Leonard Play Mirrors Ethnic Maneuverings in Little Italy

Jim Leonard Jr. may be the only playwright in America whose words are not precious to him.

“It doesn’t bother me if we lose dialogue,” he said of his latest work, “V & V Only” (opening Friday at South Coast Repertory). “I’d rather the audience believe that what’s going on is real. So there’s a lot of overlapping dialogue; people are talking over here, and something else is going on back there.”

The setting is V & V’s coffee shop in New York’s Little Italy, “a carry-out kind of place where a few people hang around, but mostly they sell coffee-to-go, espresso, cappuccino ,” he said.

Casting a cloud on the picture is the specter of change. “New York is changing rapidly,” noted Leonard, 32, reaching for his smokes (a habit he fell back into at the onset of rehearsals). “The whole section of Little Italy is almost nonexistent now, bought up to a phenomenal extent by Chinese, Japanese and Koreans.

“They work nonstop and provide beautiful service. But the point is they’re taking over, encroaching on Little Italy--and there’s an awful lot of tension.”

Leonard, who keeps a tiny apartment in that neighborhood, said he felt the setting was ripe for a treatise on urban immigration.

“We tend to think about immigration as being something in the past: something our forefathers did, three generations ago,” he said. “But it’s happening now .”

He admits to “hanging out and hearing things” as the basis for his theatre verite, but stressed that the setting is fictional. “The title is the name of the coffee shop,” he said. “The owner’s name is Vito; his wife--who left him years ago and now does makeup for pornographic movies--was Victoria.”

The Indiana-born writer (whose second play, “The Diviners,” rocketed him to success in 1981, with runs at New York’s Circle Repertory and South Coast) completed “V & V” more than a year ago and had it read at Circle Rep. After the reading, the company’s then-artistic director, Marshall W. Mason (now the new guest artistic director of the Ahmanson), told Leonard that he wanted to stage the work. The result is a co-production between Circle Rep and South Coast that will play six weeks in Southern California and then move to New York.

“It works out very nicely, “ Leonard said. “They split the costs, and John Lee Beatty designed the sets to be moved.”

Is the West Coast staging the guinea pig production?

“Not exactly,” he said. “What would be wonderful is if you could run a play in New York for eight or nine weeks before the critics came--but you can’t do that. See, there’s an incredible amount of business to work out, very specific action. When we read through the first act sitting down, just running lines, it lasts 40 minutes. When the actors are up on their feet, trying to figure out what’s going on, it’s an hour and a half. It will last an hour. It’s just that it’s a very prop-heavy show: They’ve got to make coffee, serve the cappuccino .”

In any case, he’s pleased with the way the play is taking shape emotionally.

“I like to tell a story,” Leonard said. “The way (artistic director) Marshall works--and I don’t know anybody else who does this--is that he asks the actors to memorize scenes in progression. So we start out rehearsals day one with scene one. The actors memorize the first five pages the first day. Then we stage those five pages, muck through that.

“The next afternoon, we do the next three pages. The next morning we run the first eight pages--and that afternoon, stage five more. They never have scripts in their hands. It’s like running hurdles, getting to each spot. And there’s a real sense of flow to the play.”

Leonard (whose second residence is an 1890s Indiana farmhouse he shares with his wife and 12-week-old son, Abel) hopes to balance writing stage plays and screenplays. Several years ago, director Robert Altman hired him to write the screenplay for “The Diviners” (as yet unproduced).

“I loved (John Patrick Shanley’s) ‘Moonstruck,’ Horton Foote’s ‘Tender Mercies’ and (John Guare’s) ‘Atlantic City,’ ” he said, reeling off a list of films written by playwrights.

“I think it would be wonderful to make lower-budget pieces--not art films, but serious attempts that say something literate. Intelligent. That’s not asking too much.”

‘V & V Only’

Friday, 8:30 p.m.; Tuesdays through

Fridays, 8:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 3 and

8:30 p.m.; Sundays at 3 and 8 p.m.

South Coast Repertory, 655 Town

Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

$19 to $24.

Information: (714) 957-4033.