Israel Horovitz Returns to Gloucester

Playwright Israel Horovitz thinks Los Angeles is a wonderful place to work out a new play. But not for the reasons one might imagine.

“L.A. is so focused on TV and film that theater is kind of an arcane sport,” the Obie- and Emmy-winning writer said. “People look at you like you’re doing something cute .”

Despite those external perceptions, his own commitment perseveres. “As a playwright, I’m very close to the work,” said Horovitz, author of “Strong-Man’s Weak Child,” opening Friday at Los Angeles Theatre Center. “And now, being the director too, it’s right at the end of my nose . . . though with my nose, that’s not so close.”

“Strong-Man” is the latest in Horovitz’s “Gloucester plays” (he counts “9 or 10” of them), a cycle of works rooted in Gloucester, Mass. Horovitz visited the town as a child; as an adult, he traveled back “to this place I loved so much and went to work in this little Victorian house on a hill.” Formerly a working-class area, Horovitz has seen “Boston yuppies” drive the real estate prices up; at the same time, local businesses--some of them five generations old--began to founder and disappear.

With local suicides on the upswing, morale at a low ebb and drugs taking fierce hold, Horowitz began thinking of the community as a microcosm of society’s contemporary ills.

“It seemed if I could write about life in this little dot, it might be a metaphor for what’s going on in the larger world,” he said. “So with the Gloucester plays, I started to make (the setting) as important as the story. I had the feeling that if I got it right for Gloucester, it would work for the entire world.”

“Strong-Man” was inspired by Horovitz’s time at a gym there.

“I’ve been a runner since I was 13; now I’m 51,” he said. “I’ve been working out in gyms because I don’t want to look like other writers--but since I run, I’m very thin.

“I’ve been around gyms forever, and I really love them. What you see in Gloucester are these lampers (stevedores), big, beefy strong men who’re not trained for anything else--and now the shipping industry is closing down. I loved the metaphor of the men keeping their bodies in shape, almost as an antidote for the work going away.”

The piece, which features Meg Foster, Peter Iacangelo, Nick Mancuso and Don Yesso, tells of a body-builder whose daughter is stricken with bone-marrow cancer. “I used bone-marrow because it’s the deepest possible rotting,” Horovitz noted. “The story sounds like a soap opera, but when you see it, it’s larger than that. You have these uneducated people discussing deeply philosophical issues without a sophisticated language--dealing with questions like ‘What is a father?’ ‘What is a parent?’ ”