Strelich’s ‘Dog Logic’ Picks a Bone With Progress

For such a young playwright, Thomas Strelich has a remarkable obsession with things dead and buried.

His quirky comedy “Dog Logic”--which began its premiere run Friday on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage in Costa Mesa--is literally strewn with decaying images. The setting is an abandoned pet cemetery in the San Joaquin Valley boondocks, 40 acres of forgotten and forlorn territory that may be in the path of lucrative urban development.

The cemetery’s reclusive caretaker is a young fellow who lives amid a junkpile of eroded television sets and sofas, who talks to the dead pets, and who frequents the room where the scents of his deceased father and pet dog still linger.

A little wacky?

Not to Strelich, 34, who lives with his film maker-photographer wife, Alison, in North Hollywood and who supports himself between plays as a computer analyst. Strelich will grant you that the ideas of his hero, Hertel Daggett, “can be outlandish, his behavior, to some, exasperating.” But the playwright sees his creation as “a perfectly normal, absolutely lucid fellow, no matter what people think.”

Indeed, Strelich admires Daggett for being a maverick who isn’t afraid to take a cosmic view of life, instead of seeking the posh existence that can come from the quick buck.

This isn’t the first time that Strelich--a Bakersfield native who recently won a $12,000 playwriting grant from the National Endowment for the Arts--has written a parable about man in conflict with steam-roller urbanization.

His first full-length play, “Embarcadero Fugue,” finished in 1981 and later staged in Dallas and Hollywood, is about the impending demolition of an aged Bakersfield hotel and the plight of its longtime residents.

Nor is “Dog Logic” Strelich’s first comment on the breakdown of the American dream of material and societal well-being. “Neon Psalms,” a CBS/Dramatists Guild Award winner that has played New York and San Francisco, examines a worn-down family living in isolation, both physical and spiritual, in a Mojave desert trailer.

“When these people (in ‘Psalms’) were younger, back in the ‘50s, it was the ‘80s that was the future, the great hope that all will be wonderful and good,” Strelich said. “The ‘80s are now here, and none of that has come true for them. They are still lost, still dreaming.”

“Dog Logic” continues Strelich’s mockery of American “progress” while underscoring his growing socio-archaelogical approach to theater--the use of relics, in this case the pet cemetery, as dramatic symbols.

“I wanted to tell how it feels to stand on a plot of land and wonder what’s under the dirt--what lived there generations ago, even eons ago,” Strelich said. “Two million years from now, when people dig up this area, I think a pet cemetery like this will say a hell of a lot more about what existed here than any shopping mall. It will tell about things that people really loved--and that loved us purely and without any ifs and buts.”

Such fascinations with burial date back to work Strelich did in college with a Civil Air Patrol team of students investigating old crash sites. At one, a B-25 bomber from World War II had fallen.

“It was an awesome feeling,” he recalls, “to realize that people had died there (and) all that was left was this rubble. You felt such a reverence--and that they (scavengers) had somehow desecrated the place.”

It is this communion with the past that Strelich has passed on to his character Daggett. “Hertel feels a connection with the dead (in the cemetery),” Strelich explained, “an obligation to preserve and protect them, to never abandon them.

“I’m crazy about the past,” he said with a grin. “Things like dinosaurs are more exciting than outer space and all the futuristic stuff.” It’s no coincidence, then, that “Dog Logic” features a rather prominent appearance by one of Strelich’s idols--Godzilla.

“Dog Logic” continues through June 5 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Curtain: 8:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 8 p.m. Sundays with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 3. Tickets: $19 to $24. Information: (714) 957-4033.