Wilson Work on the

Despite my interest in history, I have always been more concerned with culture, and while my plays have an overall historical feel, their settings are fictions, and they are peopled with invented characters whose personal histories fit within the historical context in which they live.

I have tried to extract some measure of truth from their lives as they struggle to remain whole in the face of so many things that threaten to pull them asunder. I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother’s life – her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter – are all worthy of art. Hence Seven Guitars.

- Seven Guitars, Notes from the Playwright

In the Hill District, I was surrounded by all this highly charged, poetic vernacular which was so much part and parcel of life that I didn’t pay any attention to it. But in moving to St. Paul and suddenly being removed from that environment and that language, I began to hear it for the first time and recognize its value.

I still don’t know what works until it works, until I see it working. It wasn’t through seeing other playwrights or reading other plays because I haven’t done much of either of those. Again, you have an intuitive sense that this is dramatic or a nice shape to a scene; you intuitively know how to tell a good story (because all a play is is a story), where the highlights are, what information to withhold, and how to reveal things. This comes from an innate sense of storytelling. Here again you don’t always know what works, but if you have an opportunity to workshop a play, see a production of a play, and sit with the audience in a play, you certainly can tell the parts that don’t work. And then you say, “Show me the parts that do and I’ll make the parts that don’t ... I’ll make them like that.” This is the general idea.

- Wilson on “what works” when writing a play, 1999 interview

I write for the play, if you will. I write to create a work of art that exists on its own terms and is true to itself. I don’t have any particular audience in mind, other than the fact that the play is an artwork which is written with the audience factor sort of built in so that, craft-wise, when you do your exposition, the exposition is for the purpose of the audience knowing certain aspects of the play at certain times, and knowing what happened prior to the events of the play and things of that sort, but I don’t write for a particular audience.

- Wilson on writing for a particular audience, 1999 interview