BIG-LEAGUE PLAYWRIGHT SCOUTING IN THE MINORS

Simon Gray doesn’t drive.

“I’m probably a member of the only true minority group,” he said on this, his first visit to Southern California, which partly explains why he’s seen so little of it. The author of such prominent plays as “Butley,” “Otherwise Engaged” and “Quartermaine’s Terms” is in town rewriting his latest piece, “The Common Pursuit,” for an Actors for Themselves production that opens Feb. 7 at the Matrix Theatre--an Equity Waiver house.

Equity Waiver? Seated in a cafe on Melrose Avenue, Gray needed to do some explaining. Why would this member of the Big Leagues choose Little League for the Los Angeles premiere of a play that enjoyed a major run in London in 1984 and a semi-major one later at New Haven’s Long Wharf?

“People keep asking me this question, and it’s never struck me as being a question until it’s been asked,” he said, lighting the first of many cigarettes.

“I came because I thought it would be exactly the right circumstances in which to work on the text. I was unhappy with it. I’d heard very many good things about the Matrix. It seemed to me this would give me a nice kind of laboratory atmosphere.”

A tall man with a square face framed in steel-gray hair, Gray, 49, punctuated his speech with sips of white wine alternating with double espresso:

“It struck me that instead of just allowing the play to happen, it would be a chance to get back to it in a rehearsal atmosphere. I love small American theaters. I find the intensity of the commitment of terrific value to the work.”

The latter seemed an odd statement from one who has acerbically confessed to Byzantine experiences in the American theater (two muggings, a rape, a holdup, a death and a bomb scare). These are humorously detailed in some post-journal essays tacked on to “An Unnatural Pursuit,” Gray’s published diary of how the London production of “Common Pursuit” was put together, under the direction of Harold Pinter, his friend and fellow playwright.

“Later, I did quite a lot in smaller theaters,” he said, “at the Manhattan Theatre Club, for instance” (where his “Rear Column” and “Close of Day” were staged), noting that his bad times in New York centered on mainstream theater.

At its swiftest, Gray’s special kind of dramaturgy is not what you’d call wildly commercial. Until he gave it up last year, all of Gray’s adult life was spent teaching English (eight years at Cambridge, 20 at London University). His writing loves this setting, focusing on the minutiae of British academe (“Butley” features a teacher, “Quartermaine’s Terms” an entire faculty), personal dissociation (“Otherwise Engaged”) and frequently both.

Little in his youth, however, pointed that way. Forced with his brother to spend World War II with elderly grandparents in Canada, they became steeped in alienation.

“Smoking, pilfering, comic-reading and general thuggery” is how Gray remembers those years in Montreal--a daunting situation for his mother to confront when her boys were redelivered to England. She prevailed, but the sense of estrangement acquired in his childhood--not Cambridge--is what informs Gray’s work.

“There was an influence at Cambridge that, if one had submitted to it, would have prevented one from ever writing anything. The only literature considered of value was great literature. Writers can’t sit down to write great literature. They can only sit down to write. I had to break free of that and decide that I am what I am.”

What he was, was a playwright, something he discovered by accident after writing four novels.

“The BBC bought a short story of mine,” he said, “and asked me to write a play, which they then refused to touch on grounds that it was too pornographic. So my agent sent it to (London Producer) Michael Codron who bought it. It was ‘Wise Child’ which was done--my God--20 years ago!

“The moment I actually started to write plays, I never wanted to write anything else. I loved the form. It proposes challenges that are rather like a sonnet for a poet. There have to be pages that are like the couplet at the end of the sonnet. There has to be something approaching a climax at the curtain. You have to find notes and tones and variations. And one is working with people. To tell a story that way is quite an engaging responsibility. I can’t think of anything more exciting.”

It was Codron who produced “Butley,” the first play to give Gray an international reputation and to unite him with Pinter who has staged eight of Gray’s plays, “Pursuit” being the latest. It dwells on the friendship of six Cambridge students and reworking it in Los Angeles has had its ups and downs.

Kristoffer Tabori, who was staging it originally, is now playing the lead and Sam Weisman has come in to direct. Gray, who attends all rehearsals (“The more often I hear the text the more useful it is”), has backed off from the position, stated in print, that the play has no plot.

“I think I was being a bit frisky when I wrote that,” he said, smiling. “I actually do believe there is, in a sense, a plot. It’s a story of six lives. There are years between each scene. Each tells a different part of the story. There’s adultery; marriages break up; children get born. All these have to be in some kind of order, which gives you plot. But I don’t know what it’s about.

“I think it’s about life as I understood it when I wrote the play--and a bit about life as I understand it now that I’m rewriting the play. That’s all.

“Part of what’s fascinating about the theater is the way in which we can explore how people have the capacity to change--and how they have an in capacity to change and don’t know it. I wouldn’t know if people who knew me when I was 20 would find themselves talking to the same person. Probably not.

“We talk about the shock of recognition, but what we really mean is the shock of the failure to recognize. Sometimes you don’t see a close friend for years. What’s shocking is not that you got back together, but that you can’t understand on what terms you ever were (friends). It was Heroclitus, I think, who said that you can’t put your foot in the same stream twice and one of his smart pupils said you can’t put the same foot in the same stream twice.”

As for the natural antithesis of academia and creativity, “they didn’t correspond with me until my last few years because I made it a point of teaching anything to do with theater by conducting seminars as if they were rehearsals.

“We’d look at Shakespeare and I’d say, ‘Let’s pretend we’re producers and we’ve just received this play. Let’s find out what it is--who these people are.’

“Teaching for me was marvelous. It meant that if you’d had a really bad evening at the typewriter, you still thought you might have done something of consequence in the world. There’s nothing like helping students. It can be very much a shared experience.”

Gray lives in Highgate, “with woods in back.” He finds London “the nicest city in the world to live in.” Liking to walk, he has found “the peculiar combination of main drags and suburban architecture” near his Hollywood hotel charming and unexpected. As a writer, does he feel a need to segregate himself?

“I’ve got two children growing up, 19 and 16. The house is full of animals--and I’ve got a wife. Segregation is not easy to achieve.”

Does he work well with actors?

“I like actors very much. I’ve got great respect for them. On the whole I think we get along very well. But I don’t know. I’ve made a point of never asking.”