INTERVIEW: Mark Wilding on his new play ‘Our Man in Santiago’
Photo: Presciliana Esparolini and Nick McDow Musleh star in Our Man in Santiago. Photo courtesy of Charlie Mount / Provided by Lucy Pollak PR with permission.
Mark Wilding has found wild success in the TV industry, penning scripts for everything from Grey’s Anatomy to Scandal to Charmed, in addition to producing many shows. A few years ago, he decided to add a side project to his busy TV life when he dusted off an idea that was several decades in the making.
More than four decades ago, Wilding read a magazine article by the great Gabriel García Márquez about the tumultuous politics of Chile and American intervention in the South American country. The background to the piece were clashes between President Richard Nixon and the Marxist government in Chile. Apparently there was a little sidebar to these historic times that featured a plan by the Americans to send a glee club to Chile, almost like a Trojan horse, in order to overthrow the government.
This idea, spawned by Márquez’s article, stuck with Wilding through the years, and then he decided to dramatize the proceedings in a dark comedy for the stage. That’s where Our Man in Santiago comes from, his new play that had a successful 2021 run in Los Angeles and is set to begin previews Tuesday, Sept. 13 at the AMT Theater in New York City. Charlie Mount directs the engagement.
“I’ve always held on to newspaper articles or magazine articles over the years where I’m like, I wonder if I could ever do something with that,” Wilding said in a recent phone interview. “Finally I sort of figured it out just about three years ago. I figured out how to make it into a play, a comedy. The play picks up three years after the glee club fiasco, and it’s a couple CIA agents who are down in Santiago trying to overthrow [Salvador] Allende because, of course, he was overthrown in a coup in 1973 that [Augusto] Pinochet led. … And so anyway I thought that would be an interesting play. It might be kind of fun and also darkly funny, and so we did it at Theater West, which is this theater I belong to in L.A., in 2020. I think our opening night was March 13, 2020. Of course, that’s when the pandemic hit, and we had to close the play down after two nights. And then a year and a half later, last December, we decided to do it again, and the cast was very enthusiastic. And it ran for about six weeks out here in Los Angeles. People seemed to like it a lot, so we decided to try to bring it New York and see how that went.”
Because the L.A. audiences responded so well to the piece, which is billed as a raucous political farce, talks of a New York City transfer began.
“We got a lot of nice reviews,” he said. “People really thought it was great, so we thought, let’s do this. Believe me, if L.A. hadn’t liked it, we wouldn’t be going to New York. Hopefully the New York audiences will like it. I think it’s pretty funny. We have a really good cast, and it’s been just wonderfully directed by Charlie Mount, who is our director. We’ll see how it comes about, but it was something that we all decided, this might be fun to do.”
Wilding said he remembers reading the Márquez story and thinking the story of the glee club was apocryphal, but he trusts the magazine and the famous novelist’s words (Márquez was also a journalist).
“With all the various shenanigans that the CIA has been up to over the years … I thought this is sort of grist for the mill,” Wilding said. “This is something that should be explored. If there’s a theme to the play, I would say it might be beware American involvement or adventurism in other parts of the world because we always think that we’re doing the best for people and for countries, but maybe we’re not. Look at, for instance, when we went into Iraq under George W. Bush. We wanted to spread the seeds of democracy. That didn’t go so well.”
He added: “I think the same things inevitably just keep occurring, be it with Vietnam or be it with Iraq. We just sort of step into these things, thinking that the rest of the world thinks like we do, and I think that’s wrong-headed. And weirdly I think we always think we’re doing it for a good reason. I think that’s why we keep repeating it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Our Man in Santiago, written by Mark Wilding and directed by Charlie Mount, begins performances Tuesday, Sept. 13 at the AMT Theater in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
