Drama From ‘Down Under’ Comes to O.C. : Australian Playwright Takes a Comic Look at His Own Milieu in ‘Emerald City’

David Williamson is not so well-known in America as his mates, the Australian film directors Bruce Beresford and Peter Weir, but that is only proof of the premise in his play “Emerald City”--that being a writer of movies relates to power as a canoe relates to the QE II.

Williamson is a writer of movies and a successful one at that (“Gallipoli,” “The Year of Living Dangerously”), but he remains foremost a playwright. In his 1987 play “Emerald City,” which begins its Southern California premiere Friday at the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, he went back to stage-writing to explore the ignominious lot of the screenwriter, finding in the financial imperatives of the movie business a way of measuring the entrepreneurial manners of the last decade.

The play, a satirical comedy, was a huge hit in Australia in 1987 while playing simultaneously at front-line theaters in Sydney and Melbourne.

While the particulars of the plot have to do with the Australian movie business, the circle of film-culture characters in “Emerald City” would be very much at home in Los Angeles or New York with only slight adjustments in their accents and colloquialisms.

The Emerald City of the title refers to Sydney--Australia’s version of Oz, a shimmering, blue-harbored destination sought by the country’s most ambitious, status-conscious and greedy. It is to Sydney, from the more respectable world of “Chardonnay socialists” in Melbourne, that the play’s screenwriter protagonist Colin has fled at the outset, uprooting his politically committed wife, who figures ironically in the ensuing play-length debate about what it means to sell out.

The story of “Emerald City” is to some extent the story of David Williamson. Like Colin, Williamson moved from Melbourne to Sydney a decade ago. He is married, like Colin, but to a journalist rather than a book editor. They live in a house with a harbor view, and, like Colin, Williamson does the shopping. Once a professor of thermodynamics and a member of a Maoist collective theater company, Williamson has gone on to great commercial success (and corresponding academic disdain) by investigating the comic behavior of Australia’s branch of the free-market leisure class.

Though “Emerald City” tosses a few darts in the direction of Hollywood, its main target lies closer to home, Williamson said during an interview at his house in the Sydney suburb of Balmain.

“There’s an attitude in the play toward Australians who do try to make American movies here . . . the thesis being that unless there are identifiable Americans in this Australian film, no one over there will be interested,” he said.

“We have a saying that Americans make better American movies than we do,” Williamson said. “There’s no sense in us trying to make these bastardized, transatlantic movies.”

That issue pops up in “Emerald City” when Colin grows desperate for work and enters into a partnership with a disarmingly likable, low-talent hustler who, for commercial reasons, wants to relocate one of his stories about an Australian aboriginal woman to Tennessee.

Toiling in the relative obscurity of the Southern Hemisphere, Williamson has produced 14 plays and 13 movies since 1970, an output that surely ranks him, at age 48, as one of the most prolific and versatile writers of his generation. (At 6 feet, 7 inches, he must also be one of the tallest.)

His plays, stretching between satire and realism, offer sharply amusing, sometimes sobering accounts of the sexual and professional wars waged among the educated classes of his emerging nation. They have won major awards and a certain following in London, but only sporadically have begun to lodge in the repertories of U.S. theaters .

In Australia, Williamson has become perhaps the leading playwright, but at the same time he has been an object of scorn and suspicion among two opposing camps: those who find his sometimes unflattering depictions of Australian society offensive (and unfit for export) and those who find him not offensive enough, an insufficiently radical entertainer of the middle class.

“I think Freud was right,” Williamson said. “There are some deep dark impulses--aggression, sexuality, territoriality and all that stuff deep down there in the psyche. All the social engineering in the world is not going to change that, as the communist societies have found out.

“I think in an American context, my plays would be seen as quite political. But in this academic left-wing culture here, they’re seen as conservative. So it’s just a spectrum shift. The worst insult they can hurl at me is to say ‘You’re just the Australian Neil Simon.’ They know it’s not true because they know there is actually more social and political content in my work, but it’s something they like to abuse me with.”

It’s hard to imagine Neil Simon writing, as Williamson did, a 1988 miniseries aired by HBO, “A Dangerous Life,” that underscored U.S. complicity in the corrupt Ferdinand Marcos regime. Or the miniseries commissioned (though never produced) by Warner Bros. and CBS about South Africa’s Watson brothers, the white rugby champions who stood up against apartheid and were imprisoned for their beliefs.

“It isn’t a pleasant atmosphere to be a playwright in,” Williamson said of the Australian criticism. “It’s actually been a pleasure to get to America, where these prejudices are not rampant, where you can do a film about McCarthyism and an individual suing General Dynamics, and it will be considered a film with some content to it.”

Despite the tweaking he gives Sydney’s vaunted materialism in “Emerald City,” Williamson believes the city to be “a much more civilized place” than Los Angeles. On one of Williamson’s last visits, L.A. resident Bruce Beresford gave him a tour of the city and the freeways, explaining how gang members go around shooting innocent bystanders on street corners. “It’s just a cowboy society, isn’t it?” Williamson asked.

At the same time, speaking as one who has been repeatedly upbraided for something he has written, he said he values American manners over those of his homeland.

“Middle-class Americans seem to have very good manners indeed, from an outsider looking in,” Williamson said. “There’s a lot of tact and a lot of politeness, whereas Australian culture can be much more direct and brutal at times. After being subjected to some frank questioning at Australian dinner parties, I’m rather relieved to get to America, where there’s much more politeness. Melbourne is worse than Sydney. I went down (to Melbourne) to do a radio show the other day, and the interviewer said ‘Well, I hear your latest play is a real stinker. What do you reckon?’ ”

At one point in “Emerald City,” Colin announces to his wife: “Being a writer is one of the most humiliating professions on earth, and I’m sick of it! I want to be a producer, and I want to have money, and I want to have power. I want to sit in my office with people phoning me ! I want to sit back and tell my secretary that I’m in conference and can’t be disturbed and that I’ll ring back, and then make sure I never do!”

The speech would seem to resonate well beyond Australia, but Williamson said that, so far, his experiences in Hollywood--he has recently completed two scripts for Hollywood producers--have yielded no horror stories comparable to those he puts to comic use in “Emerald City.”

“The nightmares are obviously (still) to come,” he said.