It's a wide, 'Wicked' world

Gregory Maguire, who crafted the book on which the musical "Wicked" is based, recently published "A Lion Among Men," the third in his trilogy of works set in a re-imagined Oz. He has created family histories and pedigrees of the various munchkins, wizards and witches in Ozland.

Maguire, who earned a doctorate at Tufts University and is the son of a journalist, talked by phone last week about his childhood, his writing and "Wicked," which opens this week at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis.

Q Where are you?

A I'm in the hall of my mother's house here in Albany [N.Y.]. There's still only one phone in the house. Up till a certain age, I shared a bedroom with my three brothers. I'm here, swinging my feet and having a cup of tea, reminiscing. It's hard to believe that I'm the same person who [once was] sitting on the front porch with four copies of "Peter Pan."

Q "Peter Pan" was part of your awakening, wasn't it?

A I remember going to a library, finding "Peter Pan" and running home to read it on my front steps here in Albany. I was born in 1954, when conformity reigned. Fantasy was a way out. Early on, I discovered that I was not going to be my father's son, even though I didn't have words for it then.

Q What do you mean?

A Well, I knew then that I was gay, even if I couldn't fully articulate it. Perhaps, in a deep subconscious way, I was already suspecting that I was being marginalized. But it gave me a special insight. I felt that my capacity to appreciate or apprehend what was going on around me was more heightened than those around me, even those who were smarter. I couldn't tell if it was youthful egocentrism or if I had a gift. But I knew that I was set apart.

Q You wrote your doctoral dissertation at Tufts on fantasy in children's literature. What did you discover in your academic research?

A I started looking at 1938, the year that both [J.R.R. Tolkien's] "The Hobbit" and [T.H. White's] "The Sword in the Stone" were published. Such was the climate of the time -- World War II was about to start -- that both writers were compelled to write much bigger, sprawling narratives that became fantasy for adults. The fantasy genre was capacious enough to serve as a mirror to our complicated world. From the late '30s on, fantasy, which had previously been escapist, became more of a lens to the world.

Q And you put your research in practice in your own creative writing. Your Oz is a complicated place.

A Yes. I wanted to make a magic land in which there could be sex and trouble and poverty and oppression so that when virtue shows up, one can see it for the beauty that it is. It's one thing to have a beautiful picture of a rose, floating on an icon, but if you have a drawing of a rose growing out of a dump, that rose has a different kind of beauty. That contrast gives you a fuller understanding of the magnificence.

Q As a green-skinned girl, Elphaba should be on the margins of society. Does she accept being marginalized in her consciousness and spirit?

A She's such an outsider that there's no other character like her in the world; she's the only one. She's a monster in a sense, yet she's always a person. The secret to why the play and the book have been so successful is that people can see that even though there's an urge to conform, there really is no "in" group. Everyone imagines that there's a sexier party going on down the street that they're not invited to. But she realizes that it's not so. Elphaba realizes that she's the center of her world.

Q When I read your books, I am fascinated by how vividly you construct this world, with all the politics and fighting and nuances in the latest one.

A It is so real in my imagination that I could go Google Oz with it just like Google Earth. I can zone in to any little corner and find something fascinating. The place feels so real, with its own history and population, its peculiar strains of beliefs and imagination and social progress. It's the vehicle that has allowed me to open up the most far-seeing apparatus of my imagination.

Q Some of your fans have been guessing about the literary influences of your characters. Elphaba, for example, seems very 19th-century in some ways.

A Well, she is a composite. In her college years, I imagined her as [songwriter] Laura Nyro: long dark hair, beautiful voice and a lot of passion. Later on, I imagined her as young Virginia Woolf, who used to call her sister Vanessa "Nessa." I was thinking of Edwardian young women not allowed into the same colleges as their boyfriends or brothers. In the second half of the story, when she goes to the castle and becomes a recluse, I thought of her as Emily Dickinson, who was so far ahead of her time, it took half a century to catch up to her. I liked that [Dickinson] had had the courage to withdraw from a community that was not healthy for her.

Q How is Oz different from Tolkien's Middle Earth?

A There's sex in my books because -- let's face it -- sex is a part of life. Some parents get upset because they want Oz to be a nongendered, neutered world where characters have hairless pudenda and no genitalia. I wanted to make it a magic land that's different from Middle Earth. I don't know how those hobbits came to be, since there are hardly any female characters.

Q "Wicked" and Oz have given you a great living and, I imagine, artistic fulfillment. How do you keep grounded?

A Well, that's easy. I have been able to adopt three children: two boys from Southeast Asia and a girl from Central America. They could give a flying fig leaf about any of my accomplishments. They want attention when they want it, or to be ignored. They have no patience for the miracle of invention or nation-building on the page, which is what I do. That really is remarkably humbling in a very productive way.

Q What is next for you?

A Well, my favorite saying from the musical is not by me but by [songwriter] Stephen Schwartz: I'll keep defying gravity until the grave gets the better of me.

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390