Stage Is Latest Arena for Suicide Guru : Theater: ‘Is This the Day?’ is based on Derek Humphry’s book on how he helped his first wife kill herself. It has its U.S. premiere Friday in Oregon.

Derek Humphry hangs up the phone after sparring with a German television station and glances out the large window of his office in the Hemlock Society’s national headquarters.

“They were begging me to come to Germany, all expenses paid. I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I just don’t have time,’ ” says the 61-year-old guru of “self-deliverance and assisted suicide” for the terminally ill.

Ever since his incendiary book, “Final Exit,” topped the nonfiction bestseller lists last fall, Humphry has been hot news. Reporters, photographers and television crews parade through this spacious office daily, seeking pearls and dirt. The white-haired crusader suffers them all gracefully.

But he’s also inscrutable--a fact underscored by his mysterious lack of involvement in the U.S. premiere here Friday of “Is This the Day?,” a 1990 British play based on an earlier book on how he helped his cancer-weakened first wife, Jean, commit suicide in 1975.

No stranger to controversy, Humphry is the thrice-married (two of his wives have committed suicide) executive director of the Hemlock Society, headquartered near the city center. From here he has guided his Hemlock Movement by going toe-to-toe with the medical profession, right-to-life groups, religious leaders and others against voluntary euthanasia.

Humphry’s weapons for legal reform have been his own persuasive powers as a debater and speaker, his books, initiatives, pamphlets, newsletters, the talk-show circuit and now the play, “Is This the Day?”

While Humphry draws stiff opposition from ethical and legal fronts, no resistance has yet surfaced here to the play, based on his 1978 pioneering book, “Jean’s Way.” The Eugenesis Players of Oregon is scheduled to perform “Is This the Day?” on Friday, Saturday, Jan. 31 and Feb. 1-2 in Hult Center’s 500-seat Soreng Theatre.

An American production of this stark drama, voted Britain’s best play in 1990, has long been Humphry’s goal. Yet, with one finally emerging, he has curiously avoided milking it, even going so far as to take himself out of opportunities to hype the play and his cause by vacationing in Mexico for the 10 days just before opening night.

But he has given it his blessing, taken an interest in its development and donated $5,000 to its funding.

“I’m trying to help this play along, but I’m not trying to boss it,” he says, adding, “I don’t know anything about the theater.”

He has attended no rehearsals and has met with the cast just twice--in August to answer their questions and in October to consider their qualms about continuing after his second wife, Ann Wickett, committed suicide while apparently despondent over cancer and her divorce from Humphry.

But Humphry remains keen on the play. He has seen it only twice--during the run in Britain and in Eugene earlier this month, when a condensed version was given at a Hemlock Society meeting here.

“My emotions are so heavy on this that it’s difficult to be objective about whether it’s any good or not,” Humphry says. “It’s a very unusual experience to see yourself on the stage, especially in such a painful episode. A lot of the dialogue is exactly what was said. It’s not easy.”

Nor was it a picnic for the actor who portrays him. At the Jan. 5 presentation, Gene Otis couldn’t miss Humphry in the second row, bathed in bright television lights. “That was the toughest thing I’ve ever done,” Otis says.

But that’s just one of the play’s many blurrings of reality and artistry. Another occurred when Humphry’s three sons, weary of media attention, demanded that their names be changed in the play. At the same time, Derek himself was changed to “Max,” Jean to “Jane” and Ann to “Amy.”

“When you write about yourself, you expose your family very nakedly to criticism and exposure. You might get fame and fortune, but, boy, you get a lot of private grief that comes with these things as well. You pay for what you get,” Humphry says. “I’m sorry I put them through it.

“My justification is that it is a crucial cause to mankind.”

Mounting “Is This the Day?’ has been a trial. When rehearsals began in August, director Judith Roberts thought she simply had an “intriguing” play. Suddenly, the outside world barged in: “Final Exit” hit the bestseller lists and Humphry exploded in the media. When Humphry’s second wife committed suicide, Roberts was dumbfounded.

“It was like living in a docudrama,” she says. “The ironies abound and they continue to unfold before our very eyes.”

The cast has had enough irony.

“I’m just so tired of all the sensationalism,” says Diane Johnson, who plays Humphry’s first wife. Adds Cara Siler, who plays his second wife: “I’m trying not to weigh all this too heavily on the character.”

When first performed, the play, written by Vilma Hollingbery with Michael Napier Brown for the Royal Theatre in Northampton, England, garnered critical acclaim but modest attendance (“It’s the death and dying thing,” Humphry says). Still, it ran for three weeks and won a best play award. Then it practically vanished.

To spark interest, the Hemlock Society, which owns the play, sent scripts to 450 American theatrical producers. None bit. Undaunted, the society asked Roberts, a local director, to consider it.

Roberts likes the play because it is “more cinematic than it is everyday theater. Yet it feels natural. It makes a very difficult and delicate issue accessible to everybody. That in itself is exciting: To open up a new realm of thought. It’s always difficult to do an ‘issue’ play without beating people over the head. This one feels to me to be a passionate story, without being maudlin, depressing or propaganda.”

Humphry has long sought a dramatization of “Jean’s Way.” Scripts by Columbia Pictures and Granada Television were shelved and other deals never materialized. Only the play got produced. Still, there are no plans for this production after Feb. 2.

In Humphry’s opinion, the movie scripts failed by taking a literal approach to the book, whereas playwright Hollingbery succeeded by deploying Humphry’s second wife (absent from the book) as both a narrator and a character.

In light of her 1991 suicide, the presence of Ann’s character on stage may rasp the senses of some patrons--especially since the play hasn’t been updated. “What happened afterward is another play, another book,” Humphry insists, adding that he intends to deal with both wives’ deaths in a future book titled “The Two Faces of Suicide.”

Historically, what’s transpired--the book, the play, the production, the Hemlock Society, his fame--occurred because Humphry, then a reporter at the London Sunday Times, wrote “Jean’s Way.”

The ensuing commotion made “Jean’s Way” an international sensation. When book sales sagged and attention to Humphry waned, he took a reporting job at the Los Angeles Times in 1978. But the book kept selling and provoking debate. In 1980, he founded the Hemlock Society out of his home in Santa Monica. Eight years later, he moved to Eugene for “quality-of-life” reasons.

Legal reform is at the root of Humphry’s work.

“I have two driving forces: One, I enjoy publishing books--the writing, the publishing, publishing newsletters, pamphlets. Then the other side of me is a campaigner, a missionary. I want to play my part in changing the law to make the world a better place in this one small respect. If I can do that, then I’ll die happy,” he says.