O.C. THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Cecilia Fannon’s Determined to Playwright It Her Way

You get an inkling of what she’s like from the titles of her plays: “Wowee Maui” or “Bounds of Normal” or “Green Icebergs.” But they don’t quite prepare you for the playwright in person.

Cecilia Fannon is sitting at her dining room table in Newport Beach. It is close to midnight. A slim redhead with granny glasses on the bridge of her nose, she looks very Irish and very smart and nothing at all like the stand-up comic she could easily be if she ever wanted to.

“I actually wanted to be a nun,” she said, “until I thought I was going to be a sex goddess. I used to wait for the guardian angel to appear at the foot of my bed. I’m not kidding. You’re told you’re going to receive a vocation, that’s the word they use-- receive --and I always thought there would be some announcement. What happened was at 17 I decided to skip trigonometry and make out with Billy McCarren.”

Fannon’s eventual calling, which she discovered just four years ago, has yielded half a dozen full-length plays and an equal number of one-acts. Though still an unproduced playwright, she has already been blessed twice by South Coast Repertory.

She won the $5,000 top prize in SCR’s 1993 California Playwrights Competition for “Green Icebergs,” a comedy about modern sexual manners, and the $3,000 second prize in 1992 for “To Distraction,” about a woman trying to get her life in order.

In addition, “To Distraction” will air tonight at 6:30 on KCRW-FM (89.9) as part of the L.A. Theatre Works radio series “The Play’s the Thing.” If that isn’t enough to make Fannon queen for a day, this morning at 10:30 on KTTV Channel 11, the Fox television network will air one of her episodes in its Emmy-nominated educational cartoon series for children, “Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?” (see box).

Fannon, who is 43, appreciates the accolades, the money, the radio exposure, the free-lance work she gets in television. But none of that has fulfilled her craving for a full-scale theatrical production. “I feel like a virgin,” she said. “I keep winning prizes, but I never get, um, produced.”

That may change in the not-too-distant future. “Green Icebergs” will have a NewSCRipt reading May 2, to be staged by SCR producing artistic director David Emmes. “It’s seriously under consideration for a production next season,” Emmes said. “We’re anxious to see how it works in the reading.”

Meanwhile, two of Fannon’s biggest fans--SCR literary manager John Glore and dramaturge Jerry Patch--both maintain that it’s just a matter of time before her plays catch on somewhere.

“Frankly, I’m surprised ‘To Distraction’ hasn’t been grabbed up,” said Glore, who has touted it to resident theaters around the country. “Her writing is very funny, but in the best kind of way. It feels real. It doesn’t feel jokey or put on.”

Fannon, a native New Yorker who worked during the mid-’80s as head writer for the CBS-TV daytime soap opera “The Guiding Light,” insists she has never considered herself a comedy writer.

“I’m always amazed when people find my stuff funny,” she said, pouring a second cup of coffee. “I deliberately write things that are ironic and skewed. Right now I’m writing a play called ‘White Blood, Red Blood’ about St. Ursula and the slaughter of 11,000 maidens. How can I possibly make that funny?” The main theme in all her plays, she believes, is infidelity.

“I’m always writing about it,” she added. “Sometimes its sexual infidelity. But not being a great practitioner of sexual infidelity myself, I spend a lot of time in shame and remorse over verbal infidelity. I mean out-and-out betrayal, like picking on the frailties of friends.”

A devoted playgoer from childhood, Fannon remembers growing up on Broadway shows during the ‘60s. “I can still see my father the bookmaker weeping at ‘A Man for All Seasons,’ ” she said. “He was a big theater buff, and he always took me along. He couldn’t take me to the track because I wasn’t old enough.”

Fannon, 43, cut her teeth on Broadway musicals as well: “I saw Richard Burton and Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet in the original ‘Camelot.’ I saw Barbra Streisand in ‘Funny Girl.’ I even remember going out to the Westbury Music Fair and seeing Phyllis Diller take off her girdle.”

After Fannon decided not to become a nun--this during her senior year at a Catholic high school in Manhattan--she naturally began to consider acting.

“I thought I was being called to the legitimate stage by Sol Hurok, or maybe it was David Merrick,” she said. “I remember confiding to my sister that I wanted to go to Lee Strasberg’s school, the Actors Studio. She looked at me with absolute horror. ‘Forget Barnard? Forget City College? Forget Catherine Gibbs?’ ”

But taking acting lessons was just a passing notion. Instead she played hooky from school and took trips to the Performing Arts Library at nearby Lincoln Center.

“I would develop crushes on whoever I saw in the theater,” Fannon recalled. “So I would go look them up at the library. You could get all these loose files with their pictures and obscure stories about them. I would become part of their lives for a moment.”

It wasn’t until recently, however, that playwriting became part of her life. Five years ago Fannon picked up a script of “Top Girls,” an early-’80s social satire by the British playwright Caryl Churchill, and had a revelation of sorts.

“I never thought I was good enough to write plays,” she explained. “Smart people wrote plays. Chris Durang wrote plays. Peter Shaffer wrote plays. When I read ‘Top Girls,’ something happened to me. I thought, ‘Wow! It’s outrageous!’ So what the hell; I guess I decided to recapture that guardian angel.”

Fannon studied Russian, classical Greek and Yiddish and took a bachelor’s degree at the University of Utah in 1974. She spent two years in a master’s program in comparative literature before giving up on academia.

“I couldn’t bring myself to write another paper on Milton,” she said. “So many people had been there before me. What could I write? That Milton was really talking about striptease artists in ‘Areopagitica?’ ”

The only academic research that interested her were bizarre topics, she said, such as flower symbology in D. H. Lawrence or Manipean satire in Ben Jonson’s classical tragedy “Sejanus.” And she couldn’t find enough bizarre topics to keep her attention.

“I used to bribe my husband to write some of my papers,” Fannon said.

She didn’t have to look far, though, for the subjects of her plays. Whether she sets them in Tuscany (“Green Icebergs”) or Hollywood (“To Distraction”) or Queens, N.Y. (“They Live Upstairs”), all of her plays seem to be informed by intense feelings about her Catholic religion and her Irish family.

“Even though I’m a practicing ex-Catholic, I really like the idea of Christianity,” Fannon said. “Catholic Christianity, not any other kind. I like its idea of a reward at the end of all this.

“I mean, it took the Catholics centuries to figure out the hierarchy of heaven. There’s actually a guy who wrote a book called ‘The History of Heaven,’ which is fascinating to me. He’s Catholic, of course. Who else would bother writing a book like that? You think some Lutheran is going to sit down and write the history of heaven?”

As for her family, Fannon said she has been trying to escape it all her life--another instance of her betrayal and infidelity, she thinks, and a recurring theme that also runs like a deep vein through her family’s history.

“My father’s story is the story of infidelity,” Fannon explained. “His mother ran off with this guy, Clary Witherspoon. His father went off in another direction. It was all very Park Avenue and Palm Beach. I guess they climbed to the top of the lace curtain.”

Fannon finds it particularly ironic, however, that she now spends her time recapturing in her plays the very family she spent so much time running away from.

“I’m like the servant in ‘A Man for All Seasons’ who keeps giving away the secrets,” she said. “It’s in his nature. He can’t help it. Neither can I.”