STAGE : Humor From the Dark Side : Alan Ayckbourn writes plays that speak to a common bleakness in today’s society--and they work on both sides of the Atlantic

Playwright Alan Ayckbourn was at a party a while back when a woman acquaintance started talking about her boyfriend, an art historian. The historian lived in such a desolate, run-down part of England, Ayckbourn recalls, that everyone else on the block had moved out. Describing the neighborhood, the girlfriend said she was afraid to visit anymore.

Better to set a play there. Ayckbourn transformed the historian into a composer, gave him a loveless home life, then imagined him creating art “in an area of total vandalism, annihilation and destruction. How did the artist relate to the bigger life-and-death issues?”

Ayckbourn’s answers shape “Henceforward . . . ,” a dark comedy due Thursday at the Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum. Winner of the Evening Standard’s Best Comedy Award in 1989, the play finally arrives in Los Angeles after casting problems twice bumped it from CTG’s Ahmanson-at-the-Doolittle season.

“Henceforward . . . “ is set in an urban wasteland “sometime quite soon.” There are roaming marauders called the Daughters of Darkness, answering machines with video screens, and automated nannies.

Within this environment, “Henceforward . . . “ looks at creativity. Actor John Glover plays Jerome Watkins, a composer who hasn’t written any music for four years and is recording everything around him as potential fodder for his compositions. Awaiting inspiration, Watkins finds nothing too personal or trivial for his recording devices.

Given that Ayckbourn has turned out 43 plays over the years, nobody could fault his muse. Yet you can’t turn out all those plays without borrowing a little bit from your immediate world, and the playwright is clearly exploring familiar territory. Ayckbourn says he’s not yet written a counterpart to Howard Cosell’s running commentary from the foot of Woody Allen’s bed in “Bananas,” but he does admit to some guilt about what he calls his “compulsive spiritual kleptomania.”

“I wanted to write about creative artists on a personal level, and I wanted to write about how they really are jackdaws (crow-like birds) that steal things from their own lives. . . . I’ve had reproachful looks given to me by close friends and relations on the first night (of a play) when they’ve heard some very private exchange blasting out over a theater audience.”

Where better to tell that tale than Southern California?

“ ‘Henceforward . . . ‘ is about the human condition, the role of the artist, dehumanization through gadgetry and the difficulty of expressing love on either a personal basis or through one’s art,” says Gordon Davidson, artistic director-producer of the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum. “Those people could be anywhere, but I know they’re in Los Angeles.”

The playwright, who’s been called everything from “the English Neil Simon” to “The Moliere of the middle class,” is quite industrious. His work pattern generally consists of writing one new play and directing another five plays each year.

At 52 years of age, Ayckbourn has already passed Shakespeare in productivity and is probably the world’s most-produced living playwright. His plays have been translated into 35 languages in more than 50 countries, and many have been big hits on London’s West End. Such earlier plays as “Absurd Person Singular” and “The Norman Conquests” also landed on Broadway, and “Henceforward . . . “ is just one of three Ayckbourn plays being mounted in U.S. regional theaters this season with hopes of future commercial productions.

“Henceforward . . . ,” like nearly all his plays, started out at his Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round in Scarborough, a seaside town about 250 miles northeast of London. There he not only writes and directs plays but also runs the place as artistic director.

Leaving his converted vicarage in Scarborough for his well-appointed flat in London, he regularly takes each year’s new Ayckbourn play from his 308-seat theater to the West End. Usually also the play’s director, he has called himself a “one-a-year man,” telling an interviewer that he tries to have one play running, one starting and one in rehearsal at any given time.

While Ayckbourn directed “Henceforward . . . “ in Scarborough, London and Houston, Tom Moore is directing it at the Taper. Directing it a fourth time would be “a little difficult,” Ayckbourn says. “I don’t have anything new to say, really, and I would be trying to excite actors secondhand and inspire them with things I’ve said already. And, I have no time. I’m like Pavarotti. I’m booked up until ’93.”

Ayckbourn writes to the calendar. “I designate a month, and I say that is my writing month. About three of those weeks I walk around restlessly pacing. Then eventually I shake out the idea that’s been coiled up in the brain.” He prefers, in fact, to think of himself as a director. He left Scarborough for two years in the ‘80s to direct plays at London’s National Theatre, an activity for which he received considerable critical acclaim, and estimates he has directed more than 100 productions over the years.

“My writing is something that occupies me for a maybe a twelfth of the year, and I’ve been a director longer than I’ve been a writer,” says Ayckbourn. “I enjoy it more than writing, which is very boring. Thinking about it is wonderful and finishing it is great, but the actual writing business is terrible. It’s very hard work.”

Ayckbourn didn’t start out as either a writer or a director, but rather as an actor. His grandfather did some acting and ran an ice rink, and his grandmother was a male impersonator. But his father, a violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra, left home when the playwright was 5, and he was most influenced by his mother, a magazine writer he has called “the queen of the short story world.”

Ayckbourn finished school one Friday when he was 17, and the following Monday went to work in the theater as an actor and assistant stage manager. He built sets, drove trucks and rigged lights. When his mentor in Scarborough told him to go off and write himself a good part, he turned out “The Square Cat” and played the pop singer protagonist himself.

That was 1959--when he was 20--and just a few years later came “Mr. Whatnot,” the tale of a mute piano-tuner, which landed on the West End in 1964. “It was a tremendous disaster, “ says Ayckbourn. “It ran three weeks--it shouldn’t have run that-- and sent me scurrying to the BBC in Leeds. I joined the BBC vowing never to write anymore.”

He directed dozens of plays for the BBC, but he did not, in fact, stop writing, and in 1965 came “Relatively Speaking,” his first big hit. “How the Other Half Loves,” his second big hit, followed in 1969. Ayckbourn left the BBC, went back to Scarborough to take over the theater, and, he says, he and the theater just matured together.

In Scarborough, says Ayckbourn biographer Michael Billington, “he has to conquer that home-grown, skeptical audience.” And that’s just the start--the playwright must also tailor his plays, ideas and staging to a theatre in the round.

But within those restrictions, Ayckbourn runs wild. “Intimate Exchanges’ ” two performers alternate playing out some 16 possible plots. And “The Revengers’ Comedies,” his latest West End entry, is essentially about two people who meet as they’re about to jump off the Albert Bridge, exchange stories, and each agree to kill the other’s nemesis.

Or consider his two newest plays. “Wildest Dreams” is about a group of misfits who take on assorted personalities as a game each week, then actually become inhabited by their creations. “Body Language,” which Ayckbourn concedes is “equally bizarre,” is about two women--an overweight journalist and a sexy model--whose heads are lopped off in a helicopter accident and then sewn back onto the wrong bodies by “a passing surgeon from an unnamed East European country who doesn’t speak English.”

Other times, he shows off his sheer prowess in weaving together intricate plots and settings. “Bedroom Farce” is set in three different bedrooms, and “Absurd Person Singular” takes place in three different kitchens on three consecutive Christmas Eves. “The Norman Conquests” is a trilogy of self-contained plays chronicling one weekend’s activity from various points of view.

“I’m absolutely convinced that he’s done everything (and) part of his genius is his ability to apply all that to his plays, “ says Billington, theater critic for London’s Guardian newspaper. “He’s always experimenting with things you theoretically can’t do onstage--he put a river in ‘Way Upstream’ and a swimming pool in ‘Man of the Moment.’ ”

(Not that such staging isn’t problematic. A production of “Way Upstream” at the National Theatre wound up both wrecking the stage and flooding the theater. Not only did they have to shut the place down, but it wound up costing a small fortune to repair.)

One reason for all the staging gimmicks, the playwright concedes, is to find fresh slants on his “relatively simple” tales of people and their relationships. “It’s necessary,” he says, “to find new ways to tell those stories.”

There are, indeed, common characteristics among Ayckbourn’s people, and one of them is the inability to communicate, particularly with one’s spouse. Ayckbourn himself was married at 19, has two grown sons, and remains friendly with his wife although they have lived apart for many years. But marriages don’t fare well in his plays and he told biographer Ian Watson that “the marriages I do see are either fraught or dull. . . . I think a big piece of us dies in a marriage.”

Seeking to escape loveless or unsatisfying marriages, Ayckbourn’s women are generally pretty frustrated people. In “Absurd Person Singular,” one wife makes assorted suicide attempts, while the heroine of the more recent “Woman in Mind” has to invent an entire dream family to find life tolerable. His male characters, in turn, are often foolish, incompetent or deceitful.

“There’s always a relationship worse than theirs (onstage)” he said of his audiences recently, and “Henceforward . . . “ fits that pattern. In fact, he says, he had to rewrite the play entirely, making it funnier. “I wrote it, tore it up and started over. It was very, very depressing the first time. The second time it was just depressing.”

The lady of the house in “Henceforward . . . “ is, after all, the Nan 300F, a discarded, automated nannie that the composer reworks to make it sort of wife-like. The adjustable, battery-powered hostess----played at the Taper by Paula Wilcox in one act and Jane Krakowski in the other--represents Ayckbourn’s feelings about “how we treat people and try to alter them.”

First performed at Scarborough in summer, 1987, “Henceforward . . . “ was produced at Houston’s Alley Theatre a few months later. (The Alley had already done six Ayckbourn comedies.) Writing from Houston at the time, former Los Angeles Times drama critic Dan Sullivan urged “anyone with a theater to fill in Los Angeles” to hop a plane for Houston.

The play opened on the West End in 1988 and was first promised to Doolittle subscribers for April, 1990. But casting the composer was a major problem, Davidson says, especially given runs at the Doolittle which were considerably longer than those at the Taper.

George Segal played composer Watkins in Houston and Ian McKellen did so in London. But Ayckbourn says he, too, had problems casting the show because “for quite a lot of the play, he is the silent, watching one. It’s the Jack Benny role--a lot goes on around him.”

These are good times for Ayckbourn. He was recently named Oxford’s Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre, a university post previously held by Stephen Sondheim and McKellen. He’s writing more “family shows” for children, and hopes to take his theater company from Scarborough to Chicago next summer to perform two of his children’s plays at the International Theatre Festival of Chicago.

Ayckbourn’s plays are produced worldwide in commercial and nonprofit houses alike. The playwright earns thousands of pounds a month just from amateur royalties, says his agent, Tom Erhardt, at Margaret Ramsay Ltd., who also reports mail or phone inquiries every single day. “Henceforward . . . “ alone has already played in Greece, Germany, Denmark, Japan, Israel, France, Holland, Italy, Finland and elsewhere, says Erhardt.

The playwright indicates some surprise at the worldwide nature of his popularity, but readily admits “what I set out to do was to be popular . . . (and) all the old stuff about everyone being related under the skin is probably true. Birth, death and marriage are things that affect us all. We all strike up some relationship, we’re all born and we all die. Those (things) tend to appear in my plays much more than, say, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.”

They certainly can’t get enough Ayckbourn in England. More than 20 of his plays have been produced at London’s National Theatre or on its commercial West End since “Relatively Speaking” opened on the West End in 1967 and went on to play 355 performances. The playwright had five plays running at once on the West End in 1975, and there have been frequent revivals of his earlier plays in recent years.

On Broadway, “Absurd Person Singular” played nearly 600 performances in the mid-’70s, while both “The Norman Conquests” and “Bedroom Farce” had respectable runs a few years later.

“The Norman Conquests” had its American premiere at the Ahmanson (which later also produced both “Absurd Person Singular” and “Bedroom Farce”) before heading on to Broadway, and Ayckbourn’s plays have occasionally been performed at other regional and smaller theaters in Southern California. South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa produced “A Chorus of Disapproval” in 1989, for instance, while Los Angeles’ smaller Colony Studio Theater revived “Bedroom Farce” earlier this year.

Ayckbourn himself is finding that he and his U.S. audiences are less and less “divided by a common language.” “Taking Steps,” another older play, ran 78 performances earlier this year in a limited run at Broadway’s Circle in the Square, while the Manhattan Theatre Club revived “Absent Friends” at about the same time. In Los Angeles, the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s production of “Absurd Person Singular” finally closed in October after a run of nearly six months.

The playwright’s recent West End hit, “Man of the Moment,” which takes on heroism and the media, will have its American premiere this spring at the 612-seat Cleveland Playhouse. With its huge stage, the theater is one of the few in the country which can accommodate an onstage swimming pool, says artistic director Josephine Abady.

Like the Taper’s Davidson, who hopes to take “Henceforward . . . “ on to future venues after Los Angeles, Abady hopes her production will also later move on toward New York. “We may be catching up to his sensibility as our own comedy writers get darker,” says Abady. “I also think the times we live in are so bleakly comic that Ayckbourn is more pertinent than he has ever been.”

Lynne Meadow, artistic director of New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club, will direct Ayckbourn’s “A Small Family Business” in New York later this season. No venue has been set yet, says Meadow, who earlier directed successful MTC productions of both “Woman in Mind” and “Absent Friends.” But noting the two plays fared well with both critics and audiences, Meadow implies that the playwright’s appeal to U.S. audiences has, in fact, been underestimated.

Ayckbourn himself meanwhile sees greater U.S. acceptance and acknowledges “a body of fans, or at least supporters. I’m not deliberately writing darkly to attract an American audience. It seems (my plays) are getting darker, but maybe ‘deeper’ is a better word. That forges a greater link across the Atlantic. It rings a bigger bell.”