Orange Flower Water

Two married couples live with their children in relative bliss ... until two of them begin a passionate affair. A writer for Lost, United States of Tara and Six Feet Under, Craig Wright tells us about Orange Flower Water, a play about relationships and the contract of marriage - and how something beautiful can suddenly turn very ugly.

What was the initial idea behind Orange Flower Water? My mother was my father's third wife. It occurred to me that if he hadn't left two other women and four children behind, I never would have existed. That opened onto the idea that no one treats babies like they're mistakes. And yet, quite often, they are the result of mistakes, or, in some cases, actual ethical disappointments, ie situations where, looking back, we wish we had behaved more kindly. The mysteries of all this appealed to me, because I didn't have an answer. How do good outcomes arise from bad choices?

You've said that something you enjoy as a writer are scenes of courtship. What is it about this human ritual that interests you? To be honest, I think I like writing those scenes because I myself like courting as an anthropological activity. I like those moments when people just begin to open like a flower; when you just begin to get the privileged access. I like it when people really try. Because what are they trying to do? Let's assume it's not just conquest. What do we want when we want another person? That question fascinates me, and the texture of the answer can be felt, if not defined, in the texture and tone of the courtship.

Like most people, I have a harder time once the flower's open and everyone's blown their potential and now it's time to make something new together. But that is, after all, hard work. It should be hard. So I'm not going to beat myself up about it.

The play also explores the darker side of relationships. Oh, there's a whole lot of relational darkness in this play. I think the male and female rage within the heterosexual marital dynamic is a large force in the writing, the misery at being stuck in this dyad together. Denise Levertov, the poet, has a poem called ‘The Ache of Marriage' in which she uses the phrase, "Two by two, in the ark of the ache of it." This play is full of that ache. 

You've also said that you're preferred theatre is that which is ‘ceremonial' or ‘invocative'. What do you mean by that? I like to let the audience know that watching the play together is an invitation to think about something else other than the play, something invisible and shared that precedes it, together. There's a humility in that tonal shift can be magical.

You're an American writer and the play is set in Minnesota - so how well do you think the play will translate to Australian audiences? I think it won't translate at all. It will be like watching monkeys endlessly rearranging broken furniture in a sealed tomb.  More seriously - people are people: I don't think anyone will have trouble relating. And if they do, there's a ten-minute sex scene and a joke about a girl with a lazy eye: that's two ways in right there. Darryn King