STOPPARD: GETTING THE RIGHT BOUNCE

American playwrights tend to see themselves as little Eugene O’Neills, throwing a new thunderbolt with every play. This can lead to strain when the thunderbolts don’t come. Contrast Tom Stoppard. When he can’t think of an idea for a play, he writes something else.

Actually, Stoppard was saying the other afternoon, his problem isn’t finding ideas, it’s thinking up plots. For instance, he is intrigued with the new scientific notion that uncertainty is the innermost state of things. But how do you put that on the stage? “I wish I were more fertile as an inventor of stories. It’s the major obstacle to writing more.”

So Stoppard hasn’t written a full-course, sit-down play since 1982’s “The Real Thing,” which opens Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum. (It concerns a clever playwright who stubs his toe against real life, real love, real betrayal.) Nevertheless, he’s been turning out scripts. He did, or re-did, the screenplay for “Brazil” and he is currently adapting Arthur Schnitzler’s 1895 play, “Leibelei” for the National Theatre of Great Britain, under the title “Dalliance.”

Some find Stoppard’s adaptations as richly Stoppardian as his original plays. (The Taper saw his “Undiscovered Country,” also derived from Schnitzler, last season.) Stoppard says only that “it’s nice to have these interludes when I can Call-A-Playwright” and, so to speak, collaborate with him.

And not knuckle under. When he’s adapting a play, Stoppard works from a literal translation, but he takes whatever liberties he thinks necessary to make the play work today.

“I used to be a much more faithful adapter. But you’re not doing the guy a favor, if the thing won’t bounce properly, to say, ‘Well, that’s exactly the way it was in the original.’ It’s also true that audiences today don’t need as much information as they once did.”

So he cuts and shapes, and, in “Dalliance,” has even changed Schnitzler’s ending--”toughened it up.” If poetry is what gets lost in translation (he quotes Frost to that effect), perhaps other things can be sacrificed, too. The bounce is all.

The metaphor (it also turns up in “The Real Thing”) is from cricket, which Stoppard still plays at 49, to aches and pains on Monday morning. Twenty years ago, he was a bit of a dandy. He seems sturdier now, more at home in the world.

Above all, a practical man of the theater. “I like rehearsals. I like to sit there with my pencil ready. They always say: ‘You must get bored.’ I don’t get bored.”

Does he want to direct? He has tried it, twice. A dozen years ago, on a self-dare, he staged “Born Yesterday.” This season he did his own “The Real Inspector Hound.” His conclusion:

“I’m no good at it. I’m good at working with actors in a room. I’m good at knowing what kind of noise the play is supposed to make. But it comes to putting the play on the stage, I have remarkably little to contribute.

“I don’t seem to have a visual imagination. The designer will make a suggestion and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, that sounds great.’ He’ll make a contrary suggestion and I’ll say, ‘Yes, let’s try that, too.’ I am a fatal victim of multiple fascination.”

How can a man without a visual imagination write movies? “You will find that in my movies people talk a lot. That’s what I get paid for. Also I tend to be good about getting a script from point A to point B, rather than just letting things whiz by. Actually, Terry Gilliam (director of “Brazil”) thinks that in the movies things should just whiz by. In a way, he’s right. Who cares?”

Stoppard claims to be plagued by “multiple fascination” generally. So he finds comfort in a specific assignment. (Which may be why he likes to do adaptations.)

“If someone said, ‘I want you to do a film the likes of which has never been seen’--I wouldn’t know where to begin. But if you know that you’re putting together a piece for some actors and a symphony orchestra (i.e., his and Andre Previn’s “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour”), there are a lot of things you can’t do, and you begin with that.”

Another way of delimiting the problem is working in a specific genre. “It’s clear from the plays how I love to fool around with genre material. If someone asked me to do ‘Fistful of Dollars,’ I’d probably do it. Of course, you have to have this inner certainty that your ‘Fistful of Dollars’ would have that certain something that only you can give it. . . .

“ ‘St. Joan of the Lost Ark!’ Now, there’s a movie I’d be very interested in doing.”

It is, after all, the same old Tom Stoppard. Does writing get easier for him, or harder?

“Harder. I look at stuff I wrote 10 years ago and I say, I wouldn’t know how to do that today. Of course, I also look at stuff and wonder what I was thinking of. I saw ‘Jumpers’ not too long ago in a provincial British theater and I thought that we must have been mad to think that this was a Broadway play.”

“The Real Thing” was very much a Broadway play, bringing Stoppard a Tony. “Yes. Taking my American experience in isolation that play appealed to a larger part of the spectrum. It seemed to come closer to peoples’ experience than anything else I’d written.

“But I’m not sure that the kind of play I’m here to write isn’t closer to ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Travesties’--intellectual extravaganzas. My whole career has been quite haphazard, in a way. My plays aren’t written out of a policy. They tend to suggest themselves.”

What would Tom Stoppard, successful middle-aged playwright, say to Tom Stoppard, bright young playwright on the way up?

“I would say, don’t give interviews. Once you give one, you’re trapped. You have to keep living up to the last one. You present a version of yourself that you think will gratify the interviewer, and the next day you read about this person who puts himself forward in ways that you don’t.

“It’s embarrassing. And strangely enough, the more accurate the interview is, the more you’re embarrassed.”