In ‘Cleo,’ an Affair Plays Out in Public
AUSTIN, Texas — Lawrence Wright, the author and longtime New Yorker staff writer, is not as serious as he may seem. He is not obsessed with terrorism and religion, as his recent work suggests. Sometimes he just wants a juicy sex scandal.
Indeed, before he wrote “The Looming Tower: Al- Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, and before he wrote “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief,” a 2013 National Book Award finalist, Mr. Wright was working on “Cleo,” a play about the sordid love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton during the filming of the 1963 epic “Cleopatra.”
Mr. Wright began writing “Cleo” about 20 years ago, but it was derailed by the September 11 terrorist attacks. “Cleo” was scheduled to debut April 6 at the Alley Theater, in Houston. The production, directed by Bob Balaban, the theater and screen actor, sated one of Mr. Wright’s earliest desires.
“The Taylor and Burton affair coincided with my puberty so I was especially attuned to what was going on,” Mr. Wright said. “This relationship — the passion and the lust just spilled out all over the world. It certainly awakened my attention.”
Last August, Mr. Wright sat at home in West Austin. On a computer monitor was a document opened to draft Number 78 of “Cleo.” He was preparing for the play’s September debut. Then Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and damaged the Alley, prompting the delay.
In those seven months, Mr. Wright wrote nine more drafts, all while serving as an executive producer for the new Hulu series based on “The Looming Tower” and completing a new book on Texas politics. “Cleo” is now a drastically different play than it was when Mr. Wright conceived it, yet the theme remains the same.
“It’s in some ways a disquisition on love, and how dangerous it is, and yet how essential,” he said. “We’re condemned to have this riotous, unsettling element in our natures and we don’t understand it.”
The actors Lisa Birnbaum and Richard Short portray Taylor and Burton. They were cast, Mr. Balaban said, for their ability to embody both tragedy and comedy.
Burton and Taylor, whose relation- ship ripped apart their marriages, couldn’t keep their cravings secret, and the nascent paparazzi captured every blatant minute of their sunbathing and petting. “There was outrage,” Mr. Wright said. “Nobody had ever seen this kind of thing happening in public before. ”
The pope condemned the couple, and a congresswoman from Georgia proposed prohibiting Taylor, a naturalized United States citizen, from returning after filming. Fidelity was a tightly held American value, yet the pair persisted in flagrant defiance and, in Mr. Wright’s estimation, helped to spark the sexual revolution.
“The play ends with a rather brutal scene — a big, knock- down, drag- out fight that you would think would tear Taylor and Burton apart but is actually what ends up cementing their relationship,” Mr. Balaban said. “We wanted to present something that was probably like what really happened.”
On April 17, Mr. Wright will publish “God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State,” based on reporting he did for The New Yorker. David Remnick, the editor, asked Mr. Wright to explain his home state; the writer playfully reminded the editor that he gets paid by the word.
Mr. Remnick took the risk. “The secret to Larry is that he writes only about what completely grabs his attention and imagination,” Mr. Remnick said. “He does what he’s going to do. And the results are invariably amazing.”