MICHAEL WELLER EXAMINES VALUES IN ‘GHOST ON FIRE’

Michael Weller, whose new play “Ghost on Fire” will open Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse, is a playwright whose larger works resemble a periodic American checkup, a self-examination turned outward.

“Moonchildren” dealt with a group of college kids caught in the enervating tensions of the ‘60s, bookended by assassination near the beginning of the decade and the apocalypse of Vietnam toward the end. “Loose Ends” caught the same milieu of middle-class kids some time later, now out and on their own in careers and marriages, still suffering their disarray and unhappiness like a chronic infection.

What “Ghost on Fire” will come to represent is too early to tell--no one knows how works of art take until they’ve had time to seep into the cultural fabric. Weller himself still appears to be standing back and looking at it from different angles. If you ask him what the title represents, he may say, “What do you think it means?”

And what will one surmise?

Ghost : something that once had living form and retains immaterial presence. Ghost on fire. The presence burns in memory. Something that can’t be ignored.

Weller toys with the idea. “Yes,” he says noncommittally. Then the ambiguous: “Interesting.”

“ ‘Ghost on Fire’ is about values that are burning two characters up,” Weller continued. “They knew each other in college, when they worked together on making an art film. After that, they had a falling out. One takes off and doesn’t return for years. The reason he comes back is that he wants to confront his friend with the reason he left. But in a larger sense, it’s about people who feel separated from the values around them, yet feel deep, unconscious urges to make something more of themselves. It’s a much more passionate play than I’ve written before.”

However passionate it may be, like much of Weller’s work, it took a long time coming (“I spend a lot of time note-taking”). “I’ve been a fan of Des McAnuff since his New York days,” Weller said. “Last summer he approached me at a theater conference and asked me to do a new work. I said, ‘Yeah,’ and mentioned this. We finalized an agreement around Christmas, and I started working in January. It came just in time. I was broke.”

Broke is, of course, a relative term. Weller is a major American writer in the theater, and he’s written the screenplays for “Hair!” and “Ragtime.” That he’s characterized as a spokesman for his generation--he’s 42--is a role he considers accidental and unsought.

“The subject matter I deal with consists of what I feel at the time I set out to write, and because my friends are my age. But every play I do is a formal challenge. I’m most interested in creating an elegant artifice. More recently, because of the influence of movies, I’m interested in shifting locales. ‘Ghost on Fire’ has a number of settings. I like creating a large space with very local means. The Elizabethan theater fascinates me for that reason--those plays go everywhere.”

Weller’s interest in the elegant artifice by no means precludes his concern with what goes on inside, in an era that more and more, as he puts it, “invalidates personal response.”

“I stick with the theater because I’m not a literary writer, or a prose writer. People talking to each other is a fundamental trait of mankind. The challenge I feel as a playwright is how to get people to open up, to examine what seems familiar. There’s a tendency now, fed particularly by pop cultural forms, to make people less attentive to what they’re really feeling than to what appears. The artist says, ‘No, it’s not like that.’ ”