This week, two plays by Doug Wright open in Buffalo on the same night. His Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway hit, I Am My Own Wife, is being produced by Buffalo United Artists, starring Jimmy Janowski, and his successful grand guignol account of the last days of the Marquis de Sade, Quills, for which he also penned the screenplay, is being produced by Torn Space.

When asked, by telephone, to comment on this coincidence, the famously witty playwright dryly inquired, “Do you think I’m getting overexposed in Buffalo?”

Hardly! Before this week, none of Mr. Wright’s plays had ever been seen here.

For the past several years, Wright has been one of the most talked about playwrights on the New York scene. He wrote the book for the current off-Broadway sensation, Grey Gardens—the musical based on the documentary film about Big and Little Edie Beal, eccentric cousin and aunt of Jacqueline Onassis, who lived in a squalid Long Island mansion. Currently, Wright is working on the book for the Disney stage adaptation of The Little Mermaid. He is most widely known, however, for I Am My Own Wife and Quills.

“I seem to be irrevocably attracted to the weird,” confesses Wright. “I like to explore the extremes of human experience.”

Wright’s fascination with the extreme has, several times, captured the public imagination.

For Quills, he was inspired by the growing wave of repressiveness that characterized America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, exemplified by the outcry over the 1990 Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in Cincinnati.

For I Am My Own Wife, Wright took inspiration from his acquaintance with Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a biologically male cross-dressing East German who survived first the Nazis and then the Communists—all the while pursuing her obsession for 19th-century furniture and household objects.

“I never would have anticipated being a historical or biographically oriented playwright,” says Wright, “but that is what has happened. I think the reason is that with all the turmoil in the world today, all the urgent political concerns, it is not too difficult to pull all the musty old books down from the shelf to find that we have been in similar places before. There is an endless supply of readily available metaphors.”

Howard Shalwitz, director of the original production of Quills at the New York Theater Workshop in 1995, observed the development of Wright as a biographically oriented playwright. Shalwitz is the co-founder and artistic director of Woolly Mammoth theater in Washington, DC, one of the nation’s most influential incubators of new work. Interestingly, he is a native Western New Yorker, having graduated from Kenmore West High School, where he was the salutatorian, in 1970. (Shalwitz got his start in the 1970s doing dinner theater with Alleyway’s Neal Radice; he also appeared in the 1976 Studio Arena Theatre production of A Little Night Music).

“Doug responded to what he saw as the culture of censorship that was gaining power in the early 1990s by taking on the most reprehensible artist he could think of,” recalls Shalwitz. “Who is the hardest possible case? The Marquis de Sade!”

“Quills started as a one-act, before I was involved. They did a search for directors and I was hired. Doug remembered a play he had written called Watbanaland that had done poorly in New York, but had later been a big success for us at Woolly Mammoth. It was a substantial developmental process. He had me read the Marquis de Sade, all of it vile, much of it very funny, and though he will not name them, the characters had real-life counterparts from the headlines.

“I find it a challenging play,” continues Shalwitz, “because it pursues its theme relentlessly, upping the stakes over and over and over again in brilliant ways, oppressing the marquis more and more, in more extreme, bizarre and oppressive ways. And I love the dynamic of the priest squashed between these two titans [the prisoner and the jailer], who never actually meet. Doug was thinking of the French Grand Guignol [theater of the late 19th and early 20th century that specialized in reenacting actual crimes for horror and comic effect]—very physical, very violent, very funny. Our fight choreography was spectacular, and we had a wonderful cast of eccentric actors. The Abbe was originally played by Jefferson Mays, who later starred in I Am My Own Wife.”

Shalwitz thinks that eccentric actors are essential to the Doug Wright aesthetic. If this is so, the Buffalo productions of I Am My Own Wife and Quills are on the right track. From the time I Am My Own Wife opened off-Broadway, Western New Yorkers were insisting that Jimmy Janowski should play the role; and the eclectic talents of the Torn Space company would seem made-to-order for Quills.

Though it may be theme and narrative that drive Wright, the playwright agrees that it is character that gets him started.

“I am initially attracted to character. Then when I find a personality compelling enough, I begin to ferret out the life and to find the narratives surrounding that personality.”

Revealing the life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf began as a fairly straightforward affair, because Wright knew her personally. It was only when Wright realized that Charlotte had taken liberties with the facts of her biography that the writing became complex. The enigma of her life became the substance of the one-person play, which won a Pulitzer Prize for the playwright and a Tony Award for Jefferson Mays, its original star, who portrayed over 30 characters over the course of the evening.

“I reconcile it this way,” says Wright. “Charlotte never intended to lie. You know how sometimes what you feel emotionally cannot be expressed by the mere facts of what happened? For Charlotte, the emotional facts became the actual facts. And if you retell a story enough, it becomes real in your mind. Charlotte had a series of set stories that she told by rote, and certain words would trigger them, almost like a phonograph. For example, if you mentioned the word ‘father,’ ‘Ah yes!’ and she would go into the story of how she killed her father. It was very difficult to get her to speak spontaneously. She would always revert to her rote pieces. When confronted with contradictions, of course, her English became faulty and she would conveniently not understand the question. But still, I believe, when she first told me the stories, she believed all of them in all of their details. I think, too, that I have taken a dramatic approach, rather than a journalistic approach in telling her story. Unlike a journalist, I am attracted to the contradictions and the ambiguities. I am not exhaustively interested in the material truth of Charlotte’s life. I am happy with the truth I know, complete with its contradictions.

“I think, too, that for gay people, Charlotte is an instructive and necessary figure from our history. I heard that there was a production of I Am My Own Wife in Salt Lake City, and I thought, ‘How wonderful the theater is!’ Brokeback Mountain was banned in Salt Lake City, but somewhere in that town, people can see I Am My Own Wife and hear Charlotte’s story.”

Buffalo can see the Torn Space production of Quills at the Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle and Library, 612 Fillmore Ave. through May 21st; and the Buffalo United Artists production of I Am My Own Wife at Alleyway’s Main Street Cabaret, through May 28th.