Playwright’s Works Are Always in Progress : Theater: Lyle Kessler, as with his ‘Orphans,’ is rethinking ‘Robbers’ two seasons after it premiered. SCR will help him out with a staged reading.

It took 25 rewrites and two full productions before Lyle Kessler found the right ending to “Orphans,” the play that put him on the theatrical map with hit runs in New York and London and then was made into a movie with Albert Finney.

Now Kessler has gone back to the drawing board with his latest play, “Robbers,” which opened to good reviews two seasons ago in a world premiere at Seattle Repertory Theatre and before that had a workshop production at the Actors Studio in Los Angeles.

In an effort to help the 47-year-old playwright rethink the script, South Coast Repertory will present “Robbers” Monday as the first staged reading in its seventh annual NewSCRipt Series.

Kessler’s black comedy apparently qualifies for the series, which was designed to develop unproduced plays, because it is still very much a play in progress. (The Costa Mesa theater, however, calls “Robbers” a “new work” and contends it is getting its “first professional presentation.”)

“The play keeps evolving,” Kessler said Thursday in a phone interview from Santa Monica. “It’s always that way with plays. You keep doing them until you get it right. I haven’t yet figured out the ending, even though it was successfully produced. That’s why I’m doing it again.”

The urban atmosphere of “Robbers” bears an unmistakable resemblance to that of “Orphans,” which started out in 1983 at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles and came to prominence two years later in the Steppenwolf Theatre’s Chicago production, if only because of similarly well-imagined, streetwise characters--all of them oddballs stranded in deep waters. But Kessler regards “Robbers” as more of a fable.

“The story is the journey of a young repressed innocent who has the opportunity to play many roles,” he said. “For the first time, in the guise of detective operating undercover in a factory, he suddenly forms relationships, has love affairs. These are things he has never had as himself in Flatbush.

“But then he realizes, ‘Hey, I’m going to (be asked to) inform on all these people.’ He suddenly has to deal with that dilemma. So the play is really all about his progress in the world, how he navigates. I think it’s about how one keeps one’s inner self.”

None of Kessler’s half-dozen or so plays are autobiographical in a literal sense. Any suspicion that he might have grown up an orphan like the two crazed brothers of “Orphans,” for instance, is dead wrong. He was born in Philadelphia and raised in a middle-class Jewish family. “I had a mother and father and a sister, no brother,” he said. “And I did not hide in closets or mug people on the street.”

But his plays are “emotionally autobiographical,” he said. “My best writing has to do with an internal process that I’m working out unconsciously and put into my characters.”

Kessler, a college dropout who became an actor (instead of pursuing a medical career) before turning to writing, has lived in Santa Monica since the early ‘80s. He and his wife, actress Margaret Ladd, who played the principal role of Emma in the TV series “Falcon Crest,” have two children: twins, a boy and a girl 9 years old.

When Kessler is not writing for the theater, he’s writing for the movies. He has done the screenplay for “Gladiators,” an interracial boxing film about club fighters being exploited by an East Coast racketeer. It is scheduled for release in February by Columbia Pictures (with Brian Dennehy, Ossie Davis and James Marshall of “Twin Peaks” fame).

Also in February, another of his screenplays, “The Saint of Fort Washington,” is scheduled to go into production, starring Danny Glover. It chronicles the adventures of a middle-age black man and a young white schizophrenic boy who meet in a New York City shelter for the homeless and struggle to return to ordinary society.

“The emotional connection with these characters, many of them black, is something in myself,” said Kessler. “In the case of the ‘Saint’ movie, I did do some research. I visited a few shelters. But usually my stuff just comes out. I don’t have any control over that.”

Though writing for movies is more lucrative than writing for the theater, Kessler clearly regards himself first and foremost as playwright. And although SCR has not promised him a future production of “Robbers,” he just as clearly hopes the SCR reading will lead to one. At the very least, he said, he expects the reading to help him improve the script.

The reading will be staged by SCR producing artistic director David Emmes with a cast that includes SCR founding artists Richard Doyle, Don Took and Art Koustik (returning to the stage for the first time since a near-fatal motorcycle accident a year ago almost to the day), as well as guest artists Aumi Katz, Robin Goodrin Nordli and Elizabeth Dennehy (Brian’s daughter, who has worked at SCR before).

“I’ve never had a play done this way with just a couple of days’ rehearsal,” said Kessler, “but I’m looking forward to it. You never know who will be intrigued by this kind of material.”

“Robbers” will be read Monday at 7:30 p.m. at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $7. Information: (714) 957-4033.