fashioned concepts of feminine integrity. And obviously in this episode, I think we make a really big statement that being a woman is not about making a baby."
And, he laughs, "On the flipside of the female characters, the biggest voice on the show to get married, have kids, and settle down is that of a gay mortician. I love that."
And as for writing for Six Feet Under - his first television writing experience - Craig describes himself as, "the luckiest guy in America."
"I love Alan Ball's vision, which seems to me to be about the immensely moral, complex landscape that people live in set against a world where there's still amazing beauty. There's a combination, a tension between those things, the ugliness of what people do to each other, and life's insistent ability to continue to show us horizons of hope that lead us forward even in spite of ourselves. It just feels like such a true way to see things."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
