Playwright Draws on His Own Life to Craft ‘Rockville’

Insanity, death, divorce, drinking and horse racing are the tragicomic bedfellows in Jamie Baker’s “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” which opens Thursday at the Victory Theatre in Burbank under his direction.

“I was living in Denver three years ago and it was Derby time,” the actor/playwright explained of the play’s genesis. “I started thinking about my family. My grandmother had had a stroke--and my grandfather, who’d been a jockey (at Churchill Downs), had died 12 years before. Also, there was an argument going on in my family at the time. I thought if I could write a resolution to it, it might help them. So that’s how ‘South Central Rain’ (at the Pacific Theatre Ensemble through Sunday) came out.”

A 1974 “funeral/divorce party” in a Louisville bar was the emotional setting for both his grandfather’s wake and his parents’ split. “But after I heard (the play) read, I felt like it didn’t resolve anything. Instead of feeling love afterward, there were only unanswered questions. There was no awareness. The people were just horses, running around in circles and not getting anywhere, hitting each other with whips. I wanted to turn the play around to where people started loving each other.”

Instead of rewriting that story, Baker began a new play, “Rockville” (which was also developed at Pacific Theatre Ensemble, as a reading in 1986 and in a 12-performance run last January). The characters are the same. This time, however, it’s 1944. His parents are kids, his grandparents are in their mid-20s--and one of Grandma’s old boyfriends looms as an interloper.

But, again, the playwright wasn’t satisfied: “I wanted to sum things up.” Out came a third play, “Feeling Gravity’s Pull,” which is set in 1968. In that one, “My grandfather’s betting money with a bookie to raise enough money to get my grandmother out of an insane asylum. In ‘South Central,’ she was getting there. Now, 24 years later, the drugs the doctors have been giving her (have taken their toll).”

Although Baker, 26, stresses that some of the plot twists (including a sexual relationship with his cousin Rhonda) are totally made up, real life provided the majority of his dramatic fodder. Grandma did indeed go batty. (“She accused Spiro Agnew of stealing her jewelry, so they had to put her away.”) And when Grandpa--up before a local judge on one-too-many driving-under-the-influence charges--was counseled that he’d either have to give up drinking or driving, he coolly approached the bench and handed the judge his car keys.

Baker laughs as he retells the incident. “Each time I got into a little story, I’d think, ‘Wow, that would make another play.’ ” Nevertheless, he thinks the Louisville trilogy will probably wrap up the cross-generational inspection--for now. As for a play about his own adult life, “I don’t think it would be all that interesting,” he says ruefully. “I guess the next big question is, ‘Can I write a play about anything except my own family?’ ”

The answer is yes. Upcoming projects include a musical--inspired by Jack Kerouac’s “Tristessa” and set in 1955 Mexico City (“sort of a musical ‘Year of Living Dangerously’ ”) and a play about ‘30s publisher Harry Crosby, who shot his mistress--then, two hours later, turned the gun on himself.

“I want to write about those two hours,” Baker said soberly. “The only problem is, I think of that (era) as one of great intelligence, a very literary world. I don’t know if I have the vocabulary to capture that--I’m so used to writing general-admission track people.”

It might have to do with the company he’s been keeping. “I’m much more into horse racing now than I was as a kid,” Baker acknowledged. “As a kid, those 20 minutes between each race felt like a day and a half. But now I go there and read the form and it’s like, ‘I don’t have enough time!’ I started to go because of the play; I wanted to learn how to read the racing form, figure out the strategy. Some people find the stock market interesting. I find the racing form interesting. But I don’t think it has anything to do with my childhood.”

He left Louisville--and a Catholic school education--at 16 when his parents divorced, spending time in Phoenix, Ariz. (“horrible”), and Yorba Linda, Calif. At college (Santa Maria’s Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts), he trained as an actor, later enrolling in writing classes “to learn more about characterization through the actor’s eye--then I kind of got hooked.”