Interview with Erin Cressida Wilson

JODY MCAULIFFE How did The Trail of Her Inner Thigh start for you?

ERIN CRESSIDA WILSON I wrote it as an attempt to write fiction or a short story or novella in response to the state of theater in America, the lack of funding. And while I was writing it, it started to metamorphose into a play, and I have now done that with another play as well. I find that what may be a nice way for me to go is to start with narrative. This play has a stronger narrative than other plays of mine maybe because I started with a narrative before the play.

In the sense of story—with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

That’s right. It came out of when I was fifteen. I had a friend who was fifteen who was seduced on a train by a thirty-year-old woman. Had sex with her for about a month and took lots of drugs. Then she disappeared and sent him a telegram that they had a child. And this so horrified me and fascinated me for the last almost twenty years that I was always trying to do something with that story. It struck me that if I were he I would go investigate, and so it came directly out of that fantasy of what he would do, and it also comes about with my being about that age—thirty—and my understanding her point of view in getting the sperm for the baby that she wanted on her own. So I felt I could get inside both people. And I also wrote it for a specific actor, Sean San Jose; and therefore when I had the actor, I was able to see how to make the character because Sean’s thirty years old, but he seems very childish and like a man. So he could be the fifteen-year-old and the thirty-year-old who goes to look for the child. And he’s perhaps retarded developmentally because of this episode.

Can you talk about the various stages in development of the play?

I’ve started in the last many years generally to wait—to keep my plays to myself for perhaps a couple of years, which I did with this one. Because I know if I’d gone and had a reading of this play, which speaks its narrative, and I was unsure of this and someone said, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s going to work,” it would have cut me off. It would have really been damaging, and I’ve learned that lesson. So I kept it to myself, and between me and the actor who dramaturged it from the beginning on a daily basis over E-mail, and worked with you on it. When I felt okay about it there was a series of readings that I did not even attend in San Francisco at Campo Santo. And just from the feedback on that I started to get ready. This play had two workshops at Steppenwolf. They have this pretty great thing where they bring in the playwright for a series of workshops. And I prefer that it was in a city where I knew nobody and where it was okay to fail.

One of the unique things about the script is the idiom and something that I think is true about all your plays—that they make graphic certain inner workings of consciousness, which also means or includes that they use heightened or poetic language that is very physical.

Every time I get poetic I try to undercut it with very grounded, almost crude language and then undercut that.

So that the language has a dynamic with itself.

This is not the case with this play, because it has a plot, but I think that can be a plot, that can be a forward drive.

There’s...