Los Angeles playwright Craig Wright has written for the television series “Lost,” “Six Feet Under” and last year’s short-lived “Dirty Sexy Money,” but television can’t match theater’s “irreproducible moment.”

“My first loyalty is to the theater,” he said in a phone interview conducted while driving back from an early morning production meeting. “I like having such a large audience to talk to with television. It’s been a fun, lucky experience, but theater is my primary forum . . . The fact is theater is living in front of you, not an electronic reproduction. That’s always going to matter more. That’s always going to have more emotion.”

Wright’s ability to find emotional moments and ask deeper questions about life led to his selection as this year’s honored playwright at the Horton Foote American Playwright Festival held today through Saturday at Baylor University’s Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center.

“The Unseen” by the American Actors Company

Performances: 7:30 tonight and Saturday at Theater 11 in Baylor University’s Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center. No late seating.

Tickets: $15. Play contains adult themes and language. Call 710-1865 for ticket information.

Baylor University theater students Chris Ramirez (left) and Francisco Lopez prepare the set for Craig Wright's "The Unseen," to be presented tonight and Saturday as part of the Horton Foote American Playwright Festival. (Duane A. Laverty photo)

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Craig Wright

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The Marcy & Zina Show

Performance: 8 p.m. Friday at Jones Theater in Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center.

Tickets: $25, or 2 for $40. Call 710-1865 for ticket information.

• Story: Songwriter says 'Marcy and Zina Show' the result of impatience

Wright has written such plays as “Grace,” “Recent Tragic Events,” “The Pavilion,” “Melissa Artic” and “The Unseen.”

The latter concerns two inmates in separate cells in an unnamed prison who construct their versions of the world outside their cells as a means of keeping hope alive. A prison trusty involved in torture interacts with them and starts to have doubts about what he’s done to others.

Baylor’s theater department, under its professional acting title of the American Actors Company, a company founded by Foote decades earlier, mounted an Off-Broadway production of “The Unseen” at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre last spring. Baylor theater lecturer Lisa Denman directed a three-man cast of department chairman Stan Denman and faculty members Thomas Ward and Steven Pounders.

They’ll reprise the drama Thursday and Saturday night in Theater 11 in Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center. The festival also will offer “The Marcy & Zina Show,” a musical revue by Broadway actresses Marcy Heisler and Zina Goldrich, at 8 p.m. Friday at Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center.

It’s the first festival since the death of Foote last spring, and Stan Denman said the festival’s schedule today will feature readings of the native Texan’s plays “Courtship” and “The Actor.”

“His inspiration and commitment to the festival made it come about,” he said. “We certainly want to acknowledge all he did for us and for American playwriting.

Wright wrote “The Unseen” as a Hartford Stage commission for “a play about Jesus Christ,” he said. When the theater passed on producing it, it was picked up for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival. Lisa Denman and her acting faculty colleagues presented it at Addison’s Water Tower Theater, then New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre. Wright also directed his own Los Angeles production.

Reaction to his piece varied from strong audience and critical response in Dallas to mixed reviews in New York. New York audiences read the play as a political statement about American prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, but Wright said they also tend to turn up noses when playwrights want to address deeper issues.

“Out in the rest of the country, they’re not offended when an artist wants to talk about the meaning of life,” he noted.

Television’s supporters point to a richness and complexity of characters developed over the run of a series compared to those seen in film and theater, but Wright said that complexity is misleading.

“TV really requires focus. As much as people like to advertise a TV story for complexity of character, a good TV show is still simpler than a basic play,” he said. “Take ‘The Sopranos.’ The basic idea is, ‘He’s a bad guy, but troubled by it.’ Television can’t deviate from that simplicity . . . You have to deliver the same thing over and over again.”

Wright’s still active in television — the Emmy-nominated writer has series pilots under consideration by Showtime, Fox and CBS — and notes the difference between cable and network programming is narrowing as entertainment options for viewers’ time increase. “There’s more nervousness at the top. Even cable shows are getting notes from producers now,” he said, referring to the second-guessing that network producers often do on a television director’s creative choices.

“Theater is my primary forum, but I like doing both. I feel like I’m escaping one when I’m doing the other,” he added.

A schedule of festival events is available online at www.baylor.edu/hortonfootefestival.

choover@wacotrib.com

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