Playwright Looks at ‘Condo Wasteland’ Life : Theater: Wendy MacLeod’s ‘Things Being What They Are’ will be given a public reading Monday at South Coast Repertory.

Wendy MacLeod remembers being mistaken by her husband’s uncle for one of the other Wendy playwrights. The first time she met him, he told her he’d just been reading about her in the Wall Street Journal.

But, she says, he must have been thinking of Wendy Wasserstein. Or was it Wendy Hammond? Or Wendy Kesselman? “There are four or five us, each with a different voice and a different level of fame,” MacLeod noted.

This Wendy arrived in Costa Mesa Friday for rehearsals of her latest comedy, “Things Being What They Are,” which is to be given a staged reading Monday at South Coast Repertory. It will launch the theater’s 1990-91 NewSCRipt series of works in progress.

Speaking earlier this week from Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches at Kenyon College, MacLeod, 31, described her comedy as a “chamber piece” set in a “suburban condo wasteland” with people who are “a notch below Yuppie.”

The characters haven’t acquired their BMWs yet. But they have a roof over their heads, they’ve made their career choices and they’ve chosen their mates. Or they think they have.

The heroine, Adelle, is still trying to make up her mind after eight years of marriage: She’s not quite sure whether her husband, Bill, or her former lover, Bob, is the right man for her. Bill and Bob--not unlike their names--seem to have “a certain interchangeable quality,” MacLeod said.

“I keep thinking of one of Shaw’s lines,” she added. “The one that goes, ‘Like many young men, you greatly overestimate the difference between one young woman and another.’ That’s sort of what this play is about. We think of making the right choice of mate when, in fact, it has more to do with committing to whatever choice you do make.”

MacLeod, a 1987 graduate of the Yale School of Drama, also has a full production of another play, “The House of Yes,” coming to Southern California. That one--a much darker comedy than “Things,” she says--will open Oct. 23 at Las Palmas Theatre in Hollywood after a five-month run at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre.

“I subtitled it ‘a suburban Jacobean play’ because it’s full of madness, incest, murder, blood and gore,” MacLeod said. “It’s a black comedy about identical twins who make love to each other by re-enacting the Kennedy assassination. So you can see it’s very different from (‘Things’), which is more wistful and a much softer piece.”

“The House of Yes” was supposed to play for two weeks in the Magic’s 1990 spring festival of new works but got rave notices and ran through the summer. “Nobody expected it,” said MacLeod, who had a similar experience in Chicago where “Apocalyptic Butterflies”--an earlier comedy that also started out at the Magic Theatre--was extended for four months in 1988.

Still another of MacLeod’s black comedies, “The My House Play,” is scheduled to open in New York at the WPA Theatre in January. It involves a suburban family laying siege to its own home when a highway comes through the back patio. The family ends up living more or less on the highway’s median strip.

“I go farther out into the surreal with my other plays,” MacLeod said. “That’s why I’m very surprised they seem to like (‘Things’) so much at South Coast Rep. It’s delicate, not hip or splashy or cutting edge. Because it’s old-fashioned in a way, I wasn’t sure it would get any attention.

“I kind of love the idea that it’s not hip,” she added. “I question hip. At the same time, I have this tremendous longing for my work to be hip. And yet I don’t think that’s the truth of America.”

In fact, MacLeod concedes, she sometimes asked herself what makes “Things Being What They Are” different from a television sitcom. “My answer was that it’s better written,” she said. “It’s subtler, more stylized, heightened in terms of its rhythms and repetitions.”

It also has a more serious theme. “What I’m playing with,” she said, “is that everybody is telling the absolute truth from the absolute bottom of their absolute hearts. And they’re still lying.”

Elaborating on her theme, MacLeod noted further: “There’s a restlessness and dissatisfaction that affluent people have. Once they’ve solved their basic problems--choices about their careers and mates--there’s this feeling, ‘And then what?’

“I think there’s a real yen for some kind of connection. The most banal choice is to flail around for a sexual connection. But in the second act (of ‘Things’) two men make another sort of connection. It’s a humane gesture. One person treats another like a human being. I think there’s hope in that gesture.”

MacLeod, who was born in Rochester, N.Y., and raised in Arlington, Va., recalls that she always wanted to be a writer. But it was only when she got to Kenyon College as an undergraduate in 1977 that she discovered her interest in play writing. She had started out writing fiction and went to Kenyon because of the literary reputation of the Kenyon Review, which is associated with the college.

After enrolling as an English major “like everyone else,” MacLeod recounted, the drama department won her over because of its “much more hands-on approach” to literature. “Becoming a playwright was a logical fusion of all the things I’ve done. I’d always acted. Later, I started directing. So when I got to Yale, it all fell into place.”

At Yale about half the playwrights had theater backgrounds and half had literary backgrounds when she was there. “I felt like the theater people were way ahead of the game because they understood how things worked,” she said. “Not logistics. Just dramatic structure and dramatic use of language, as opposed to poetic use of language.”

But the comic irreverence of her writing, a sensibility shared by all her plays, apparently was bred in the bone.

“I could give you theories on it,” said MacLeod, who won the 1987 Charles MacArthur Award for the humor of “The My House Play” at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. “I was always funny. Maybe it’s familial. I had a very funny father.”

Whatever the genesis, she added, “I do feel in a way that laughter is what an audience wants. To laugh together is just about the most visceral response there is in the theater.”

“Things Being What They Are” will be given a public reading on the South Coast Repertory Mainstage in Costa Mesa Monday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $7. Information: (714) 957-4033.