THEATER : ‘Conversations’ With His Ghosts : For Herb Gardner, his combative comedy-drama is an especially personal take on the perennial battle of the generations

“This play,” said veteran playwright Herb Gardner, “was like being a war correspondent. Except that this war is never over.”

The “war” is the perennial battle between generations and the play is “Conversations With My Father,” Gardner’s memory drama, which opened Thursday at the Ahmanson at the Doolittle Theatre with a cast largely drawn from its yearlong run on Broadway. Judd Hirsch is re-creating his Tony-winning performance as Eddie Goldberg, the immigrant Jewish saloonkeeper who lives by two rules: Don’t be too Jewish, and don’t let anyone push you around. Those rules lead to a lot of bloody noses in the Goldbergs’ Lower East Side neighborhood with its turf-crazy immigrant Asians, Jews and Italians.

Eddie has the scrappy iconoclasm of most other earlier Gardner heroes, such as Murray, the cheerful nonconformist of “A Thousand Clowns”; Max, the die-hard Coney Island vendor in “The Goodbye People” (the film of which Gardner also directed), and Nat Moyer, the park bench philosopher in “I’m Not Rappaport,” which won the 1986 Tony for best play and ran for two years on Broadway.

As in those works, this combative comedy-drama also delivers the bromides and didacticism that have made the playwright a favorite of audiences, if not critics. But if there are sharper edges here than in what Gardner terms his “usual whimsical bull----,” it is because “Conversations” conjures up the ghosts of his youth, particularly his father, who owned a tavern on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Never before in Gardner’s work has the unresolvable clutter of misplaced dreams exacted quite so personal a price.

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Gardner, 58, is casually dressed in a blue crew-neck sweater and jeans, his curly hair now completely white.

“I feel so strongly about some of the things that this play will always be difficult to talk about,” he said over a large platter of sushi in a restaurant near the East Side garden apartment where he lives with his wife, Barbara Sproul, chairman of the religion department at Hunter College, and their two young boys, Jake, 5, and Rafferty, 2.

“Um, this play has been harder to talk about than . . . well . . . uh . . . It’s just . . . uh, that . . . uh . . . “

His discourse stalls completely--as it would many times during the conversation--leaving him to stare off into space or sniffle slightly, the lingering effect of a recent prolonged bout with pneumonia. “Well, you can see how articulate I am,” he said after a long pause. “I need a taxi to get me to the end of a sentence. It’s been a hard one to talk about from the beginning.”

Hirsch says he understands Gardner’s challenges in the play: “Herb had to write this play because, like many of us, he never had a chance to have that conversation with his father. It’s his attempt to make some sense of those times and that man.”

Nearly two years after the play premiered at Seattle Repertory Theatre, home to director Daniel Sullivan, who also directed “Conversations” in New York and is doing so in Los Angeles, Gardner appears to be haunted still by the “noisy ghosts” he said drove him to collect “the bits and pieces of memory” that make up a drama that is autobiographical in “the emotions, not the specifics.”

“I grew up with people who lived at the top of their lungs,” Gardner said of his extended family, on whom he based his composite characters in “Conversations.”

“If they didn’t argue about Lenin, they argued about egg salad. My father was not as violent as Eddie, and the name of the bar was the Silver Gate, but he was just as willful and determined and dominant, always promoting, always pushing.” These ghosts of the past, he added, “just wouldn’t shut up until I wrote them down.”

“Conversations With My Father” includes the high-decibel confrontations typical of domestic family dramas from Eugene O’Neill to August Wilson.

“Good or bad,” Gardner observed, “the father wants the son to be strong, to develop into a contender, and then one day, he finds himself in the ring with his own invention, fighting against the very strength he hoped to give his son.”

But there is another battle at the play’s center, the struggle for Eddie’s soul. Swathing his bar in patriotic American bunting and mementos of the latest crazes, the saloonkeeper spars repeatedly with his boarder, Zaretsky, an elderly Yiddish actor who exemplifies the Old World traditions that Eddie denigrates.

Those traditions are affectionately evoked in the play, reflecting to some extent Gardner’s rejection of his own father’s amusingly fumbled efforts to assimilate, just as Eddie’s sons--Joey and the younger Charlie (the playwright’s stand-in)--remonstrate their father’s disgust with the past. “I loved all those different voices,” Gardner said. “My father would look down his bar sometimes and say, ‘It’s the League of Nations.’ It was fun for me to recapture that mood and feeling.”

Zaretsky, who does a 12-minute version of the Yiddish classic “The Dybbuk” (playing all the parts, of course), embodies a whole tradition of 2nd Avenue theater that was on its tail end when Gardner was growing up.

“I had an uncle who ran a halvah refreshment stand at the old Yiddish theater on Houston Street,” he recalled, speaking of a neighborhood in which one could walk for 10 blocks without hearing English spoken. “I saw all the plays there. The authors sure liked to move from crying to laughing within moments of each other.”

Indeed Gardner’s plays, with their lightning shifts between hilarity and horror, their raucous sentiment and formulaic melodrama, their combative optimism in the face of despair, may well have been influenced by Yiddish theater. Eddie is a man still on the defensive against the bloody pogroms of his youth, the brutality of which he communicates to his sons.

“You’re Jewish,” he tells them. “You gotta be smarter than everybody else; or cuter or faster or funnier. Or tougher. Because basically, they want to kill you. This is true maybe 30, 35 hundred years now and is not likely to end next Tuesday.”

The playwright said that, as in the play, he could recall the “mini-pogrom” that took place on the night of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reelection in 1944. Then roving groups of American rightists went on an anti-Semitic rampage, holding Jewish boys over open manholes and breaking light bulbs on the sign atop the Jewish Daily Forward building so that the message “Jew Is For War” was emblazoned across the night sky and reflected in the East River.

Then only 9, Gardner said, he was first fearful and then angry: “I knew my father had been right.”

Those experiences fueled both Gardner’s ambition and a lifelong vigilance against anti-Semitism. Indeed, he was an early achiever, even if he now jokes about having turned collecting unemployment insurance into “an art form” when he was a young adult. (“I could never hold a job,” he said.) By the time he was 27, however, he had a hit on Broadway with “A Thousand Clowns” (about a man who quits his job) and had already retired from a career as the creator of a popular cartoon called “The Nebbishes.”

By then Gardner, who attended Carnegie Tech and Antioch College (he never graduated from either), had long abandoned his ambition to be a sculptor for the “romantic rogue act” of going into theater. (“How do you ask a kamikaze pilot if his work is going well?” he joked about his profession.)

Indeed, Gardner has always thought of himself as first a playwright, although his script for “A Thousand Clowns” brought him an Oscar nomination in 1966 and subsequent work in Hollywood, including scripts adapted from his short story “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying These Terrible Things About Me?” and his plays “Thieves” and “The Goodbye People.”

Both the stage and screen versions of “The Goodbye People” flopped, as did the film of “Thieves” with Charles Grodin, but Gardner persevered and was rewarded when, in 1986, his comedy “I’m Not Rappaport” defied poor critical reception to win the Tony for its author, director (Sullivan) and star (Hirsch) and go on to become an international hit. Its octogenarian protagonist Nat Moyer, debating the issues of the day with his African-American contemporary, could well have been a habitue of the Gardners’ Silver Gate saloon. And there is in his speeches traces of the fiery old Jewish leftist of the ‘30s.

Not everyone, however, appreciated those ethnic references in “I’m Not Rappaport.” Gardner recalled the time that he attended a preview of “Je Ne Suis Pas Rappaport” in Paris, where his work has been very popular, and discovered that the lead actor had cut references to the character’s Jewishness. Furious, the playwright confronted the actor and director backstage after the performance.

“They basically said, ‘Well, it’s clear this character is Jewish, but does he have to be that Jewish? So very Jewish?’ ” Gardner recalled. “I simply said, the lines go back in or I will close the production. I felt violent. Here they were all looking at me like I was crazy: ‘Here’s that Jewish thing again, always making trouble for everyone.’ And, standing there, I felt as helpless and as angry as I did 40 years before looking at that ‘Jew Is For War’ sign on election night.

“Just the other day hundreds of gravestones in Long Island were desecrated with the words ‘Hitler was right.’ Those old, horrible songs are being sung again. People don’t even know what a pogrom is or they think of Hitler as a one-time-only, custom-made aberration. I just started out to write a comedy with ‘Conversations’ and all this stuff just came pouring back.”

One can be certain that Nat Moyer’s Jewishness will be well- represented in the screenplay of “I’m Not Rappaport,” which Gardner is writing for producer Mike Hausman and director Sullivan. Gardner said he and Sullivan hope that Walter Matthau will star in the film production, which would allow them to have “creative independence”--which has been the case for almost all of Gardner’s career in films.

“I’ve been spoiled,” he said, after observing that he would very much like to make a film of “Conversations” starring Hirsch. “I’ve been very lucky with my experiences in Hollywood. And in New York, for that matter. The thing is, I tend to remain terrified and insecure through both tremendous failure and great success, with a wonderful emotional and cowardly democracy.”

Describing himself as an “antique dad,” Gardner expressed deep satisfaction that the play was a blood knot of sorts binding the generation of his father, who died in 1970, to that of his young sons.

“It’s Jake’s voice you hear coming from Charlie’s stroller in the first scene,” Gardner said. “And once in a while he’d like to go downtown and see the play he referred to as ‘Jake in the Stroller.’ He’d watch for a few minutes, hear his voice and then lose interest.

“But, after the show,” Gardner said, “Jake liked to sit at the bar (onstage). And it gave me a funny feeling to watch my son, sitting there in his grandfather’s bar. There was a certain color and life all around it that he loved, a color and life that just doesn’t exist in New York anymore. And, I thought, ‘It’s still not over, this conversation with my father. It goes on and on and on.’ ”