Finding What’s Funny : Author of new play ‘Catch a Falling Star’ sees humor in serious subjects.

It probably says a lot about playwright Lee Murphy that her untitled play in progress will be a comedy about a woman with brain cancer. With “The Sirens of Seduction,” co-written with Jan Bina in 1992, and now “Catch a Falling Star” (written alone), Murphy is trying to search out the comedic in just about everything.

She is doing this, she says, in a kind of comfort zone: the Victory Theatre, where “Catch a Falling Star” opened this week, where “Sirens” enjoyed a healthy run and where Murphy is official playwright-in-residence.

What this newest title means exactly varies from theater to theater. At the Victory, explains Maria Gobetti, co-artistic director and “Falling Star” director, it means that the theater company has a “first look” arrangement with Murphy, who in turn has the security of a theater to write for.

It’s a modest security but still relatively rare among playwrights.

“It’s well deserved,” says Gobetti. “I’ve been working with new plays for 16 years, and I’ve not seen many writers who know their craft as well as Lee does. She’s also an extraordinarily non-threatened playwright who isn’t bothered to cut something.”

But on the subject of cut and paste, Murphy quickly adds that “changing a scene is nothing compared to the pain of changing or cutting a line.”

It’s more painful, she suggests, than going off on her own to write a play--though she says she misses working with a writing partner. “Jan and I would play all the parts, really enjoy the time we spent together. Now, I have that camaraderie with Maria that I had with Jan.”

“I think in pictures,” says Murphy, a veteran stage actor who also happens to write screenplays. “I love film, writing in film terms, and I first envisioned ‘Catch a Falling Star’ as a film. But I wasn’t willing to go through the grief of waiting and waiting for it to actually get made as a movie, so I wrote it as a play in order to see it get done.”

Murphy sets “Falling Star” in a small town on a broad Texas plain. The mythic place is called Dewey (“I lived in many Deweys growing up”), where 33-year-old Ginny Wakely is coming home for her birthday celebration. She’s been in Los Angeles, where she’s eking out an acting career in the odd soap and commercial. Her family and everyone else in Dewey, though, believe that she’s a big Hollywood star. It only makes it more difficult for Ginny to warn her folks that People magazine is about to report of her porno past.

“And when Ginny actually does tell her mom,” says Murphy, “her mom just laughs it off. I realized at some point that I had created a situation similar to Preston Sturges’ film, ‘Hail the Conquering Hero,’ ” in which a man finds himself having to pose as a war hero when he returns home--and the town goes along with the ruse.

But more than any kind of homage, Murphy, 47, says that “Falling Star” is “a memory play for me. My niece saw a run-through of the show and said that (Ginny’s parents) were like my mom and dad, only nicer. I suppose what I did draw from was my alcoholic father and overzealously Christian mother. She was a Southern belle, who found disturbing my father constantly changing jobs. He played for the Chicago White Sox, sold furniture, was a private detective and a golf pro. We moved around Texas 13 times by the time I was in third grade.

“There was this longing to connect with them . . .” Murphy’s voice trails off, and she begins to cry quietly. “They’re both dead now. I haven’t had this kind of emotion even talking with the cast about them, and bringing out my family photo album.

“Ginny’s quest is really to find her home again,” she says, “the kind of home that I guess I never knew. She learns what I think is true, which is that your real home is inside yourself.”

This is a comedy, though, and Murphy has inserted some of her Texas phobias--including tornadoes: “ ‘The Wizard of Oz’ was the scariest movie for me growing up, because of the tornado. It’s a totally irrational thing; it just hits you when you least expect it. Which is exactly what happens in life.

“I mean,” she says, locking eyes with her guest, “have we really gotten over the quake yet?”

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Catch a Falling Star.”

Location: Victory Theatre, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursday to Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. Indefinitely.

Price: $16 to $18.

Call: (818) 841-5421.