Following up on his essay "Captives" published in the November 9th issue of The New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright performs The Human Scale - an unsparing, graphic exploration of the ongoing crisis in Gaza, one of the most searing political conflicts of our day.  Returning to the stage following his acclaimed My Trip to Al Qaeda, Wright workshops his newest piece in collaboration with director Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of The Public Theater.

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Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.

He is a graduate of Tulane University, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the American University in Cairo, where he taught English and received an M.A. in Applied Linguistics in 1969. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1971, Wright began his writing career at the Race Relations Reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Two years later, he went to work for Southern Voices, a publication of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, Georgia, and began to freelance for various national magazines. In 1980, Wright returned to Texas to work for Texas Monthly. He also became a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In December, 1992, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he published a number of notable articles, which have won him the National Magazine Award for Reporting as well as the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, and Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting.

Wright is the co-writer (with Ed Zwick and Menno Meyjes) of The Siege, starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening, which appeared in November 1998. He also wrote the script of the Showtime movie, Noriega: God's Favorite, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Bob Hoskins, which aired in April 2000.

His history of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006) was published to immediate and widespread acclaim, spending eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and being translated into twenty-five languages. It was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Lionel Gelber Award for nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Award for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

In 2006, he premiered his one-man play, "My Trip to al-Qaeda," at The New Yorker Festival, and then enjoyed a sold-out six-week run at the Culture Project in Soho. It is now being made into a documentary film, directed by Alex Gibney, who won the 2008 Academy Award for Feature Documentary.

Wright has published six previous books. City Children, Country Summer (Scribner's, 1979), In the New World: Growing Up with America, 1960 - 1984 (Knopf, 1988), Saints & Sinners (Knopf, 1993), Remembering Satan (Knopf, 1994), Twins: Genes, Environment, and the Mystery of Identity (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997; Wiley & Sons, 1998), and God's Favorite (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He also serves as the keyboard player in the Austin-based blues band, Who Do.

www.lawrencewright.com

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Oskar Eustis has been the Artistic Director of The Public Theater since 2005. From 1981 through 1986 he was resident director and dramaturg at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco, and Artistic Director until 1989, when he moved to the L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum as Associate Artistic Director until 1994. Mr. Eustis then served as Artistic Director at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island for eleven years. At The Public he has directed the 2008 Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet, featuring Michael Stuhlbarg and Sam Waterston, and the New York premiere of Rinne Groff’s The Ruby Sunrise. At Trinity Rep, he directed Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Henry IV and Julius Caesar at the Mark Taper Forum.  At Trinity Rep he also directed the world premiere of Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production); Homebody/Kabul (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production); the world premiere of Rinne Groff’s The Ruby Sunrise; Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director); Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika; as well as world premieres of plays by Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, Emily Mann, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ellen McLaughlin, and Eduardo Machado. He commissioned Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco and directed its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum. He was a professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance at Brown University, where he founded and chaired the Trinity Rep/Brown University Consortium for professional theater training. He received an honorary doctorate from Brown in 2001 and currently serves as Professor of Dramatic Writing and Arts and Public Policy at New York University.