Jay Tarses: Enjoying Life Outside of TV Sitcoms : Stage: The mastermind of such shows as ‘Buffalo Bill’ and ‘Molly Dodd’ has found true happiness seeing his play produced.

Standing on a stage strewn with cables and sawdust, 3,000 miles from the city of his tortured dreams, Jay Tarses is a kid again. He can hardly believe how untroubled, how completely at ease he is in this tiny theater above 42nd Street, how much he loves everything about it: the actors, the director, the $750 set. Even, God forgive him, the management.

“It’s rapture. It’s heaven. It’s lovely,” Tarses declares, laying on superlatives like a tourist catching his first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline. “It’s just great. You don’t have to watch what you say. You don’t have to think in terms of cutting for a half-hour episode. You don’t have to think about what can get by the censors.”

Tarses, the sly mastermind of such urbane, subversive TV fare as “Buffalo Bill,” “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story” and, most memorably, “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” does not toss off admiring tributes lightly. As Hollywood’s Last Angry Sitcom Writer, he says he is perpetually frustrated by the struggle to get his work on the air unfiltered by ratings-crazed TV execs--including his own daughter, an executive at NBC, which aired the first 26 episodes of “Molly Dodd.”

“The state of television is so deplorable,” Tarses says of the industry in which he has worked for virtually his entire adult life. “ ‘Molly Dodd’ was such a freak thing. . .”

But the 53-year-old, Baltimore-born writer feels no sense of alienation on the upstairs stage at Playwrights Horizons, where his first play, “Man in His Underwear,” is currently receiving its first New York production. On the contrary: Tarses feels positively coddled. The play is being given the kind of loving attention that many veteran playwrights only dream of: a first-rate cast that includes Dann Florek, Debra Monk and Robert Joy, working for less than they would receive on unemployment; a two-week run, through last Sunday, in which Tarses got to tinker to his heart’s content, and perhaps best of all from his point of view, critics are not only not welcome, they are not invited.

What is going on here is the Off-Broadway version of college football recruiting. The people at Playwrights are going out of their way to make Tarses feel he has found a safe haven. They speak of nothing less than grooming him for a new career on the coast on which, he says, he would actually prefer to live.

“I think the theater needs Jay Tarses. He is one of the most original writers--he’s every bit as funny as Neil Simon,” gushes Don Scardino, who, as Playwrights’ artistic director, persuaded Tarses to mount the reworked play in his 75-seat studio theater after it had been produced two summers ago at the Williamstown Theater Festival, with disappointing results. “If we can encourage Jay Tarses to write for us, the theater will be better for it.”

It normally doesn’t happen this way. The economies of scale traditionally tip in the direction of prime time, not Off-Broadway. The normal career progression is: starving, obscure playwright; struggling, moderately well-known playwright; rich and famous TV writer. And few who leave for Hollywood ever make it back to the theater district as anything except a member of the audience. But just as his TV comedies have often transcended the cliches of that medium, so, too, does their creator defy the stereotypes of his profession. He is a comic writer, trained in the crafting of dialogue between commercial breaks, who yearned for the challenge of live theater.

“I wrote it in L.A. in ’89 in a burst of passion,” Tarses says of his play, as he sips from a cup of black coffee in the lobby of the theater. Wearing well-worn green corduroy slacks and a shapeless black sweater, he looks every inch the role he seeks to play, that of budding theater writer. “I wanted to do this as a regular, working playwright,” he says, and seems to mean it: His modest biographical entry in the Playbill, even briefer than the sound designer’s, makes no mention of his TV credits.

“Man in His Underwear” is the story of Al Kirkland, a middle-aged Baltimore businessman who, in the throes of a midlife crisis, has an affair with a younger woman. Al’s infidelity forces him and those he loves to reassess their lives and relationships. Tarses says the play is not autobiographical--he has been married for 30 years and has three grown children--but that he had wanted to write for some time about marriage and mortality.

Scardino brought the play to Playwrights as part of its New Theater Wing program, a 5-year-old project underwritten by private donors that allows the theater to stage, at low cost, works-in-progress by both fledgling and well-known playwrights. Those who have had works produced have included playwright A.R. Gurney and actor Tom Mardirosian.

Tarses was thrilled to get another crack at the work, not only because he was anxious to revise it, but because he was becoming more and more disenchanted with network television. The cancellation of “Molly Dodd” by NBC had been deeply wounding, and his brushes with the networks since have left him dispirited. A pilot he did for NBC, “Baltimore,” starring Megan Gallagher, has never run; the network also has 13 completed episodes of his new series, “Smoldering Lust,” a show that takes place in San Francisco and is, according to Tarses, about “passion and infidelity.”

NBC has yet to put it on the schedule. “The silence is deafening,” Tarses says. “If I pitch something that they like, they’ll buy it, and then they’ll kill it if it’s something that is not 100% commercial.”

A spokeswoman for NBC, Patricia Schultz, laughed good-naturedly when told of the comments by Tarses, who has long railed against network decision-making. She said “Smoldering Lust” is a potential midseason or summer replacement series for NBC, but no decision on when to run it had been made.

What makes Tarses’ complaints seem all the more like the subject of an impossible-to-believe episode of a Tarses show is that the person in charge of comedy development at NBC is Tarses’ own daughter, Jamie.

“She killed ‘Baltimore,’ ” Tarses says matter-of-factly, as if every daughter has veto power over her father’s life’s work. “She said, ‘Not your best work, Dad.’ We didn’t talk for a while after that.

“We’re very close, but it’s very strange,” he continues. “We’ve had some awful fights. But she’s good at what she does. I condemn what she does--she’s given us such gems as the ‘Mark and Brian Show’--but she does it very well.” Jamie Tarses did not return calls.

On 42nd Street Tarses is sequestered from the dictates of the networks. It is just him and the play. Aside from a trip to California to mix the last three episodes of “Smoldering,” he has been a constant presence at Playwrights, joking with the cast and director Kevin Dowling, even stepping in to read the lines of absent actors.

“He’s very prolific,” says Debra Monk, who plays Jan, the wife on whom Al cheats. “There haven’t been major, major chunks of rewriting, but he’s always open to suggestion.” Dowling says that “Jay has this unique sense of humor. But he’s a rusher, he always wants to try different things. If there’s anything I’ve had to say, it’s ‘Slow down, let’s see if it works.’ ”

That’s something Tarses wants to know, too. He thinks he may be close to a finished product--”In my mind, this play is on the verge of being a really acceptable American play,” he says--but the jury is still out. At a performance one evening last week, the laughs did not came as fast and furiously as they did for a smaller audience at a rehearsal earlier that week.

But if anyone knows the vicissitudes of putting on shows, it is Jay Tarses. He’s not hedging his bets. In his biography in the Playbill, he substitutes the usual data with a disclaimer: “He doesn’t plan to write a second play unless his first play is well received. If it’s not, a potentially great voice in the America Theater will be tragically stilled.”