Play’s Lessons in Coping Inspire Theater Group

A child dies, a marriage collapses, a friendship strains in Mary Gallagher’s “How to Say Goodbye,” the play chosen by the Stop-Gap theater company to celebrate its 10th anniversary season, opening Saturday at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa.

Yet, “How to Say Goodbye” isn’t about these dissolutions, says Don R. Laffoon executive director of the Santa Ana group that specializes in “drama therapy.” Instead, he said, it is about the ways people deal with misfortunes such as terminal illness or emotional trauma. Considering the work Stop-Gap does, “How to Say Goodbye” struck home, inspiring the company to give the play its West Coast premiere.

Stop-Gap players visit abused children, cancer patients, stroke victims and others in crisis and stage sketches to help their audiences cope with their lot. Twice a year, to raise funds and to keep theatrical skills honed, Stop-Gap mounts full-scale productions for general audiences.

“I was struck by how Mary Gallagher was able to zero in on how this (crisis) affected a marriage and how it affected the friends of this couple,” Laffoon said.

“How to Say Goodbye,” which premiered at the 1986 Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky., and subsequently won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for female playwrights, is a sort of post-’60s melodrama in which freewheeling pals from the early 1970s find their lives irrevocably altered by the birth of a brain-damaged child named Conor.

The play cuts back and forth in time between the happy days of Conor’s toddlerhood and the troubled hours attending his death at age 8.

Gallagher, 40, said in a phone interview from her home in Kerhonkson N.Y., that her interest in “long-term tragedy” as a dramatic subject began after her own father became mentally ill years ago.

“It seems to me that in everybody’s life you have to deal with some sort of tragedy like that, something that happens and doesn’t go away because it isn’t over. “

By structuring the play as she did, with frequent slips between past and present, Gallagher said she sought to spare audiences from a linear descent into the depressing topic of her play.

Her intent was to write the story of Conor’s demise and its effects “to be more like art and less like a hospital drama.”

For Stop-Gap, the subject was immediately compelling. The company’s major productions follow the themes its players encounter in their charity work.

Last fall’s production was “Listen to the Dreaming,” an original play by John Weston focusing on AIDS. In the past, the company has produced versions of such plays as “The Miracle Worker,” William Gibson’s Helen Keller story and Christopher Durang’s “Beyond Therapy,” a farce that ridicules psychiatrists and their patients.

“The San Francisco Mime Troupe does political theater, the Orange County Black Actors Theatre does work related to the black experience, and this is what we do,” Laffoon says. “It makes perfect sense to me that the plays we select to do are on socially relevant themes.

“They are not depressing; they’re just about what we are all trying to cope with. They are life-affirming plays.”

Stop-Gap’s production of “How to Say Goodbye” by Mary Gallagher will be presented at South Coast Repertory Theatre’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Preview performance today. Regular run opens Saturday and continues through June 24 (no performance Monday). Curtain time: 8:30 p.m.; Sunday matinee at 3 p.m. Tickets: $12, previews; $15, regular performances (except June 18 benefit package, $100, including dinner). Ticket information: (714) 957-4033. For benefit information, call Stop-Gap at (714) 648-0135.