Director & Playwright Explore Queer Trauma in Off-Broadway's 'Wounded'

Playwright Jiggs Burgess and playwright, screenwriter, actor, and director Del Shores are in such creative sync that even though the two are joining our Zoom call from different locations – Burgess in Texas, where he lives, and Shores from his home in Los Angeles, where Burgess' play "Wounded" premiered last year as part of a fringe festival – they easily fall into a companionable repartee.

"Wounded" has made its way East to NYC's Soho Playhouse where it plays through February 11. For more details follow this link.

Shores is well known as the author of the play "Sordid Lives," as well as the movie and TV series it spawned. Long the director if his own work – but no one else's – Shores undertook to helm Burgess' first professionally produced play, "The Red Suitcase," when the original director bowed out. "He decided to go to divinity school," Burgess tells EDGE. "He got a calling!" Shores, who was understudying the part of Jesus, was called in turn – to step in and direct. "Jiggs got insane reviews," Shores recalls of the play's success. "I mean, they were calling him a blend of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams and Capote."

That collaboration led naturally to the current one, with Shores directing the off-Broadway production of Burgess' new play, "Wounded," at Soho Playhouse. The New York production follows "Wounded" having won the 2023 International Fringe Encore Series Award after it premiered last year at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. "Wounded" is a hilarious – but also dark – work that sees two former school mates reunited after life has chewed them up for decades. Carrol (Craig Taggart, a veteran of "Sordid Lives: The Series") was, in his youth, the socially awkward, unmistakably gay kid no one wanted as a friend; Roger (Shaw Jones, "Blue") was the popular kid who was deeply in the closet.

The one-act play unfolds on Carrol's porch, and as platters of food go uneaten, hummingbirds swarm, and a three-legged dog barks in the distance, the two men excavate the traumas that the world has visited on them, and that they have visited on each other. Something ominous hangs in the air, but is it long-unresolved love... or revenge?

EDGE: Del, you had never directed anyone else's material before "The Red Suitcase," also by Jiggs, and now you're directing Jigg's follow up, "Wounded."

:Del Shores: I loved directing "The Red Suitcase," don't get me wrong, but it was hard. "Wounded" is right in my pocket. It's two characters. It's talking. It's a brilliant piece of work.

EDGE: This is a psychologically gripping and dark play, but it's also really funny.

Jiggs Burgess: If I just [showed] the vicious part of Carrol, then you couldn't stand to watch it. The best way to get somebody to love a character is to make them laugh, and the character is funny – but that humor comes from psychological pain. His defense has been that humor.

Del Shores: In my own work, I love the blend of humor and drama, and what Jiggs does so brilliantly is he seduces us into these characters. And then there's these little hints of, "Oh shit, oh my god, did he just say that?" And then, all of a sudden, it's like, bam!

Jiggs developed this in a writing class that I have on Monday nights, and I saw this from the moment he wrote it. Something magical happened, where every element just came together for this play.

EDGE: Jiggs, did you let the characters guide you to the story? Or did you start with the story and then think about what kind of characters it would need?

Jiggs Burgess: The story started because I needed something for class, and I didn't have anything. I was sitting out on my back porch watching the hummingbirds, and I this voice came in into my head that was a little bit Leslie Jordan. I listened to him. I don't know how to explain it. It was almost too easy.

EDGE: That's funny, because as I read Carrol's lines, I could hear Leslie Jordan's voice. Del, can you imagine what it would have been like to cast Leslie Jordan in that role?

Del Shores: Well, we'd have to change a few things... It's hard for me to talk about it. Last night I was watching the Emmys, and I just was not expecting to see Leslie. [Jordan's death] was the biggest loss for me, in my professional career and in my friendships. It was just so unexpected. When he passed away one of the things that just slayed me was, I'll never get to write another word for him.

I don't believe in anything, honestly, but if I were to believe, I would like to think that Lesley's hovering around. We were at the Broadwater with "The Red Suitcase," and that's where Leslie premiered his play "Like a Dog on Linoleum." I'd sat in the audience and gone backstage to see him. There were wonderful memories. And then, when they said the Soho Playhouse [would be producing "Wounded"], I saw that Leslie had done his play "Hysterical Blindness" there. So, we're kind of following him around.

Nobody could make you laugh as much as Leslie. We would have had to pull him in just a little bit [if he had played] Jiggs.

Jigs Burgess: The sensitivity and honesty that that Leslie showed in "Southern Baptist Sissies," I think is maybe what he would bring to this, as well. Those little moments just made me adore him even more.

EDGE: The title tells us that these are two damaged people. If they hadn't had the traumas they've had, would they still be fundamentally the same people? Or is your point that when you subject people to a traumas like the ones they've gone through, this is what they become capable of?

Jiggs Brugess: It's not just the big trauma. It's the small traumas that happen, too. It's all those little rejections that Carrol has gone through throughout his life.

He's never been a part of any group he wanted to be a part of. I think that had he been accepted in the group as a kid, he would be a different person. He'd still be bright, he'd still be funny, but he wouldn't be vicious. He wanted somebody to have a crush on him. Probably the most devastating line to me is, "We didn't think of you in a sexual way."

Del Shores: Yeah, that's not hurtful at all.

Jiggs Burgess: I don't think a lot of people would see that as hurtful. I mean, "You're just Carrol. We just didn't see that way." But to Carrol it's a knife to his heart, because that's what he wanted. He wanted somebody in that group to love him – and, in particular, he wanted Robert to love him. But I think he probably would have settled for a couple other people, too...

EDGE: It sounds like you've worked together incredibly well. Are you already looking for something to do together in future?

Del Shores: We're not actively searching. We just want to get through this. But if Jiggs will have me back, I'll work. My Wikipedia is going to go, "He abandoned writing, and suddenly he was only directing Jiggs Burgess plays."

Jiggs Burgess: I have an idea for what probably would be an Amazon Prime or Max series. I've got the start for five or six different plays, and I know that when they come around, they'll come around. That's the way kind of my mind works. I'll have these ideas and I'll write a few pages, and then it'll need to go away for a while and kind of gestate.

Del Shores: Jiggs' mind is like a bad neighborhood. You don't want to go there alone.

[Laughter]

EDGE: Del, have you also got projects coming up?

Del Shores: I do. I have a TV show in development right now that I co-wrote with Emerson Collins (producer of "Wounded") and Leslie before his death, and I love it so much. It's a little early, but we're working with some really good people. And then I have a new play called "The Recipe Box." That is a four-character play, and that will be the next theater piece that I do after "Wounded."

Jiggs Burgess: It's a good play.

Dell Shores: You just steal from life. I just keep hoping somebody will do something in front of me that I can take. It's always good things happening.

"Wounded" runs Jan. 24-Feb. 11, 2024 at SoHo Playhouse in New York City. For tickets, follow this link.