STAGE : Emotion Gets the Best of David Hare : Using American playwrights as his role models, the veteran of British stage explores modern tragedy in ‘Secret Rapture’

As a playwright, a stage director and a filmmaker of steadily deepening vision and passion, David Hare has amassed a body of work that views politics and individual lives as intertwined.

“To deny that social forces don’t have a profound impact on each person,” he says emphatically, “is to deny reality.”

But like any good Briton, Hare worries about his American cousins. He laments that American playwrights--he exempts David Mamet and his close friend Wallace Shawn--seem as apathetic about politics as American citizens. Hare doesn’t say it in so many words, but he feels a need to fill this thematic void, providing something “humane, yet socially awake.”

He’s getting his wish, and then some: His 1988 play, “The Secret Rapture,” has just opened at South Coast Repertory. “Rapture” is also on stage at another leading U.S. regional theater, Chicago’s Steppenwolf, through mid-November.

Because Yankee theater tends to be apolitical, Hare’s 20-plus years of work have hardly received a fair U.S. hearing outside New York. Los Angeles, for example, has seen only his rock ‘n’ roll drama, “Teeth ‘n Smiles,” which played the now-defunct Company Theatre in 1979.

“You can’t write anything about Britain in the ‘80s without writing about materialism,” Hare says. But he adds that “any political dimension in ‘The Secret Rapture’ was second nature, because I didn’t mean it to have a political reference. I imagine it’s second nature, since politics is a given for my generation. We grew up in a society where history and the individual were linked.”

While Hare attempts to bring some politics to America, he also wants to fill what he senses is “a terrible gap in British stage life. I’d call it an emotional realm. Our own playwrights just shy away from it, as the English are wont to do.”

And who is Hare’s model for this theater of emotions? American playwrights, especially Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

“They are really the modern masters,” Hare said by telephone from London. “In England, we consider them to have written the recent classics. Sadly, Miller complains how he can’t get a play on in New York. We (British) absolutely thirst for the fury and passions they elicit. I mean, people can’t even wait for an upcoming revival of (Williams’) ‘Night of the Iguana,’ which is hardly anyone’s idea of a masterpiece.”

Hare credits Miller as crucially inspirational during the writing of “Secret Rapture”: “While I was getting in the throes of it, I saw a production of Miller’s ‘A View From the Bridge.’ It had a terrific effect on me. He was saying that there are situations people can’t get out of. That is precisely Isobel’s position in my play.”

Isobel runs a modest ad firm with her partner and emotionally dependent lover Irwin. Her sister, Marion, is a rising star in Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government and married to a man who is president of “Christians in Business.” Isobel is an idealist with her goodness intact and Marion sees the world as a place to make money, but they share one thing in common: Katherine, the alcoholic widow of their just-deceased father. When Isobel decides to give Katherine a job at the firm, it sets off a series of irreversible events for the well-meaning sister.

“There is no fair way to deal with an alcoholic,” Hare says, “just as there’s no fair way to deal with Irwin, who can’t accept that Isobel doesn’t love him. And Marion can’t stand human complications. When Isobel escapes to a far-away island--I borrowed that from ‘King Lear,’ which I think has the greatest plot--she sees there’s no use.”

The play’s reception during its London premiere was, well, rapturous. “David Hare,” waxed critic John Peter of the London Times, “has written one of the best English plays since the war and established himself as the finest British dramatist of his generation.”

“Rapture’s” New York engagement was practically drowned out, though, by the clamor raised when Hare publicly took New York Times critic Frank Rich to task for a pan that the author called “dishonest.” (Rich loved Howard Davies’ original London staging and thought director Hare had botched his own play.) Variety summed it up in brilliant Variety-ese: “Ruffled Hare Airs Rich Bitch.”

Hare, reputedly reticent in interviews, doesn’t try to hide his intentions with “The Secret Rapture.”

“I suppose that starting with ‘Plenty,’ I wanted to test myself and see if I could write modern tragedy. Certainly, our century would seem to be natural ground for tragedians, but you just don’t see very much of it. It seemed to me that a woman of Isobel’s nature would be swallowed up by the terrible materialism which took over England in the ‘80s. She’s in a hopeless situation.

“Is it possible for a good person to survive in today’s world?”

According to Hare, though, how you interpret “The Secret Rapture” (the title, he says, refers to the moment before a dying nun is reunited with Christ) depends on where you live. London audiences took Marion to be at the center of the play (“They saw her as the voice of Thatcherism, and the play’s subject,” according to Hare). Steppenwolf crowds, Hare reports, see Isobel as the key, which is what he intended. Labeled by a few writers as “a secular nun,” one critic likened Isobel’s arrival at Steppenwolf to “Jesus coming to Chicago.”

Hare, as well as Steppenwolf’s “Rapture” director Eric Simonson, who had previously directed Hare’s play “Knuckle,” agree that this secular nun can come across as too passive. Says Simonson: “We saw that from the start. The solution is to cast it with an actress who projects strength.”

When Hare directed the play in New York--originally at the Public Theatre and then on Broadway--he picked the actress he had written the role for: Blair Brown. Former Royal Shakespeare Company actress Caroline Goodall makes her American stage debut in the role at SCR.

Hare acknowledges that a seeming problem with the play is Isobel’s selflessness. “What’s the motive? That’s always been a problem my work has encountered,” he says regarding the mixed reviews his plays and movies usually receive in the United States. “But I wonder if that doesn’t match the people in ‘Secret Rapture’ who puzzle over Isobel. I think it’s a case of good people just being in the presence of not-so-good people to make them nervous and shifty. Marion and the others can’t believe that Isobel doesn’t want to make money. They assume there’s an ulterior motive, when there isn’t one.”

In conversation, Hare impresses one as determined to resist all labels. Not just the left-wing playwright-ideologue. Not just the voice of cynical outrage or poetic lament for lost ideals. Not even just the dramatist of ideas. He has worked in musicals (“The Knife,” which was panned), richly cinematic thrillers (“Wetherby”), epic plays and collaborations (“Pravda,” with longtime colleague Howard Brenton). Director Michael Bloom, who staged the American premiere of Hare’s 1975 play about Chinese cooperatives, “Fanshen,” has written that he “is still a play-writing anomaly: an intellectual with the pizazz of a genre writer.”

Still, Hare is better known here for his films: “Wetherby,” his 1985 debut as director-writer; “Plenty,” for which he adapted the script from his hit play; and this year’s “Strapless,” again as writer-director, and starring Blair Brown, to whom he dedicated “The Secret Rapture.”

Hare was born in 1947, too late for the war that was the high point of the life of his “Plenty” heroine, Susan Traherne. After schooling at Lancing College and Cambridge, he became a vital cog in the late ‘60s fringe movement in London theater. With Tony Bicat, who has contributed music to both Hare plays and films, he formed the Portable Theatre. The work was out to smash traditions, but its politics was in the oldest stream of the English stage, from Shakespeare’s histories to George Bernard Shaw’s plays of issues and gender clashes.

While Brenton and others veered close to pure agitprop in those days, Hare claims, “I never wrote that kind of thing. I went in for satires. Later, they weren’t enough for me.”

He eventually moved toward the kind of play where the opposition (read: the Tory right) had most of the best lines and delicious characters. Victor Mehta in “A Map of the World” eloquently speaks the point of view of a reactionary Indian novelist verbally lancing his Third World critics. “Pravda’s” newspaper tycoon Lambert LeRoux, based on Rupert Murdoch, was an actor’s tour de force role.

Of his big-scale, big-idea works, only “Plenty” made the jump over the Atlantic. “I frankly got a bit exhausted with plays requiring such huge resources. I wanted to write plays in a classic form that can be presented on any stage in the world.”

With this came a deeper desire: to write about feelings, not only through characters, but as a subject. Hare suggests that writing about how feelings are suppressed--by people, by social forces--should be as much a British concern as class conflicts. He sees “The Secret Rapture” and its landscape of clashing emotions as an example of how he is very different from, say, Shaw, to whom he is often compared.

“Unlike him, I don’t preach a point of view. I try to articulate a situation, and let the audience make up its own mind. I’m less rational than Shaw. He thought that human relationships can be made rational. I don’t see that--I believe too much in chance, and mystery.”

If Hare has made a life of not being pinned to the critical wall like an insect specimen, he’s still bucking expectations: His latest, highly praised play, “Racing Demon,” deals with a very untrendy topic--internal schisms within the Church of England and asks, in Hare’s words, “if a church so devoted to social action can maintain a religious identity, and if there’s a spiritual element to social action.” (He hopes for a U.S. transfer from the National Theatre.)

Hare has resisted trends in another way. Like Isobel, he wanted nothing to do with the money-making fever of the ‘80s. “I mentioned this,” he recalls, “to an investment man I sat next to on a plane last week. He told me, ‘It’s just as well that you didn’t. With the recession, people are losing money now.’ ”