THEATER : A Playwright Who’s in the Middle of It All

Michael Brady, a playwright from New England, has heard the knock on his work before: that it is middlebrow, middle-class and, well, just too middling.

Sitting in an upstairs office at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theatre--where previews of his popular drama “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday” begin tonight--he shrugs off the critique with the equanimity of someone who has faced it many times.

“I don’t think I necessarily write a middle-class type of play,” he says. “But I write about emotions. I write about relationships. And that’s just perceived as having a middlebrow orientation.

In “To Gillian,” the title character comes back as a ghost after her accidental death to help persuade her suicidally depressed husband that he must quit grieving and embrace life again.

“This country is split into so many kinds of audiences, so many groups,” Brady continues, looking fresh but pale in a sweat shirt and jeans and glad to be taking a brief vacation from the gray winter of the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts, where he lives.

“There’s ethnic theater, cutting-edge theater, radically oriented stuff, middle-class theater. You have to write about what you know. I probably am middle class, as most of us are. That’s what I came from. That’s what I write about.”

To Brady, a compact 42-year-old with cropped hair and a Boston accent, the charge of being middle-class and middlebrow is less unsettling than the suspicion he’s a one-trick pony and that his one trick is “To Gillian.”

By his publisher’s count, there have been 15 to 20 professional productions along with 185 or so amateur stagings of the play around the country since the original workshop version at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York (which became an Off-Broadway hit in 1984 at Greenwich Village’s Circle in the Square).

In Fullerton just two weeks ago, Orange County’s latest addition to the little league of storefront troupes--the Vanguard Theatre Ensemble--launched its maiden season with a revival of “To Gillian.”

Laguna Playhouse artistic director Andrew Barnicle is so impressed by the play, having seen the Off-Broadway production, that he chose to make his acting debut at the Moulton in the role of the widower.

That play’s popularity with amateur companies, though gratifying to both playwright and publisher, tends to obscure rather than enhance Brady’s reputation as a serious artist.

The irony is not lost on Brady. Few people have even heard of his handful of other plays.

His first, “Sarah,” about a couple struggling with the consequences of a rape, “hasn’t been done much,” he says, “though I’ve always had pride in it.” Another, “Semper Fi,” “gets done here and there.” It is about the aftermath of the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.

“I always get interest in ‘Gillian’ but not for any of the others,” Brady says. “If I can get my newest play up and shown somewhere I think that could change. It’s called “Two Bears Blinking,” and it has a lot of the qualities of ‘Gillian,’ only with a different kind of take on reality.”

Brady says he submitted “Two Bears” to South Coast Repertory, and--as if to prove it doesn’t take him seriously--SCR rejected it.

“Bears,” set in New Mexico, tells about a group of people who come to a bed-and-breakfast ranch to see the strange lights that appear every June on the walls of a nearby canyon. The UFO-ish phenomena apparently are based on actual blinking lights that have appeared in a place in Texas.

Given his remarks about writing from experience, it is tempting to believe that Brady’s plays are autobiographical. Not so. In fact, he never was in the Marines, never had a wife who was raped and never had a wife who died.

“I’ve had people die in my life, but ‘Gillian’ is not a direct story line,” he says. “I wrote it soon after being married. I was very happy and felt like a lot of issues in my life had been answered.

“But I was having lots of difficulties writing. So I began to play a game of what-if, kind of like improvising. A lot of writers do it. What if this? What if that? And one of the what-ifs was ‘What if my wife died?’ ”