It wasn't a message from on high that gave Craig Wright a new vocation just as he was about to be ordained as a minister in the United Church of Christ. It was the success of his play The Pavilion – which included a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

As Fort Worth's Circle Theatre polishes its production of The Pavilion for Friday's opening, Mr. Wright finds himself writing fulltime instead of preaching and baptizing.

Actually, the 38-year-old Mr. Wright is working overtime. This is his first year working for HBO's much-lauded series Six Feet Under, on which he and six other writers (five of them are also produced playwrights) together determine the drift of the plot. He has written the actual scripts for two episodes in the new season that began this month.

Three more of his plays are scheduled for production in the next year, including an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street for Minnesota's Great American History Theatre. He also has a hand in a couple of movie scripts and is pitching another series to HBO.

"I'm busier than I've ever been," Mr. Wright says during a telephone interview wedged between shooting sessions of an episode he authored for the HBO series. "Everyone on Six Feet Under has been so gracious and open about teaching me. I've never written for the screen before."

He doesn't seem particularly conflicted about the change in direction. "I've got to keep going when the spirit says move, staying open and trusting what I have."

Besides going to divinity school, the playwright has worked as a fishmonger, hotel developer and advertising copywriter. He also was a member of the alternative-rock group Kangaroo.

Circle Theatre's production will be North Texans' first opportunity to see his work. The Pavilion is the second installment of a trilogy of plays set in Minnesota. The first, Molly's Delicious, deals with young people back in the 1960s. The Pavilion features an older couple reunited at a high school reunion.

"It started to seem to me that it is easy to have a happy ending when people are innocent – young people who haven't made any mistakes," Mr. Wright says. "What about for people who have made big mistakes?"

Natalie Gaupp directs the Circle production, and Michelle Michael and Trey Walpole play the couple. Kevin Scott Keating is the narrator – a figure who has led many critics to compare The Pavilion to Thornton Wilder's classic Our Town.

Mr. Wright doesn't flinch at that.

"I think the comparison has been made because of the highly theatrical use of the narrator," he says, "but also because of the way this play moves back and forth between the universal and the particular."

Mr. Wright does take issue with one of the most famous – and most poetic – lines Mr. Wilder wrote for his philosophizing Stage Manager. When the young heroine, Emily, returns to Earth from her grave to see and marvel at an ordinary day in her life, she asks whether human beings "ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute." The Stage Manager replies, "Saints and poets, maybe."

Mr. Wright doesn't buy that.

"The idea that artistic and fancy people have some sort of special access to the secrets of the universe is bull," he says. "Everybody misses that most of the time, and everybody gets it maybe a little."

Maybe it's a part of the playwright's vocation to open that up a little more for everybody.

"I have a vision of life I want to convey," Mr. Wright says. "I want to examine what it means to say 'Yes' to life without being simplistic about it or denying the difficulties."

Imbibe what you can of Mr. Wright's worldview. But if you ever chance to run into the playwright, don't pump him for information on what's actually going on in this strange season of Six Feet Under, in which the hero died and came back to life during the first episode and the dialogue keeps dropping hints that the whole plot line may be a dream.

"I can't give away anything," he says. "I just hope people are finding it entertaining."