THEATER : Upper Crust vs. Ethnic Stew : After years of exploring WASPs, A.R. Gurney goes into multicultural ‘Overtime.’ ‘It is a stretch for me, talking about ethnicity in America,’ the playwright acknowledges.

A. R. (Pete) Gurney pa tiently waits in his Upper West Side apartment for the car service that will take him to the airport. Lucy, his big black Labrador, has been exiled to the country for the week and the phone is finally silent. It’s a rare quiet moment for the prolific 64-year-old playwright, off to the West Coast yet again for rehearsals on a new play, “Overtime.” The comedy, a modern-day sequel of sorts to “The Merchant of Venice,” is set to premiere Saturday at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, presenter of numerous Gurney plays since 1988, including the development of one of his best known, “The Cocktail Hour.”

This shakedown cruise for “Overtime” comes on the heels of the premiere of yet another of his comedies--”Sylvia”--about an adopted mutt and her disruptive effect on a long-married couple, at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Indeed, things have been so hectic since “Sylvia” bowed here in May to mostly raves--especially for Sarah Jessica Parker as the antic canine--that the only time Gurney can afford to give to an interviewer is an invitation to accompany him on the hourlong ride out to Kennedy Airport.

“Pacheco?” he idly asks of his guest, as afternoon light filters into a sitting room appointed with solid furniture, hooked rugs and tasteful prints. “What sort of name is that?”

Informed that the name is Latin American, Gurney and his wife, Molly, keep up a patter of polite conversation, intermingled with offers of cold drinks, until a buzzer announces that the car is downstairs. Had this same seemingly innocent conversation taken place in Gurney’s “Overtime,” however, the question of ethnic identity would have been the cue for a comic digression into stereotype. A shot of tequila might have been the libation offered, say, or a margarita followed by discreet references to tacos, low-riding gangs, neurotic Chihuahuas and sexy spangled spitfires from Carmen Miranda to Gloria Estefan.

*

Long renowned as the satiric cartographer of a shrinking WASP empire from such works as “The Dining Room,” “The Cocktail Hour” and “Love Letters,” Gurney is widening his focus with “Overtime” to mock a rainbow coalition of ethnic types, based on Shakespeare’s characters in “Merchant of Venice.”

Gurney’s multicultural comedy opens at Portia’s villa in Belmont, peopled by an African American (Gratiano), a Latina (Nerissa), an Irish American (Bassanio), a gay Italian American (Antonio), Jews (Shylock and Jessica) and, of course, WASPs (Portia and Lorenzo). The happy, if facile, denouements of Shakespeare’s play quickly deteriorate into babble fed by the characters’ antagonistic and stereotypical assumptions about each other. Gratiano is defensive about his purported sexual prowess, Jessica is awash in guilt, Nerissa is touchy about being called a maid, Antonio loves opera, Portia is genteelly manipulative and bossy, and Lorenzo, of course, drinks. The road back to harmony is pocked with danger--and laughs.

“It is a stretch for me, talking about ethnicity in America,” Gurney says as he settles into the back of the car. His uniform of khakis, button-down shirt and blazer easily reflects his privileged WASP upbringing: St. Paul’s prep, Williams College, Yale School of Drama and an Episcopal Church pew filled for a century by Gurneys. A charming and self-effacing man, he laughs easily and apologizes often for the limitations he sees in his work.

“I hope you won’t think that I’ve dealt with it superficially, but what seems so exciting about this country is that we both have some kind of ethnic identity and a commitment to community as Americans,” he says. “What interests me is how we square the circle. How we embrace our differences but also join together in our common understandings: our faith in the Constitution, say, or our belief in democracy. So if our country works, and it has so far, though God knows we have our problems, it’s because we have a main melody and a counterpoint at the same time, which makes for a very rich and dramatic experience.”

The dissonant chords in that American dichotomy between tribal distinctions and melting-pot pride have been loud and harsh around New York these days. The media were recently awash not only in Michael Jackson’s purportedly anti-Semitic lyrics on his new album but also with reports of two different groups of local high school graduates who were involved in racist and anti-Semitic episodes. Both were dealt with severely, despite the divisions among schoolmates and some adults who suggested that the students were less hatred-driven than rebellious in attacking one of the last and most powerful of social taboos.

“I’m glad they threw the book at those kids,” Gurney says. “That was so collaborative and thought out, they should be punished. But I think the episodes also serve to underscore how ethnically aware we are today. How can we not be with all this politically correct stuff? We’re constantly sizing people up that way, asking them their ethnic background to get a fix on them.

“But what I’m trying to do in ‘Overtime’ isn’t ‘Gentleman’s Agreement,’ ” he continues, referring to Elia Kazan’s seminal 1947 film about anti-Semitism. “The play is a comedy, hopefully a thoughtful one, that asks the audience to be aware that we break our bonds with each other at our peril. But I think, too, we have to be willing to air these feelings out, to get beyond them, and see that they’re not the worst things in the world. As a WASP, lord knows, I can speak to that--because WASPs are the one group you can stereotype and we don’t care.”

Gurney acknowledges that much of his success as a playwright has come from his ability to skewer--with as much acid wit as affection--the customs of his tribe. There is the repressed but cheerfully valiant aunt (“The Dining Room”), the dyspeptic alienated paterfamilias holding onto lost traditions (“The Cocktail Hour”), the overgrown Boy Scout confronting the lies of his class and station (“The Old Boy”), the stale marriages (“The Golden Fleece”).

Much of the work has been an elegy of loss and autumnal regret for Gurney’s people, marked with a wry and wise humor. But both “Overtime” and “Sylvia” represent a new, if unpremeditated, populist slant for the playwright. Greg, the gray-flannel protagonist who is smitten with Sylvia at the cost of his marriage and his job, rhapsodizes that his walks to the park at night with the mutt make him “feel more connected to the human race.” In “Overtime,” the conflicts are more loaded.

“Some years ago, I began to feel that I had pretty much mined the vein of the WASP culture,” Gurney says. “I began to be drawn to exploring other worlds than my own, other values, other customs, other ways of seeing the world. That’s how ‘Overtime’ came to be. Like everything else I write, I started out seriously and the play insisted on turning itself into a comedy.”

The playwright recalls that the project began just last year as an exercise in writing a scene about prejudice. This in turn led to his consideration of “The Merchant of Venice,” a play that he had taught both as a master at a private boys school and as a professor of drama at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to which he is still loosely affiliated, though he has not taught there in 10 years. Gurney says that he had always regarded Shakespeare’s drama about Shylock’s blood bond over Antonio to be a “deeply unsatisfactory” and “anti-Semitic” play.

“There’s no question that there’s gorgeous and rich poetry in ‘Merchant,’ but it’s not so fully realized in terms of character,” Gurney says. “Portia is so irritatingly manipulative, and the trial scenes are so arbitrary, and then there’s that endless business with the rings. I mean countless others have found it just as unsatisfying through the ages and tried out their own versions.”

As the play developed, Gurney saw the opportunity not only to poke fun at Shakespeare but also to lampoon contemporary society’s discomfort with political correctness. He chose the odd title “Overtime” because it worked on four different levels: overtime on the work clock, the extra period in a tied sports contest, the anachronistic time travel in the play and, most important, the fact that old attitudes and stereotypes do give way over time.

The anti-Semitism in “Merchant of Venice,” he says, has diminished over the centuries. In fact, in one scene, Nerissa and Gratiano confront their own stereotypical notions--she assumes her black lover has a pink Cadillac, whereas he drives a forest-green Volvo station wagon. “We’ve got a long way to go,” Gratiano says. “We’ve got to hurry.” To which Nerissa replies, “No, no. Just the opposite. Let’s take our sweet time.”

Gurney’s own social evolution indicates that it takes some time to overcome perceptions passed down from family and society, especially when one comes from a hermetically sealed environment like Buffalo, N.Y., where WASPs once spoke only to WASPs and had Irish maids, never black ones. Catholics were considered OK, though misguided on religion, Latinos might as well have been on another planet altogether, and Jews were a threat--smart, competitive, obsessively hard-working and totally incapable of enjoying themselves.

“They worked too hard, you see,” Gurney says. “They weren’t really playing the game properly. When I went away to boarding school, I got a letter from my grandfather, who wrote, ‘Don’t be first in your class, because only Jews are first.’ You didn’t really want to excel. It was bad form. We got what we called a ‘gentleman’s C.’ That was perfectly OK.”

Gurney’s first window into the world of the Other came not through his contacts at Williams College (fraternities were restricted to one’s own kind) or the Navy, in which he enlisted in 1952 as an officer (blacks were in his unit but largely in a service capacity). His exposure came during a stint in Japan when he fell in love with a Japanese woman and wrote to his parents that he intended to marry her. “They went ballistic,” Gurney remembers, “but they were smart enough not to give me an ultimatum.”

Not rebellious enough at the time to fly in the face of convention, Gurney retreated from his romance and ultimately married someone whose background is more like his own--Molly, his wife of nearly 40 years and mother to their four children. But his Japanese would-be bride-to-be did appear in “Love Letters,” in one of the most moving and sad moments in the epistolary drama.

Indeed, through the years, Gurney has written about some of the collisions that occur when WASPs have emerged from their cocoons, most wittily in his play “The Perfect Party,” in which the host tries to balance out his guest list by inviting a couple of Jews. “Once the party gets going,” the host tells them at one point, “you both should feel free to explore your own Jewishness, even in front of our shallowest Protestant friends.”

The lighthearted laughter came as a relief to Gurney, who had provoked just the opposite response nine years before, with his 1977 novel “Entertaining Strangers”--it was attacked by some of his MIT colleagues as being anti-Semitic. Although Gurney defended the book, which was about a professor who was the only Gentile on an otherwise totally Jewish faculty at a Northeastern university, as a parody of the stereotypical qualities normally associated with Jews, the criticism hurt. “I thought it was just the reverse of anti-Semitism,” he says now. ‘The whole thing really got me down.’ ”

Gurney was understandably skittish, therefore, when his “Another Antigone,” which played at the Old Globe in 1988, bowed at Playwrights Horizons in New York. Set once again at a co-ed university in the East, the drama pitted a WASP classics professor, Henry Harper, against a smart and aggressive Jewish girl, who joins a smear campaign against the professor when he will not accede to her scholastic demands.

“The world is an ongoing dialectic between Athens and Jerusalem, private conscience versus communal obligation, Miss Miller and me,” Prof. Harper intones at one point in the play. Gurney’s worries were unfounded, as the production received excellent notices.

Today, Gurney is more relaxed about the issues. Asked if he believes he is once again treading on dangerous ground in “Overtime,” which handles many of the same issues, Gurney shakes his head.

“Oh, people kept saying, ‘You’re going to get in trouble,’ but the same ones told me that I could never put a woman up onstage playing a dog, either,” he says.

“If the play were solemn and earnest, you couldn’t say these things. But what I love most in the theater is that it is playful. You’re asking the audience to collaborate on a game with you, so why not? So I hope that there is this tone of ‘just kidding,’ of my tongue firmly in my cheek, that will save me from being run out of a town on a rail.”

* “Overtime,” Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Opens Saturday. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 20. $20-$36. (619) 239-2255.