THEATER : McGarry’s Tales: True to Form : Her Work Documents the Tribulations of a Family That Could Be Her Own

If Mary Anne McGarry’s stories have the ring of truth, no matter how outrageous, it’s not merely because they’re well-written or, when she performs them, well-told.

“Fiction,” she said in a recent interview, “is mostly fact.”

Yet McGarry maintained, with a zany gleam in her pale blue eyes, that what she writes is not necessarily factual. Indeed, she likes to claim that her sharply etched, quasi-autobiographical stories embroider on reality to a great degree and that her characters are largely mix-and-match composites.

The claim is something of a subterfuge, a way to protect both the innocent and the guilty, which is understandable. Some people (especially close relatives) might not enjoy being hauled out for exposure by a comic writer with a flair for confessing the most intimate details of their lives.

In “The European Connection, 1991”--presented Sunday at the Engman International Gallery in Laguna Beach to close out a one-a-month series called “Making Scenes”--McGarry documents the tribulations of a footloose Irish-American clan that would seem to resemble her own.

“In my family,” she began, “whenever we had trouble we took a trip. And whenever we took a trip we had trouble.”

Like the bright “Honeymoon in Galway,” which opened the series last March, her latest tale does not lack for hilarious incidents or bittersweet revelations. But this time it mainly involves a pair of relatives who have the family’s “genetic predisposition to turn on the ignition and go.”

McGarry, 48, regales us with portraits of a “fair-haired” nephew who starts out as a Midwestern innocent but ends up arrested in Munich for suspicion of dealing cocaine, and a “golden-haired Commie pinko” niece who makes a beeline for Europe (“straight from graduation to airport”), knowing “there’s no point in getting a job if you don’t have to.”

We also briefly meet their mother, McGarry’s sister, “a late-blooming punk-rocker with the soul of a virgin”; her parole-officer brother who descends into “a William Styron-style depression” following his divorce from a night-shift nurse; and her father, the strait-laced professor who believes “thrift, hard work and exercise” are just the sort of vitamins needed to ward off “the perils of 20th-Century life.”

Sitting at a sidewalk cafe between rehearsals for the Engman performance, McGarry couldn’t help marveling at her family’s wild experiences. Nor could she explain why she herself seems to be a lightning rod for all kinds of raucous disasters. Just that week, her car had been stolen, and the car she borrowed was booted the next day, not once, but twice.

“People can’t believe the stuff that happens to me,” she said. “And I’m beginning to wonder myself. ‘Do I attract this stuff like a magnet? Or what?’

“I tell myself, ‘Mary Anne, it must be something about the way you live. It must be that you don’t want to be bored, and therefore you make choices--consciously or unconsciously--that keep you from being bored.’ ”

At this point in her life, boredom would hardly seem to be the problem. Her professional career as a writer, not to mention as an actress and teacher, radiates an aura of fertile chaos. She has a couple of screenplays circulating in Hollywood--one has drawn “serious nibbles,” she said--and a collection of short stories called “Missing Persons” contracted for publication in New York (though it’s embroiled in a legal dispute).

From the mid-’80s on, moreover, McGarry has worked at South Coast Repertory in Romulus Linney’s “Lost Elektra,” Neal Bell’s “Cold Sweat,” Craig Lucas’ “Prelude to a Kiss,” Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” and Alan Ayckbourn’s “A Chorus of Disapproval.”

At the same time, television has kept her busy. Over the weekend, for example, she had to dash to Los Angeles to complete scenes in a movie-of-the-week called “Darkness at Dawn.” She is playing the mother-in-law of Meredith Baxter Birney, who plays an alcoholic-cum-drug abuser. “In the curious manner of TV casting,” said McGarry, “I must have been about 4 years old when I had my son.”

That role follows one as Blair Brown’s psychiatrist in “No Secrets” and, in no particular order, other TV jobs as a judge in “Runaway Father,” a blue-collar type on the James Earl Jones series “Pros and Cons,” a snobbish type on a short-lived series called “Mulloy,” an attorney-turned-judge on “L.A. Law” (“I’ve recurred twice”) and a saleswoman on “Roseanne.”

“I was supposed to be a recurring character in ‘Roseanne,’ ” she recounted, launching into one of her typical vignettes. “They created this fantastic role, Marie, who was going to be Roseanne’s nemesis in the factory. My agent was jubilant. He thought, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got a gold mine here.’

“I went in on a Monday as this trashy, loudmouthed character. I wore blue eye shadow, and I stuffed shoulder pads into my bra, and I used this Ozark accent. So they cast me.

“I think (Roseanne) was expecting a more down-home type. Two days later I was written out. They said, ‘Don’t worry. We’re just having a little trouble balancing the plot.’ Then the director who hired me got fired. And the producer who brought me in got fired. And the writer who created the character got fired. So they gave me a deal as a one-shot saleslady, and I was never heard from again.”

Born in Cincinnati, McGarry grew up in St. Louis with three siblings. She went to Catholic schools from kindergarten through college and got her bachelor’s degree at St. Louis University, where her father taught medieval history. Her interest in theater was kindled in high school “by this very artsy order” of nuns, she recounted.

“Most of the nuns eventually left. They did things like chain themselves to department store doors to protest the (Vietnam) war and married divorced Jews.”

McGarry majored in literature at college, went to Europe afterward to take classes at Cambridge University and, by her mid-20s, landed a reporting job on the suburban staff of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat while pursuing a master’s degree in theater arts.

Not satisfied to juggle only two things at a time, she also pursued a St. Louis stage career as well. “I did Chekhov at the Gaslight Theatre in old Gaslight Square,” she recalled. “And I worked on a (Mississippi) showboat, where I was fired. I talked back to the audience. They said I was a fine actress but I jawed too much.”

Eventually McGarry got her doctorate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. It wasn’t long before she launched herself professionally in the nearby Chicago theaters, both as an actress and a director, while teaching at Northern Illinois University.

In 1982, after a couple of frustrating years in New York, she came to California to teach theater at UC Irvine. She left there in 1988 and has taught ever since at SCR’s Professional Actors Conservatory.

One thing she has never done is marry. (“Serial monogamy is what I practice, without papers.”)

Given her family’s history of “achy breaky hearts”--at least that’s how she describes her composite relatives in “The European Connection”--marriage doesn’t seem that desirable. Yet she has begun to consider giving it a try.

“There are probably a lot of interesting men out there,” she said. “But I think I might be entering the market a little late. It would probably help if I were 23.”

She smiled broadly and hooted.

“I’ll tell you something, though,” she added. “Until I was no longer living with someone, no longer deeply involved or significantly attached, I did not find my voice as a writer.”

And that, she implied, may be worth more than marriage.