INTERVIEW : Leaping Off the Page : Cartoonist Lynda Barry has turned to play writing, all the while maintaining her wry focus on growing up and the ‘60s

Maybe they’ll hang Lynda Barry in a museum one day. Not her cartoon strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” which runs in more than 50 newspapers. No, Lynda Barry, the cartoonist-painter-novelist-playwright-radio commentator and frequent David Letterman guest. As an exhibit. Her antic, red-haired, round-nosed, seriously seriocomic self--properly shellacked and framed, of course--next to the following plaque:

LYNDA JEAN BARRY (1956- )

Born Richland, Wis.,

Raised Seattle, Wash.

EX-HIPPIE WITH

FUNCTIONING MEMORY

(Only known member of species)

Well, it’s a thought--even though, if you want to get picky, Barry’s a bit young to be a true flower child. But the ‘60s lasted deep into the ‘70s, when Barry was coming of age. At least that’s the way she remembers it. And Lord knows Lynda Barry has a way of remembering things. Especially if those things happened between the ages of 8 and 14. No matter how seemingly minor or insignificant. Especially if they’re seemingly minor or insignificant.

She’s even made a career of it, drawing what she calls a “hippie stream-of-consciousness cartoon strip” about a bunch of bewildered and befreckled kids named Arna, Arnold, Freddie, Maybonne and Marlys, living out the ‘60s in a Wisconsin town.

Now based in Chicago, Barry was in New York to oversee the stage adaptation of her first novel, “The Good Times Are Killing Me,” which opened earlier this month at the Second Stage Theater.

The play--in which two girls, one white and one black, confront the meaning of racism--had an auspicious debut. The New York Times’ Frank Rich wrote: “What makes Lynda Barry’s first play a happy occasion is that she captures the innocent abandon of childhood with the wit of a mature writer but without letting go of the uninhabited child still lurking deep within herself.”

Calling the play “uneven but highly promising,” Rich added that while the show’s failings are real, “they are those of breadth not depth. Barry’s engaging debut as a playwright is anything but cartoonish.”

But it’s the cartoon--which runs in the Village Voice, the L.A. Weekly and many points between--that placed Barry, in her words, “on the left big toe of fame.”

“Remember when you were in school,” Barry says, working on a recent strip, “and the teacher would put a picture under an overhead projector so you could see it on the wall? God, I loved that. Tellya the truth, I used to look at that beam of light and think it was God.”

Which is the kind of divine transformation that Barry is hoping occurs with her play. “I guess it’s a natural progression,” she says. “I started out making paintings, then I did pictures with words, then I wrote a book with people talking--and now I have actual three-dimensional people from that book walking around onstage talking to each other.

“It’s like one of those overhead projectors,” Barry says, her freckles beaming in reflected sunlight. “No, it’s even better.

“At least I hope it is.”

“If there’s a last word on childhood,” critic Rob Rodi wrote in Comics Journal, “it belongs to Lynda Barry.”

Sure, other writers have become richer and more famous by mining the nostalgia lode--Jean Shepherd, or Neal Marlens and Carol Black, the husband-wife team that created the TV series “The Wonder Years,” to name a few. But what sets Barry apart and probably above the rest is a matter of vision: When she looks back at childhood, she doesn’t remember it being all that wonderful.

Instead, we get the point of view of a working-class white girl in an interracial neighborhood who’s less amused than confused by her life--and often downright confounded. Which is why Barry’s take on growing up seems more knowing than nostalgic. Let’s not kid ourselves, Lynda Jean Barry reminds us, The Way We Were sometimes hurt. A lot.

It was pain that led Barry to drop her paintbrush and become a cartoonist in the first place. The year was 1977; the place, Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., where Barry had become the first member of her Anglo-Filipino family to go to college. Ostensibly, she was a fine-arts major but, after her boyfriend left her, Barry was majoring in brooding. Big time.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says, “so I started drawing cartoons where the men were cactuses and the women were women, and the cactuses were constantly trying to get the women to go to bed with them.”

Soon a friend, the editor of the school paper, was printing them as “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” named after Barry’s kid brother’s pet turtle. That friend--a guy by the name of Matt (“The Simpsons”) Groening--did a few strips of his own. Barry has been cartooning ever since.

She hit the big time, sort of, between 1984 and ‘89, when she returned to her cactus roots to examine the prickly pathology of relationships in a monthly strip in Esquire. To a lot of her fans, this was her best work, especially the gem titled “How to Catch a Man.”

“When you think about it,” Barry wrote, “giving up your ‘real’ personality is a small price to pay for the richness of ‘living happily ever after’ with an actual man!”

Barry is ambivalent about her Esquire experience. “I had to work with an editor, whose job it was to make sure my cartoons conformed to the ‘Esquire Man’ way of looking at things. Thing is, I don’t see the world through the eyes of a successful, 30-year-old white guy.”

Barry’s much more comfortable telling tales of preteen and teen-age anxiety--and the difficult transition between the two. It’s a subject that forms the subtext for “The Good Times Are Killing Me,” a play that evolved from a novel that evolved from a series of paintings that evolved out a trip through a pineapple field in Hawaii. Listen to Barry tell it:

“I was on vacation back in ‘86, driving through this field when I got this kinda vision. I saw a series of portraits, in funky metal frames, of my favorite musicians--most of them black, most of them dead. Suddenly, I knew what my next project would be.”

Back in Seattle, Barry went to work, coming up with 18 highly stylized portraits of the likes of Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, R. H. (Rebert) Thomas and Jimmie Rodgers. There was a well-received gallery show, and then a publisher who wanted to print reproductions of the paintings asked Barry to write a 10-page introduction.

“I said, ‘Sure,’ then started doing some research. A coupla days later, I realized the history of American music is the history of American racism. Then I started thinking that the whole issue of race has its own DNA, its own life force, and how it’s all about power and hierarchy. So I thought to myself, ‘There must be a way to tell that story.’ ”

It’s not surprising that Barry, with her ‘60s-flavored “let’s change the world and all be brothers” way of looking at things, would want to write that tale. What is surprising is the way she chose to write it. As a novel.

That “terrifying” choice came to her, Barry says, when she went to a cabin in rural Washington, plugged in her computer and started “talking” to the first character that popped into her head, a girl on the cusp of adolescence named Edna Arkins.

“It’s always easier for me to work if I know where my characters live,” Barry says, “so I put Edna on the street where I grew up, 25th Avenue South.”

That would be in a funky, interracial part of Seattle, where Barry’s half-Filipino, half-Irish mother and half-Irish, half-Norwegian father raised three children in a ramshackle house in which the stereo was in the kitchen--”because it had the best dance floor,” Barry says.

After 10 days of isolation, Barry finished “The Good Times Are Killing Me,” a 70-page “novelini,” as she calls it. In it, Edna Arkins, who’s white, and her best friend, Bonna Willis, who isn’t, learn about the inevitability of racism, the hard way. Her publisher was surprised, of course, but published Barry’s “introduction” just the same.

“ ‘Good Times’ is a story about the loss of innocence,” Barry says, “how adults are responsible for their actions but children aren’t. The minute you understand racism, you’re responsible for being racist. It’s like eating from the tree of knowledge. I’m attempting to get people to wake up, to understand the kind of damage certain power structures can do.”

As is her usual M.O., Barry sprinkled the play with lots of Baby Boomer flashback material--the indescribable pleasure kids get out of putting a lit flashlight in their mouths, for instance.

“I feel a story becomes much more powerful if you give your audience something to remember from their childhood,” she says. “I think about my own childhood all the time. It’s the only place to go if you’re looking for answers. It’s where all our motivations, feelings and opinions come from.

“My own childhood happened to be poor. My mother worked at a crab cannery, then as a janitor at a hospital. My dad cut meat at a grocery store before he left. I heard my parents argue about money. I know what it feels like to drive through rich neighborhoods yet live in a poor one. Sure, stuff like that ends up in my work. And that’s because I think that if you want to give someone an important message--and I am trying to do that in this play--you have to coax them along with some interesting food. And, for me, childhood memories are really interesting food.”

Many people agree. Jay Kennedy, who edited Barry’s work at Esquire and is now the comics editor at the King Features Syndicate, says: “It’s the realism of Lynda’s strip that sets her work apart from the rest. Her characters are very three-dimensional. The word cartoon is often synonymous with caricature--a ‘cartoony’ script, a Mickey Mouse attitude, for instance. But Lynda’s work doesn’t fit the pejorative cartoon cliche at all.”

Novelist and comic maven Tom De Haven (“Funny Papers”) agrees. “The best cartoonists are great writers who happen to be good artists. Lynda’s a very sophisticated storyteller. She uses cartoons the way Thurber did.”

But to some, most notably cartoonist Mark Newgarden of the New York Press and the National Lampoon, the “magic” of Barry’s work is a complete mystery. “I don’t get it,” he says. “It’s as if she wants to be the cutting-edge ‘Cathy’--and why would anyone want to be that? All this ‘I remember when I was a kid’ stuff just makes me cranky. It’s a one-note samba. Who cares about Lynda Barry’s first period? Still, I don’t wish her any ill. She’ll always have her legion of fans, and I say God bless her.”

Barry was stung when Newgarden published a vicious parody of her work: “I’d spit on his shoes if he walked in here.” What made it hurt the most, she says, is that it perpetuated the most common--and annoying--misconception about what Barry does.

“Everyone assumes my work is completely autobiographical,” she says. “They’re wrong. Maybe only 20% is. The rest is fiction, or patched together from stories other people have told me about their own childhood.”

At times, this misconception has had some endearingly morbid consequences. “Once I had Maybonne thinking about committing suicide,” Barry says. “I can’t tell you how many people wrote me letters because they thought I was thinking about doing it myself. Yeah, right. Like I might kill myself the way Maybonne would--by overdosing on Fred Flintstone vitamins. Or by eating all the Barneys.”

Still, you won’t hear Barry complaining too hard about the people who took the time to write. “It would be like complaining about the paint job on my yacht. If I had a yacht.”

So, for the future, Barry’s content to sail ahead by doing what she does best. Looking back. Her weekly strip will always be priority No. 1. “The power of mixing drawing with words--it’s a quieter form,” she says, “but I think it has the power of music. I’m fascinated with the stuff you can do in that small space. What’s the longest story you can tell in four panels?”

There’s also a sequel to her novel in the works, picking up where the other one left off: Edna and Bonna’s first day in junior high.

But, for now, there’s the play. Collaborating with director Mark Brokaw has been a fascinating experience, Barry says. Especially the nonverbal communication they developed, mostly out of necessity. “I’d be at rehearsal, thinking something wasn’t quite right,” Barry says, “and Mark would come over, without me saying anything, and ask me what was bothering me. It’s amazing how he’s able to read my mind. Like something out of the animal kingdom.”

Just having a play done is a big deal for Barry, if not for the rest of her family. “You know, I was thinking the other day. My parents know what a play is, and they know what New York is, but I don’t think they have any idea at all what it means to have a play in New York.”

But Lynda Barry does. She learned it recently when buying a candy bar at a Broadway deli next to the Second Stage during a 10-minute break from rehearsal.

“A woman came up to me and said, ‘Aren’t you Lynda Barry?’ I said, ‘Yep,’ then we talked for a while. Geez, she went on and on complimenting me.”

Then the woman returned to her male companion, who asked her whom she’d been talking to.

“ ‘Oh, that’s Lynda Barry, the playwright ,’ I heard her say.”

Here Barry pauses for effect.

“God, I loved the sound of that.”