01:00 AM EST on Sunday, December 18, 2005

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Most women with children who work outside the home find it difficult enough balancing two careers -- motherhood and the job down at the office/factory/store.

Erin Cressida Wilson juggles several jobs at a time -- mother of a 1 1/2-year-old son, award-winning playwright, successful screenwriter (whose Fur, starring Nicole Kidman, is now in the editing room), Brown University professor. And she relishes every one of them.

"The day before my water broke I pitched a rewrite to Lynda Obst [a producer] at Paramount," she recalls almost offhandedly while sitting in her cozy office on the Brown campus, "and I got the job. The next morning my water broke . . . three weeks early.

"I had to get going on that job VERY soon after I gave birth and it was IMPOSSIBLE to have postpartum depression. As hard as I tried, I was having a great time between the baby and working."

While she added that "I can't talk about that film because it hasn't been made yet [it's Kate Hudson's Can You Keep a Secret?]," she did allow that "it was exciting to be a mother and working at the same time, as opposed to the many years when I wasn't a mother and wasn't working."

The svelte Wilson, with her long brown hair and unlined face, is 41 but could easily pass for 30. She isn't kidding when she says, "Work is to me one of the great pleasures of my life. I feel very lucky as a writer and a teacher to be able to do both. It has taken me years to get into this position."

She's often in her office five days a week from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., save for a mid-afternoon break when she goes home to tend to her son, taking over from daycare, later transferring watch-over duties to her partner, John Mackenzie, an actor known on screen as JC Mackenzie.

Although she swears it's a perfect existence, it sounds harried. And so it seems when we try to negotiate a time when a Journal photographer can come to take her picture, something that she's promised won't take more than 15 minutes. But she begs off.

"This is the worst week of my life," she says, apologizing that she's about to rent out her house, is losing her son's daycare, that classes are ending and she's moving for several months to New York to work on a project, taking a sabbatical from Brown.

Eventually, she gives up on the photo session and e-mails a photo she likes instead.

She will be writing while away from Brown, but says she finds it more difficult to write when she's not teaching. "It takes me longer. It's harder to grapple with. I kind of muddle around and muck a lot more than when I'm teaching.

"When I'm teaching, a lot of the process gets worked out in the fact that I need to explain and reaffirm the minutiae of what it's like to be a writer so often to the students that I end up being in a stronger position when I sit down at the typewriter."

The students, she says, give her a sort of energy boost.

She has been at Brown for 2 1/2 years, teaching a graduate playwriting workshop and a course in adaptation for the screen.

"That's about adapting short stories and novels into screenplays," she explains. "Most of the time I've had them write full 120-page screenplays, but this year I'm having them write only 60 pages."

'Movies are everything I am'

Although Wilson came out of Smith College with degrees in both screenwriting and acting, she took a circuitous route before seeing her first screenplay -- Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader -- put on screen by longtime friend Steven Shainberg.

"I always knew I wanted to write screenplays because movies are everything I am. I like the movies. I always have," she says brightly.

"But I really didn't want to write a spec script. I didn't want to do it in a void. And I didn't want to enter film through the commerce of it. I didn't want to write a script and sell it [with no control over what would happen to it]. I wanted to collaborate, work with someone and make a film."

Although she was writing plays at the time, many of which were being staged in New York and internationally, her heart was in film . . . but on her own terms. "My agent said, 'Good luck.' I waited and waited and waited.

"And eventually my good friend Steven Shainberg, the director, pitched me Secretary, an adaptation of a short story by Mary Gaitskill which had this incredibly wonderful core to it where the secretary is spanked by her boss. But in order to make it a three-act story, I got inside of it and found a hidden love story."

Secretary was a modest hit on the independent film circuit. It led to Fur, the story of celebrated photographer Diane Arbus, played by Kidman, which was filmed last summer in a new movie studio in Brooklyn with Shainberg directing again.

Based on Patricia Bosworth's biography of the photographer, who committed suicide in 1971, Wilson says that for her screenplay she "created what I had subtitled the film to be: A Portrait of Diane Arbus. I made up a fictional story based on the facts of her life.

"I didn't choose to focus on her suicide. What I focused on was her emergence as a woman and an artist . . . but I don't want to talk about the film much [while it's still in production].

"But I was on the set of both films and they were both sublime experiences, just beautiful sets.

"I did only a little bit of rewrites. Both of these films were not produced by a studio, so I didn't have a studio breathing down my neck."

Teaching nurtured the writing

Wilson is a San Francisco native. After graduating from Smith in 1985, she spent "about 10 years in New York City acting and writing.

"I wrote plays and acted a lot. I acted in a film with Kevin Spacey. I did theater. I was a puppeteer for Julie Taymor [of The Lion King fame]. I did anything I could do that interested me and fascinated me in order to survive in New York City. It was certainly a very financially difficult situation.

"But eventually I got this fantastic job at Duke [University]. They had a national search for a professor and I had been teaching at NYU part time and I had been teaching at New Dramatists and I had some of my plays done on stage. And so I was very lucky. I lived in North Carolina for eight years.

"It was when I started to teach that things broke for me in my writing. Having been this lone artist, you get very into your own work. I found that turning out of yourself and working with students and helping others really opened up my work and my mind and my ability. And that, oddly, helped me to get going as a writer. I find that teaching for me goes hand in hand with the writing.

"There's a tremendous amount of back and forth with the students. We do a lot of in-class exercises. We write in class. We read out loud in class. There's a lot of examining of what's going on. I try to examine where it is that their writing is telling us where it should go. What they write informs.

"I would never tell anybody what to write, let's put it that way. I try to expedite them to see what stories are inside them.

"Ultimately, it's a big balance in writing for the stage. You simultaneously want to be able to be as honest and truthful to your own humor, to your own stories, to your own voice, to your own idiosyncracies, while creating this theater that is entertaining and must make other people react. So you're really bringing it over to other people.

"So on the one hand they're learning to be garreted, to develop their own voice. But on the other hand, they've got to also be social enough and strong enough to win over an actor and to collaborate with that actor and director to make the next steps.

"It's different from other artists. It's collaborative. It becomes different animals at different stages."

She's asked if, because of that, her plays can look different to her on stage, after they have been filtered through the actors and director. Are there any "Oh no!" moments?

"Of course," she says. "You think it all the time.

"Or you think, 'Wow! I didn't know it was [that] good.' "

Plenty of projects

On her sabbatical, Wilson will be working on a TV pilot for director Ivan Reitman, who did Ghostbusters. "But this is not a comedy.

"And then I'm about to start a film for Disney, an adaptation of a Judy Blume book.

"And I'm also writing a play for South Coast Repertory."

How can she balance so many projects at one time? No problem, she says.

"I can work the morning on one and the afternoon on another. I don't ever speak on the phone when I write. I try to separate those activities. I never write on a day that I teach. Those are two very different types of things. I think it would hurt my teaching if I had just come off writing. I wouldn't be focused . . . and vice versa. So I have to separate them."

Among the bonuses of being a professor, she adds, is not only that it helps her writing because of her interaction with students. It also gives her a little breathing room so she doesn't have to worry about where her next job is coming from.

"I think that is very important, because it means I'm not working to survive. That makes a big difference. It gives me artistic freedom. There are times when a lot of projects in film come by and I pick the ones that speak to me . . . or I won't take a job for a while.

"I have to hand it to people who freelance. I think that's tough. I did it for many years. You have to be really strong for that."