‘Burn This,’ a Favorite of Playwright Lanford Wilson, Ignites on San Diego Stage : Theater: The play got a warm reception on Broadway, and the Pulitzer Prize winner ranks it high among the many works he has written.

“People ain’t easy.”

That’s a line from Lanford Wilson’s play “Burn This,” which is playing at the San Diego Repertory Theatre.

But, as you might say after seeing almost any Wilson play, all of which are densely populated with prickly losers, dreamers, incurable romantics--”people are worth it.” Even if the characters end up burning each other--or themselves.

Wilson is now at work on his first new project since “Burn This,” which starred John Malkovich and Joan Allen on Broadway in 1987 (Allen won the Best Actress Tony for her role). But he still counts “Burn This” as a favorite among plays he has written, along with “The Mound Builders” which premiered in 1975.

That’s quite a commendation because Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for “Talley’s Folly” in 1980, a play about a romance between a Jewish Holocaust survivor and the daughter of snobbish Midwesterners. Before that, Wilson established his name with “The Hot L Baltimore,” an Obie Award-winning play about a group of colorful hard-luck tenants in a dingy New York hotel. That play set an Off-Broadway record after it opened in 1973.

In a telephone interview from his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, Wilson acknowledged that part of the reason he is so taken with “Burn This” is that it still is his most recently completed play.

“Burn This” is a four-character play that centers on a character named Pale, a homophobic man whose gay brother had recently died. In the midst of dealing with his brother’s death, Pale falls for Anna, a female dancer who had been his dead brother’s roommate.

“Burn This” premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1987. It got good reviews from New York critics when it debuted on Broadway later that year.

Wilson said he likes “The Mound Builders” because the Obie-award winning play about architects in Missouri is “the most complicated thing I’ve ever done and the least successful,” he said.

He admits he has always had a special place in his heart for losers--even when it comes to his own work.

But, then, he is close to all his plays. All are drawn from places he has lived and the types of people--if not the people themselves--that he has known.

A 53-year-old native of Lebanon, Mo. (where his trilogy of Talley plays is set), Wilson spent his 18th year at San Diego State University. Here, he became reacquainted with his father, whom he hadn’t seen since his parents divorced when he was 5, and met his half-brothers, Jim and John Wilson, who still live here. John Wilson teaches math at San Diego State.

“Lemon Sky,” produced in 1970, which Wilson has described as the most autobiographical of his plays, is a story set in San Diego about a father-son conflict.

Wilson began his career in advertising in Chicago and moved to New York City on July 5, 1962, to become a playwright. (The second play in the Talley trilogy is called “The 5th of July,” but Wilson said that is just coincidence).

He made his reputation Off-Off Broadway at Caffe Cino and later at the Circle Repertory Company, which he co-founded in 1968. He eventually settled in Sag Harbor, the setting for at least one of his new works in progress, called “Virgil Is Still the Frog Boy.”

The play was inspired by a graffito that read “Virgil Is the Frog Boy,” Wilson said. One day the graffito was painted over, but seven years later, a new one that said “Virgil Is Still the Frog Boy” appeared in the same spot.

The soft-spoken playwright has often been compared to Tennessee Williams and Anton Chekhov. One New York critic even compared the love story in “Burn This” to the ill-fated attraction between Stanley Kowalski and Blanche du Bois in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

But, though Wilson said he doesn’t see the connection between “Burn This” and “Streetcar,” he said he doesn’t mind comparisons to these playwrights, both of whom he admires greatly, except when people refer to him as a “minor” Williams or Chekhov.

Actually, the most remarkable thing about his continuing affection for “Burn This,” which just moved to the Lyric Theatre in London’s West End after a sellout in a smaller house, is how he has been able to separate his attachment to the material from the slow burn he did when Hollywood picked up the property and tried to alter it past all recognition.

The project was sold to an independent producing team Wilson declines to name. It took his screenplay and doctored it until it metamorphosed into a light romantic comedy that was to star Bruce Willis. It was the script, though, and not the casting that bothered him, Wilson said. Wilson said he admires Willis, who did his training at the Circle Rep.

Problems arose when the producers decided that the character of Pale needed to be more likable. They dumped his wife and children to make his attraction for Anna more palatable. They showed that he had secretly supported his brother by buying him dance lessons, so he wouldn’t have to worry about the pain and guilt of losing a brother, emotions that in the play he had never admitted existed. And, to top it all off, they made the third roommate, a gay man named Larry, a villain.

Instead of the story Wilson envisioned of “people trying to recover from a great loss and find themselves,” what emerged was a light romantic comedy with homophobic overtones.

“When they got finished, there may have been passion in it, but I don’t know what in the hell it was about. They were wrong to do it,” he said.

Ironically, after the new writers sanitized the script, the people in the production company agreed with Wilson that the movie wasn’t about very much at all. They dropped the project, and it was later picked up by a company owned by Malkovich, now starring in the London version, who plans to recreate his Broadway role in the movie.

That’s just fine with Wilson, who said he wrote the part for Malkovich in the first place. However he said he does not plan to do any more work on the screenplay.

Wilson blames the time he wasted on the screenplay--and a writer’s block that followed--for three years that elapsed without a new Lanford Wilson play.

In contrast, Wilson said he enjoyed working with San Diego Rep producing director Sam Woodhouse, who is directing the play at the Rep. The two conferred for about 15 hours according to Woodhouse’s calculation and, unlike the Hollywood people, Wilson felt Woodhouse understood and appreciated the dark side of the script.

For Woodhouse, it’s the “People ain’t easy” line that attracted him to the story.

“I believe that the theater should tell stories that present characters with apparently insurmountable obstacles to happiness, and, by watching characters go through the tempestuous struggle toward happiness, we learn better to deal with the world,” said Woodhouse during a rehearsal break.

“I believe that that is what this play is about. That’s why I wanted to do this play.”

For Woodhouse, one of the advantages of working with Wilson was the opportunity to ask Wilson about the background of the characters. Wilson was able to provide off-stage information in surprising detail.

Wilson told Woodhouse that, in his imagination, Pale’s father (who is never seen or talked about in the script) made his living chauffeuring the wife and daughters of VIPs who were probably Mafia-connected. He told Woodhouse that Pale’s house (which is also never seen or described in the text) has curtains on all the windows and plastic on the furniture.

Wilson probably won’t get to see the San Diego Rep production, he said. He will be at Humboldt State University from the end of July through mid-August working with new playwrights.

But, sight unseen, he said he has confidence in the Rep’s production because he feels that Woodhouse understands the play’s complicated texture. He hopes that audiences will understand its complexities.

“It has a lot of laughs, but it’s a dark play,” Wilson said. “Larry has a lot of laughs, but don’t be fooled by that. These people aren’t losers. They are four successful people.

“But no one is successful inside themselves. They are survivors against the odds.”