Playwright Survives a Spate of Polite Script-Bashing in Audience-Review Experiment

Sitting cross-legged on the Mainstage at South Coast Repertory on Monday night, braving the ritual gauntlet of the theater’s NewSCRipt series, playwright Mark Stein was not unlike a caged mouse. He didn’t utter a squeak.

The series, designed to test the “playability” of unfinished scripts by gauging audience reaction to staged readings, has gained a national reputation as a sophisticated laboratory for developing new plays.

On the evidence of what happened to Stein’s “At Long Last Leo,” a seriocomic work in progress, the reputation of the series is not only well earned but tough-minded.

For while the audience seemed generally enthusiastic, and while it operated under the restraint of civilized ground rules (principally a request not to tell the 36-year-old playwright how to fix anything), it nonetheless got into a deceptively polite, script-bashing mood.

One woman complained that she couldn’t “feel for the characters,” despite a terrific reading by the actors, because of what was basically the play’s preposterous situation.

“You’ve done a nice mental walk-through,” she concluded.

Stein’s script revolves around Leo, a grad school dropout who returns to his suburban home after writing a 638-page manifesto that he hopes will start a movement to change the world.

“This is what I’ve been working on for two years, mom,” he announces to his chronically depressed mother.

“I knew you were doing something ,” she replies.

The unpublished manuscript acquires so much significance that it almost gets up and walks. Arriving by mail in the family’s back yard moments before Leo does, it dominates the play like a totemic prop.

Leo is not really sure that his “cockamamie reconceptualization (of life) is viable,” however. And, not surprisingly, his family can’t quite get around to reading the tome.

Still, Leo wonders with a straight face at the end of Act I: “What if I really am the next Trotsky or the next Moses?”

Both possibilities would seem to be patently out of the question. But Stein has yet to clarify whether he is satirizing Leo or taking him at his word.

During the discussion, SCR dramaturge John Glore drew attention to the issue, perhaps without intending to, by asking the audience: “Did you feel (Leo) might be a legitimate man of ideas--whether or not of the caliber of Marx or Freud--or did you at some point seriously doubt the value of what he had done there” in the manuscript?

No guffaws were heard. One man’s reaction, however, more or less summed up a very reasonable point of view: “Leo seems like a typical kid who’s still at Berkeley . . . and never got his master’s.”

Meanwhile, the character that posed the greatest problem for the audience was the mother. It was a prescient reaction, as debate about her motivation brought out, because Leo’s mother is crucial to the play’s “workability,” if not its playability.

In fact, given Stein’s unquestionable facility for glib repartee and cute one-liners, “At Long Last Leo” played so well that it never adequately addressed the submerged depths or the idiosyncrasies of the characters.

“I sensed a deep tragedy,” one man said of the mother. “But I wasn’t aware of what the tragedy was.”

“It wasn’t so important to me to know what her specific problem was,” one woman said. “The people in the play who love her don’t know what it is, so it made sense that I didn’t. But I do need to have a better sense of where her emotions are coming from.”

In an interview after the discussion, Stein praised the cast and jokingly conceded that he sat on the stage to hear the criticism (instead of remaining invisible in the audience) because his ego had got the better of him and not because he had a streak of masochism, as Glore had alleged.

But, he said, once the discussion got under way, “I wondered whether John was right.”

The cast, which had rehearsed the script for several days, included Arye Gross as Leo; Priscilla Pointer as Mom; Robert Symonds as Dad; Noreen Hennessey as Sheila; Valerie Mahaffey as Gloria, and Jeff Stephenson as Bartholomew.

“I love doing this kind of thing,” Pointer said. “Working with a new play is very exciting. This one is intriguing.”

Stein returned the compliment: “I’ve had script readings before, but never with actors this good.”

Stein, a native of Washington, has had six plays produced by small but prestigious companies, including “Groves of Academe” at the Manhattan Theatre Club. He also has four movie projects “in development at Disney and Fox.”