A musical about a mother and daughter who hoard cats and, in their declining years, join the felines in eating cat food? That's Doug Wright's Grey Gardens, a surprise Broadway success that is the story of Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, cousins of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis who descended into an economic and personal decline that might, at first glance, seem more the stuff of a tragedy than of a musical.

Wright, 44, is proof that the best shows can come from the most unpredictable material. A few years ago, he had a smash hit with I Am My Own Wife, a play about a German transvestite who endured both Nazism and the Communist occupation of East Germany. From those unlikely ingredients, Wright fashioned a play that won not only Tonys but also the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. No wonder he was asked to work on Grey Gardens, an offer he rejected several times ("I didn't initially see the story line," Wright says). But Scott Frankel, who wrote the music, "kept wearing me away, and after two years, I said okay."

But just when you think you have Wright niched, chew on this current endeavor: "I'm writing the book for the Broadway-bound musical version of Disney's beloved The Little Mermaid. It's an unabashedly charming story. I think this is an exciting project."

Born in Dallas, Wright wrote his first play at age 11 - it was, he says, "an epic two-and-one-half-hour drama where everybody dies." At 19, in college at Yale, he wrote The Stonewater Rapture, his first viable play, which he says "still gets produced 30 or 40 times a year."