PLAYWRIGHT OF IRISH GREEK TRAGEDY

Playwright Peter Sheridan, slightly slumped back in his restaurant chair, leaned forward, in the uncharacteristic position of searching for the words to describe “what it was like in Belfast then.”

That was Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1980, when 10 members of the provisional forces of the Irish Republican Army (the IRA), led by Commander Bobby Sands, conducted a hunger strike to the death in high-security Long Kesh prison.

To the British government, they were common criminals and not political prisoners, as the IRA insisted they were. What began as a protest over such claims evolved into what Sheridan describes as “Greek tragedy. People gave off this aura of dignity, not triumph. Creon may have denied burial rights, but he couldn’t destroy Antigone’s decency. Politically, you could say the British won. But they didn’t.”

Eventually, Sheridan molded those events into “Diary of a Hunger Strike,” opening Thursday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Talking with the playwright makes one wonder how writers ever survive the creative labyrinth they put themselves through.

“The process of writing is so tortuous. I hate it with a passion. But I’ve got to do it. When I was writing ‘Diary,’ I couldn’t eat for days at a time. How could I, with this fellow (Pat O’Connor, played by Colm Meaney) starving himself to death? When you’re raised with the sense of guilt over you, as I was, you either keep it or you break it. But if you break it, it’s like breaking a lifeline. So my lifeline became writing plays.

“I remember once when I was writing a speech for ‘Emigrants,’ my play about the Irish famine. The scene has a mother seated with her legs dangling over an open grave. She’s holding a dead child in her arms, pressing the child against her nipple. Suddenly, at 4 in the morning, I felt like God was going to get me for writing this.”

But in the case of writing “Diary,” another Catholic ritual serves as a better metaphor: exorcism.

“Like Calcutta,” Sheridan said in a steady tone, “Belfast then had this mood that didn’t require anyone to say anything. It was simply this feeling that said, ‘Ten of our boys are dead.’ People didn’t believe that it could go this far. Everyone shared the loss.”

Suddenly, Sheridan cried, making what he said next almost unnecessary: “I was afraid to write this play, I didn’t want to. I felt so much for these people and what the families must have gone through.”

The play, however, goes exactly against predictable sympathies, and appears designed with the ethic of the documentarian. “I wanted to portray the complexity of the situation in the North,” Sheridan explained. “I didn’t want to portray the prison regime, for instance, as a system of bully boys. I thought that if I did that, it would lessen the impact of what they represented. This is why I went for a lot of shading in the characters.

“The situation is too complex for me not to. How complex is summed up in two sayings. One is, ‘You can’t bomb a million Protestants into a united Ireland.’ On the other hand, there’s the quip, ‘Six into 26 won’t go’ (punning on math and the six Northern counties and the 26 Irish Republic counties). That leaves us in a trap.

“The North has a siege mentality. It’s no surprise why people celebrate the 1690 Siege of Londonderry. The mentality says that you dig yourself in, keep the other side out.

“I’m a Dubliner, so I’m not writing from a Belfast perspective. Somebody from Belfast would have written the same play with more anger. I’m sorry, but that’s not me. I’ve been criticized for writing a too finely balanced play. But I wrote it to get it out of my system.”

This fair-haired, slight-framed playwright grew up in what is called the Dublin Womb, the dockside inner city of the poor working class. His family home was on the same street where Sean O’Casey lived, and the O’Casey ghost seemed to follow Sheridan everywhere.

“At the same time, I was immersed in existentialism with Sartre, Camus and Beckett. Especially Beckett, and that amazing language of his. Growing up in this culturally rich yet materially poor environment, I started asking myself questions. Why were all the things O’Casey had pointed out about the poor so unchanged? So now,” Sheridan caustically remarked, “his plays are presented as works of art for the pastime of those who can afford a seat in the nicer Dublin theaters.”

That he is directing “Diary,” with a cast starring Sean Cassidy (“I’ve found it fascinating working with him”), is no great burden for Sheridan. He has done it before.

“I don’t direct from the writer’s perspective, but from the director’s. So I’ll cut without thinking twice. I ask: Is this working? What is wrong here? You see, I work mostly in a collaborative process in Ireland. I build the play up from the ground floor.”

One of those collaborations led to the Dublin-based City Workshop. It had remarkable beginnings in 1982 as a cultural employment project, sponsored by the government through an inner-city community agency.

“We hired people right off the street, but it was soon clear to me that many of them were natural performers. We had a grant for six months, but extended it to two years. It became probably the highest-profile employment project in the Republic, and we ended up playing the Royal Court in 1984.”

This, in turn, led Sheridan to help form C.A.F.E. (Creative Activity for Everyone), an alliance of cultural groups in the North and South. “It’s based on the belief that the arts are not the domain of a certain class, and that if you give people the means to express themselves, you get culture. Because real culture is the way people live.

“So,” said Sheridan, once the Abbey Theatre’s playwright-in-residence, “I’ve stepped outside the mainstream, which only has so much. I think I want to live out here in Los Angeles now. If I don’t take the chance to see what it’s like here, I may never have it again.”

And back to writing? “Yes,” but he doesn’t shudder. “I haven’t written for four years (since “Diary”), so I’m ready.”

As if remembering the pain of the hunger strikes, he adds, “Only no more histories.”