Murray Schisgal Puts on a Show--So What Else Is New?

Murray Schisgal is pacing, his hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans. When he pivots you can read “Dunlop Tires” on the back of his shirt. But for his white beard and the overgrown monk’s fringe of hair on his bald head, he might pass for an eager kid in a schoolyard.

“There is nothing more important than putting on a show,” he says, halting to peer into the rehearsal hall where his latest play, “The Songs of War,” is being readied for its premiere Wednesday at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove. “You can’t feed yourself on hits and flops, because that’s not where it’s at. Where it’s at is that I’m still working in the theater. Why else would I be here?”

Why indeed. Everybody who’s anybody in Hollywood knows that Schisgal is justlikethis with his old pal Dustin Hoffman, who employs him to develop movie projects. He co-wrote the smash hit, “Tootsie.” He was onto the phenomenally successful “Rain Man” so early that he remembers when the autistic title role was conceived as a paraplegic. Schisgal could be taking meetings at the Polo Lounge till the cows come home.

Instead, the 62-year-old Brooklyn native has resumed pacing like a caged playwright in the funky dimness of the stage manager’s office. There is such urgency in his voice and fervor in his eyes, you wonder whether he hasn’t been drafted by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland to put on a show in an old MGM musical.

“Listen to that!” he says, as the zippy, lilting strains of a World War I song, “Oui, Oui, Marie,” filter into the office. “We were always into these numbers as part of my growing up. Listen to that!”

If you do zees for me

I will do zat for you.

But while Schisgal’s latest play is filled with song and dance, he hesitates to call it a musical. He doesn’t know how to describe it without reaching for the kitchen sink. “It has everything I know how to do in it,” he says. Comedy. Tragedy. Autobiography. Family conflict. Vaudeville. Americana. Philosophy. Absurdity. Hyperbole. “I’m going for the whole bag in this one,” he says. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll be singing and dancing.”

“Songs” revolves around a 60-year-old performer, who reminisces about his life and moves back and forth through time as in a Pirandello fantasy. If it is indeed his “most ambitious play,” then it has vaulted to the top of a huge catalogue of works. For Schisgal happens to be one of the most prolific playwrights around, having penned 50 works for the stage since achieving instant acclaim 29 years ago in London with his first one-acts, “The Typists, and The Tiger.”

Best known for “Luv,” which was an enormous Broadway hit in 1963, Schisgal has lost the esteem of the critics over the years. (A pair of one-acts, “The Rabbi and the Toyota Dealer” and “A Need for Brussel Sprouts,” was roundly panned at the Mayfair Theatre in 1985.) But he has never let that stop him. Another new play, “Oatmeal and Kisses,” will be produced in New York next winter, he says. And an earlier play not yet produced in this country, “Popkins,” will be mounted in Paris next fall.

“I never know why I choose to write what I write,” Schisgal says. “I just go the way it takes me. I’ve had plays open everywhere, from Texas to New Jersey. The critics have their job. I’ve got mine. I just keep moving. That’s all you can do. Whether ‘Luv’ was a hit or not, I don’t think it matters. You have to get your satisfaction from what you’re doing and that’s a day-to-day thing. It’s writing. It’s going to rehearsals. It’s a whole gestalt.

“After spending 30 years in the theater, my feeling is that there are no rules. Experience doesn’t mean that much, because sometimes inexperience and luck are sufficient to give you what you can’t get in a million years through all the hard work.”

Schisgal calls his writing for the stage an “obsession and an addiction,” but he didn’t begin as a playwright. He turned to the theater only after producing three novels that nobody wanted to publish. Ironically, he began his career as a lawyer--after a Navy stint during World War II--in the belief that it would allow him plenty of spare time for writing. When it didn’t, he changed careers.

“I took all these part-time jobs,” recounts Schisgal, who lives on New York’s Central Park West. “I finally ended up teaching at a junior high school in East Harlem. It was a rather contorted, convoluted way of getting to be a writer.”

Although he has been lumped in with the postwar absurdists, he is not fond of being pigeonholed. The “absurdist school” has come and gone, after all, and the current crop of leading American playwrights can’t be identified with any particular school.

“The theater today is a hodgepodge,” Schisgal says. “There’s no one clear line superseding any other. I actually feel closer to Gogol (the 19th-Century playwright and novelist) than to anyone else.”