Playwright Uses ‘More Light’ to Fuel His Imagination

It’s nightmare time at the Vatican.

A 16th-Century Pope goes to sleep and dreams of heaven in Snoo Wilson’s sociological fantasy, “More Light,” opening tonight at the Lex Theatre in Hollywood.

Along for the bumpy ride are Shakespeare (played by a black woman); Queen Elizabeth I; royal astrologer Dr. Dee; a forger named Kelly; a barmaid born to a witch and Bacchus, and the renowned freethinker/period-pop hero Giordano Bruno.

“The play is introduced by the Pope,” explained the sandy-haired and mild-mannered British writer, who was drawn to the real-life story of Bruno, a Franciscan monk who dabbled in various kinds of magic, was excommunicated and eventually burned at the stake for heresy. “In the Pope’s dream--which I see as a sort of Tom & Jerry nightmare--he has to catch Bruno, have him brought back and burned properly.”

The 40-year-old writer (who was christened Andrew James Wilson--”but I lost those names at an early age; even my American Express card says ‘Snoo’ ”) became interested in Bruno in 1984, when the Royal Shakespeare Company asked him to write an adaptation of the monk’s commedia dell’arte play “Il Candelario” (“The Candlemaker”).

“It’s really three plays knitted into one, about five hours long--and has no discernible structure,” he mused. “There’s some debunking of hypocritical attitudes, a couple of chunks of cuckoldry--but it’s basically very long and not terribly good. I mean, I’m sure it is good, but it hasn’t exactly stood up to the test of the ages. Bruno was not a man of the theater; he was a man of ideas. And he was much more interesting (than his play).”

The opening of the Lex production of “More Light” was delayed by a week because of the labor dispute between Actors Equity and ATLAS--a coalition of Equity Waiver theater operators.

Wilson’s last visit to the United States was for the 1988 staging of his and Ray Davies’ “80 Days” (a musical adaptation of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days”) at the La Jolla Playhouse. An earlier Wilson play, “Vampire,” was presented in Los Angeles at the tiny City Stage in 1985.

But the bulk of his work has been done in England.

Although he enjoys collaborating, much of Wilson’s writing is done alone. “You have to trust your nose,” he noted, “that certain things are hot . I’m an imaginationist. You can still play by the rules of the theater; the rules of the theater are much kinder than you can possibly imagine. I mean, they do allow for a certain amount of play. For instance, there’s a point in this where the Pope gets turned into a fly and falls into Shakespeare’s inkwell.

“Naturalism can be sublime,” he allowed, “but it’s just not my cup of tea. This play speaks to my own escapism, my own fears. It’s about eternity, the universe--all the stuff that turned Bruno on. For me, the cutting edge of drama is being able to turn things around, so people can see it from the other end. Sure, I want them to be engrossed. They have to be, because the first act is one hour and 12 minutes.”

Wilson, who has just written a new play, “We, the People,” about a woman who thinks she’s the Queen of England, has no trouble being labeled a “political” writer.

“I am political,” he said seriously. “I can talk the hind legs off of freethinking and ideals versus repression and structure. (Even in Bruno’s story) there are parallels. I’m not Italian or Catholic. But the problems are the same: the individual versus the state. I think it’s an endless equation--and something the current power in England has got badly wrong.” Yet he remains optimistic: “Bruno had an extraordinarily positive attitude toward the universe. I’m not averse to thinking thoughts like that.”