Greenberg Resurfaces at SCR With ‘Extra Man’ : Stage: After a taste of stardom, the East Coast playwright prefers to work in obscurity.

Playwright Richard Greenberg savors his relative obscurity and goes out of his way to deflate the aura of success surrounding “Eastern Standard,” his best-known work, by describing it as “that oppressive cultural instant.”

“There’s this myth that I had this wonderful Broadway hit,” he says. “It’s in all of the brochures here. (But) ‘Eastern Standard’ ran for three months. There were times when you could have catered a reception in the balcony. It lost money.”

“Here” is South Coast Repertory, where his latest play, “The Extra Man,” is having its world premiere this weekend.

During “Eastern Standard’s” pre-Broadway run three years ago at the Manhattan Theatre Club, a brief burst of unwanted celebrity engulfed the playwright when Frank Rich, drama critic of the New York Times, hailed it as a dazzling summation of the post-crash ‘80s. Greenberg not only caught “the romantic sophistication of the most sublime comedies ever made in this country,” Rich noted, but “for anyone who has been waiting for a play that tells what it is like to be more or less middle-class, more or less young and more or less well-intentioned in a frightening city at this moment in this time zone,” Rich declared in his Oct. 28, 1988, review, “ ‘Eastern Standard’ at long last is it.”

Such extraordinary praise put Greenberg and his play in a very bright limelight. It also invited attack. What Rich lauded, other daily critics decried.

Greenberg, who was born and grew up in a Long Island suburb of New York City, does not remotely resemble the suave image of urbanity projected by his characters. He wears his shirt tails out and his long hair gathered in a ponytail. His physical heft alone probably would disqualify him from the world of wafer-thin chic personified by “Eastern Standard.”

Except for his Ivy League education--which includes a bachelor’s degree in literature from Princeton, a year of grad school at Harvard (before he dropped out) and a degree in playwriting from the Yale Drama School--Greenberg, now 33, doesn’t seem to have anything in common with the self-absorbed Manhattanites of “The Extra Man,” either.

“Actually,” he says, “I’m much more at home in this play than I was in ‘Eastern Standard,’ where I was never at home at all. In this one, it’s an apartment-and-restaurant world, and if the restaurant is too nice one of the two people at dinner is going to be uncomfortable. They’re people whose lives began with engagement but there’s a sense of dissatisfaction and stasis. In the other play, there was a slick, youthful, forward-going quality to the characters.”

Moreover, this time he purposely has written “a much less-funny play,” he says, cognizant that the deft witticisms of “Eastern Standard” are out of character for perhaps all but one of the people--Keith--in “The Extra Man.”

Keith, portrayed here by Peter Frechette (who was the gay painter Drew in “Eastern Standard”), is a writer and the fulcrum of this play inasmuch as he arranges and manipulates other people’s relationships. If by definition the extra man “is a social convenience in the guise of a friend,” as Greenberg notes, then Keith fulfills the title role with a vengeance.

Yet two other men are prime candidates for that function as well. One is Jess, a film writer, played by Kario Salem; the other is Daniel, a lawyer, played by Jonathan Emerson. Each is the other’s best friend and both are in love with Daniel’s book-editor wife, Laura, the non-extra woman played by Kandis Chappell.

“A sense of extraneousness permeates the play,” says Greenberg, “a sense of people being somehow beside the point of their own lives. What I think happens is their whole sense of reality and truth and of themselves becomes imperceptibly but completely altered in the details of daily existence.

“So this play is made up of what I think life is chiefly made up of--70% trivia and 30% deep talk.”

When SCR gave Greenberg a commission to write “The Extra Man” in 1987, the original production of “Eastern Standard” had yet to be staged. (Michael Engler, who staged “Eastern Standard” at Seattle Repertory Theatre and in New York, also is directing this play.)

“It’s the longest lead time I’ve ever had,” says Greenberg, noting that he finished the first draft of “The Extra Man” more than a year and a half ago. In the meantime, he also wrote “The American Plan,” which was produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club last season.

Greenberg says that, because of his experience with “Eastern Standard,” he kept a very low profile with “The American Plan.” The day it opened, he unplugged his phone and left it unplugged for another two days. He simply didn’t read the reviews. He no longer reads any review, he says.

And he intends to keep it that way with “The Extra Man.” After the opening at SCR, he’ll be on a plane back to New York where he is scheduled to begin rewrites on the libretto for what could become a Broadway revival of “Pal Joey,” the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical.

“It’s not that I lack ambition,” he says, reflecting on his preference for obscurity. “I just want to be a working playwright. I don’t want to be the star. I think at one time that I wanted that, before I got a taste of it. But I thought, ‘If this is the taste, I don’t want the meal.’ ”