Good is ‘the strongest gravity,’ says ‘Wicked’ author Maguire
Author Gregory Maguire chats about his novel “Wicked,” Sept. 24, in Concord, Massachusetts.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Concord, Mass.
“Wicked,” the retelling of “The Wizard of Oz,” features familiar elements. There’s a yellow brick road, an Emerald City, and even a cameo by Dorothy and Toto. Plus show tunes.
The imminent big-screen musical expands the fantasy world of L. Frank Baum’s original books and the classic 1939 MGM movie adaptation starring Judy Garland. It also subverts them. “Wicked,” based on a 1995 novel, challenges our conceived notions of Baum’s characters. It explores the nature of evil through the complex friendship between Glinda, the Good Witch, and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch.
“Are people born wicked?” asks Glinda during the opening musical number. “Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”
Why We Wrote This
Fairy tales often present characters as either good or bad. “Wicked” author Gregory Maguire asks readers to let go of binary thinking as they consider morality.
Confronting those questions may be more terrifying than encountering Oz’s flying monkeys.
Gregory Maguire, the author of “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” describes the story as “almost like a morality play.” The author, who invited the Monitor to visit his home, is sitting near a bookshelf that includes many of his works. To date, he’s published 38 titles. Some are children’s fantasy books. Others are adult reinterpretations of fairy tales such as “Cinderella” (“Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister”) and “Snow White” (“Mirror, Mirror”). His blockbuster “Wicked” was adapted as a Tony-winning musical in 2003. It’s been defying gravity ever since.
A global phenomenon, “Wicked” ranks as Broadway’s second-highest grossing production after “The Lion King.” The first installment of the movie adaptation, which has been split into two parts, arrives in cinemas Nov. 22. Meanwhile, Mr. Maguire is readying a spring release for his latest book, “Elphie: A Wicked Childhood.”
In common, these various iterations endure, Mr. Maguire says, because they speak to the innate instinct within each of us to be good.
“The play manages to make wanting to be good, wanting to do good, into a theatrical gesture that everybody in the audience can recognize and can remember,” says Mr. Maguire, his face aglow from a standing lamp in his wood-paneled living room. But, he adds, Western culture has become slightly embarrassed by this essential truth. “It goes along at the same rate with the secularization of [the United States] ... and the decline of church attendance. Anybody who talks about being good is ‘naff’ and is ‘simpleminded.’”
From a classic film, a morality play
When Mr. Maguire was a child, his four siblings called him “a moral savant.” In part, he attributes that to his Catholicism. He was taught that good is “the strongest gravity in the forward progress of time.” Mr. Maguire was raised in a strict, lower-middle-class household in Albany, New York. Reading was encouraged. Television was rationed. Every year, Mr. Maguire was allowed to watch “The Wizard of Oz.” Such was its powerful hold on his imagination that he dragooned his brothers and sisters into playing the Tin Man, Lion, Scarecrow, and Dorothy. But the boy’s reenactments didn’t always stick closely to the movie storyline, a precursor to the path he’d take as an adult. By the time Mr. Maguire began writing “Wicked,” he was an established children’s book author.
“I began to feel that some of the themes I wanted to explore were more complex,” says Mr. Maguire, who raised three adopted children with his husband. “It was a very easy jump for me to think, ‘If I want to write about the nature of evil, I’ll take an evil character in a children’s book, and begin to unpack her and see what it was that, even as a child, I could determine were deeper constructs of passion and conflict within that character than we generally pay attention to.’”
Mr. Maguire’s literary reimagining is for mature readers. Its depiction of debauchery in Oz isn’t prurient, but readers expecting something akin to Baum’s children’s books will quickly realize, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”
The musical and movie versions of “Wicked” are more family-friendly. Yet they retain the thematic core of the novel. Last year, Mr. Maguire visited London’s Elstree Studios to observe filming of a key scene in the movie.
The two witches meet at university. Popular girl Galinda (Ariana Grande) is saddled with an unwanted roommate, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo). The latter is a social outcast born with green skin and razor teeth. She also has an aversion to water. Galinda (later known as Glinda) hazes Elphaba. It’s “Mean Girls: Oz Edition.” But when Galinda sees the hurt behind her roommate’s stoic eyes, it arouses empathy within her.
“At least three times I had tears in my eyes,” says Mr. Maguire, who spent three days watching the actors. “The scenes where they were vulnerable, they had tears in their eyes.”
A fuller picture of a complicated witch
“Wicked” portrays Elphaba as a rounded human being. Her later deeds are the consequence of multiple factors and experiences rather than of one simple, reductive reason. (The upcoming “Elphie: A Wicked Childhood,” based on chapters jettisoned from the first draft of “Wicked,” delves deeper into the witch’s troubled upbringing.) The novel’s nuanced complexity avoids didacticism. The world is dominated by binary thinking, says Mr. Maguire. Everything is black or white. There’s no space in the middle.
“That’s definitely how a lot of us kind of get through the world as kids. It’s like, ‘OK, this is bad; this is good; this is right; this is wrong,’” says Emily Kay Shrader, co-host of “Down the Yellow Brick Pod,” a podcast about the world of Oz, including Mr. Maguire’s “genius” novels. “The most challenging thing about growing up is acknowledging that it’s such a spectrum. That whether it’s someone you meet on the street or it’s yourself, there’s really not a box that you can put anyone into.”
Ms. Shrader adds that it’s a good reminder to check herself whenever she meets someone who has a different political background from her.
“We have gotten more and more used to thinking we can’t tolerate something that doesn’t line up with our string of ones or a string of zeros,” agrees Mr. Maguire. “It’s true about how culture talks [about] itself to us.”
However, the novelist isn’t a moral relativist. After all, Elphaba becomes a terrorist to combat the nefarious wizard who rules Oz. “She is not the evil witch from MGM or L. Frank Baum,” he says. “But she’s not a saint either. She makes lots of mistakes, and she’s morally confused. She’s willing to cause harm to people if she can, and if she can do it in order to further what she considers as a good cause.”
Discerning the dividing line between good and evil isn’t always easy, the author says before he ushers his visitors on a tour of his “Wicked” memorabilia, ranging from figurines to umbrellas.
“It is a conundrum with which we have to live,” says Mr. Maguire. But, he adds, we can’t stop asking ourselves that question. Avoiding doing so risks “taking the easy way out and taking early retirement from our job of being moral agents in the universe.”