THEATER : Revival of ‘Joe Egg’ to Hatch at ART : Autobiographical black comedy about a handicapped daughter is ‘a warts-and-all presentation.’

When “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” first appeared in 1967, it came as a shock. Here was a play in which a mother and father make sick jokes about their handicapped 10-year-old daughter.

Father, impersonating a German doctor: You vont a vord for her? You can say she iss a spastic vis a damaged cerebral cortex, multiplegic, epileptic. . . .

Mother: That is a long word.

Father: Which iss vy I prefer wegetable.

One might have expected that sort of black comedy from Lenny Bruce. But from a British playwright who revealed that “Joe Egg” was autobiographical, that the title character was based on his own barely sentient daughter?

We are talking about Peter Nichols, the author of nearly a dozen mordantly funny plays from “The National Health” (about death and disease) to “Privates on Parade” (about sex and the army) to “Passion Play” (about marriage and adultery).

Like the schoolteacher father in “Joe Egg,” who claims that “every cloud has a jet-black lining,” Nichols is not big on moral uplift. The idea of small victories over great afflictions does not apply. “If ever there was a case for euthanasia it was our daughter,” he said after her natural death at age 11 in 1971.

The revival of “Joe Egg” that opens Friday at the Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana uses a life-size doll rather than an actor in the title role. “It’s been done that way before,” said director Joel T. Cotter during a recent interview at Cal State Fullerton, where he heads the drama department’s scene shop.

An actor in the role, Cotter said, would have distracted an audience in the small confines of a 61-seat storefront theater, particularly when the script calls for Joe to have epileptic seizures and spastic convulsions. Further, a life-size doll fits the format of a sometimes surreal drama filled with satirical sketches, comic parodies and monologues frequently directed to the audience.

“I want the real message of the play to come across,” Cotter said. “I don’t want the focus drawn away from the other characters. ‘Joe Egg’ is not really about Joe. That’s what makes it so interesting. But it will be a warts-and-all presentation. I don’t think the audience will leave whistling.”

In fact, “Joe Egg” focuses on the strains in the marital relationship between Joe’s father and mother after 10 years of trying to cope with their biological disaster. They survive on daily fantasies of murder and guilt. The certainty that Josephine will never be more than a “living parsnip” in a wheelchair, much less a Christy Brown, keeps the sick jokes flowing. (“A useful anesthetic,” allows one of the couple’s offended friends.)

What drew Cotter to Nichols’ play was not only the subject matter but also its British texture. “I have a real fondness for British things,” he said. “I just love their film and drama. It’s very different from what the Americans do. I find most, though not all, British writers to be more substantial.”

At first glance, the 35-year-old director gives an American Gothic impression himself. In his bushy beard, faded blue overalls and yellow T-shirt, he could pass for a tall, hefty dirt farmer just finished with chores at the barn. The impression is dispelled, however, by his soft-spoken theatrical concerns.

“I hope the audience will go into this play with a clean slate,” he said. “I want them to make up their own minds about what happens to the people. I’m not trying to prod them one way or the other.”

In any case, theatergoers will be offered something quite different from the touching heroics provided by dramatizations of the handicapped in such movies and plays as “My Left Foot,” “The Elephant Man” and “Children of a Lesser God.”

“Joe Egg” will be Cotter’s third outing as a director at ART. Earlier this season, he staged a reading of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” and, last season, a production of Arthur Kopit’s comedy “End of the World.”

A native of North Attleboro, Mass., Cotter said that for three years before coming to Cal State Fullerton in 1984 he ran the scene shop at the Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky, one of the nation’s leading resident theaters.

“A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” opens Friday at the Alternative Repertory Theatre, 1636 S. Grand Ave., Santa Ana., and continues Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. through June 16. Tickets: $10-$12 ($15 on opening night). Information: (714) 836-7929.