‘Search and Destroy’ Protagonist on a Desperate Mission

At the beginning of Howard Korder’s new play “Search and Destroy,” protagonist Martin Mirkheim decides he must leave his mark on the world: “Something good. Something lasting. Something of myself.”

In a sign of the playwright’s dark view of the times, Mirkheim’s grand dreams of posterity rest on producing a movie --the film version of a novel by a shady TV evangelist/self-help guru whose first rule of success is: “Strength needs no excuse.”

“Maybe 600 years ago (Mirkheim) would have built a cathedral,” Korder said Saturday at South Coast Repertory before a rehearsal for a reading the new play is being given tonight. “Maybe 150 years ago he would have started a foundling home or some kind of philanthropic institution.”

But Korder’s late-’80s man looks to Hollywood. “Movies are our secular church,” Korder explained, and in Mirkheim’s quest for spiritual fulfillment “he gravitates toward this industry of fantasy.”

A dark comedy that chronicles the increasingly desperate means by which Mirkheim pursues his goal, “Search and Destroy” comes to SCR as part of its NewSCRipts series of public readings. This isn’t Korder’s first involvement in the program: His play “Boys’ Life” launched the NewSCRipts series in 1985.

“Boys’ Life” was never produced by SCR but did go on to a successful run last spring at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York, and Korder was praised in a New York Times review of the play as a writer with a “pungent voice and distinctive gifts.”

The 31-year-old New Yorker said his response to the success of “Boys’ Life” was low-key, due in part to his self-described “saturnine” nature and partly because the play already felt like a “relic of the past” by the time of its New York production.

“I was glad that it happened,” Korder said, “but I didn’t jump around like I had just won the ‘$25,000 Pyramid.’ ”

“Search and Destroy” was created on commission from SCR, and Korder said he hopes to see it produced there. While he said that such readings as tonight’s “have a certain usefulness” in helping him trim lines that fall flat and in otherwise fine-tuning new work, overall he takes a dim view of the word “development” when it applies to writing plays.

“They’re not muscles or photographs,” he said. “They pretty much rise or fall on their initial merit.”

“Boys’ Life,” which follows the the exploits of three womanizing buddies, resembles “Search and Destroy” in that the main characters stop at nothing to get what they want. “In one sense, (“Search and Destroy”) is about those characters in the world outside the bedroom,” Korder said.

That world, in the playwright’s view, is pervaded by fear, a persistent motif in “Search and Destroy.” One character in the play predicts that the ‘90s will be the “fear decade,” a sentiment Korder evidently shares. “I think the level of anxiety is at an all-time high,” he said. “That is an emotion that consumes all others.”

“Fear-related industries”--everything from portable security systems to “impact-proof leisure wear”--are buzzwords in “Search and Destroy,” just as “plastics” was a buzzword for the ‘60s in “The Graduate.” Fear is just one more niche in the marketplace.

“If people are afraid,” Korder said, “there are people who find a way to exploit it.”

A reading of “Search and Destroy,” the third in South Coast Repertory’s 1988-89 NewSCRipts series, begins at 7:30 p.m. and will be followed by a discussion of the work with the playwright, actors and director. South Coast Repertory is at 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $6 Information: (714) 957-4033.