Cartoonist Draws Bead on Theater : Stage: New Yorker’s William Hamilton loves being a playwright, despite the agonies of getting ‘Interior Decoration,’ at the Old Globe, produced.

Humor, for William Hamilton, is a way of life.

“I was a skinny, bespectacled boy whose voice wouldn’t change. The only way I could survive was to be funny,” the tall and still bespectacled Hamilton said recently, sitting on a bench outside the Old Globe Theatre.

His sense of humor was honed at Yale, where he worked for the Yale Record, the university’s humor magazine at the time. And his wit got him work as a cartoonist for the New Yorker, where he’s become famous for his series “The Now Society.”

Now, he is hoping to become known as a comedic playwright.

The Southern California premiere of his “Interior Decoration,” a show about witty, well-to-do people, opened at the Old Globe last month and will run through Aug. 23. The female lead, Sybil Bolton, is a CEO of a major corporation, who wants a baby but not a husband. She picks a handsome, self-assured millionaire to help her conceive, but things get complicated when the wife of her gay, high-fashion decorator also makes a play to have a baby by the millionaire. It’s a complicated plot filled with characters with the same dry wit and pretensions of Hamilton’s famous cartoons.

Hamilton, 53, was born in St. Helena in the Napa Valley of Northern California. He began cartooning professionally after he got out of the Army, penning his first creation for Cycle World before working his way up to the New Yorker in the 1960s.

Over the years, he has written three novels and five plays, and he currently writes a monthly column for Buzz magazine, which is published by his wife, Eden Collinsworth, in Los Angeles, where the couple live with their 3 1/2-year-old son. Hamilton also has a 19-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.

*

Getting his cartoons published has always been easy; getting his plays produced has not.

The Magic Theatre in San Francisco agreed to present “Interior Decoration” in 1988, but Hamilton and his friends had to raise the money to put it on. Taking on such a large responsibility was “a ghastly experience,” Hamilton recalled. Audiences seemed to enjoy the screwball comedy, but although some producers nibbled to present it elsewhere, no one bit.

“Lots of readings, lots of false starts, lots of agonizing,” is how Hamilton sums it up. “There have been horrendous offstage dramas in trying to get this thing where it is now. It’s really been awful.”

But Hamilton didn’t quit. After seeing his first play, “Save Grand Central,” produced Off Broadway, he had the bug to do more.

“I don’t think anything can touch the theater. Once you’ve done it, you’ll never be happy with anything else. Once you have succeeded, even for an hour or 10 minutes, there’s nothing like it.

“It can fall like a souffle in one second and that’s horrible. But if it succeeds, it feels like a great feat. You’ve been able to do something no one else in any art form can--listen to every word with an audience. I was sure I was good at it and I was sure audiences would like it if I could just get it on.”

His luck turned when he submitted “Interior Decoration” to the Play Discovery Program at the Old Globe; it was presented as a staged reading in 1991 at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

*

Jack O’Brien, the Old Globe’s artistic director, put the play in the 1992 summer season. Then the problems started again. John Tillinger, who had directed the show in San Francisco, was to direct in San Diego but had to drop out for family reasons. Another director also dropped out. Cast members started getting nervous. Before they could drop out, O’Brien decided to step in himself to direct.

O’Brien says he likes the challenge of finding a balance between the play’s comedy and what he calls its larger issues: parenting, chauvinism, territorial imperatives. And then there’s the trick of maintaining Hamilton’s urbane perspective.

“He writes a very brilliant kind of high comedy that no one writes anymore,” O’Brien said. “There is a genuine tone and a voice that is quite remarkable and individual. But it’s a style piece. (Richard Brinsley) Sheridan, (Noel) Coward, (A. R.) Gurney and Hamilton are akin to Strauss waltzes. It takes a certain approach. It needs a light touch and a certain amount of elegance to bring it off.”

The one good result of all the delay since the 1988 production in San Francisco, Hamilton says, is that he’s had time to update the material. The idea for the play came to him nearly six years ago when his wife told him about an unmarried woman she knew who was going to get herself inseminated. Then, it seemed quite a new idea, which was reflected in the original script: When the CEO told her decorator and his wife that she wanted to become pregnant, they were shocked.

Today, the subject has become more commonplace, so in this version, the couple not only are not surprised at the news, but they’re completely up to date on all her options.

Despite the seriousness of the subject, this is a comedy. One can guess--correctly--that there is a happy ending in store. Hamilton believes in happy endings. After all, he finally got a happy ending for the backstage dramas involved in getting this play on stage.

It all came together “just as I was in despair for the 500th time,” he said. “It’s a great feeling.”

“Interior Decoration,” at the Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, (619) 239-2255. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; today and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 23. $17.50-$30.