Re-Trodding the Primrose Path : No Pinter-esque details, please, for Irish playwright Tom Murphy, who’s based his latest play on a classic 1766 novel.

Tom Murphy doesn’t hold much affection for contem porary theater.

“I find that I’m tired of modern plays--my own included,” announces the Irish playwright, speaking by phone from the garden of his home in the suburbs outside Dublin, Ireland. “Most modern theater pieces are cynical but opaque. They wear their hearts on their sleeves; they pretend to be about love, but they’re about sex. With this play, I wanted to write in big strokes--big as opposed to [Harold] Pinter: ‘Pass the salt, darling.’ And I wanted to write about universal truths.”

For that assignment, Murphy had to venture back almost 250 years. His source was Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel “The Vicar of Wakefield.”

“I read it with a smile of involuntary pleasure on my face,” recalls the writer, whose adaptation of the Goldsmith work--”I like to call it a play that derives from a book”--opens Friday at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. “She Stoops to Folly” (the title is a homage to Goldsmith’s play “She Stoops to Conquer”) is the story of virtuous vicar and father of six Charles Primrose, who suffers a reversal of fortune--followed by a series of further misadventures--after the family’s accountant absconds with all of its money. Barbara Damashek (“Quilters”) is directing a cast of 16.

“I think Tom is one of the great neglected writers of the world,” says South Coast Rep dramaturge Jerry Patch. “He is not fashion’s slave. He writes about timeless problems, big human issues: right and wrong, man’s relationship to God, parents and children. What marks him as a playwright is that his stuff doesn’t age. I’d compare this to ‘Tom Jones’ in its big sense of life and smiling at yourself. I think that [perspective] is reassuring in a world where very little is clear-cut.”

“The play is really about simple truths: a father and a mother, and caring for children,” says Murphy, himself the father of three. “I read the story several donkey’s years ago--almost 20 years--but it stayed with me: the charm and wit and sheer beauty of Goldsmith is irresistible.

“I used his style of writing as a color for the play, sort of looking for elbow room to paint. I think the language that Goldsmith used, and what I’ve tried to emulate, will not be hostile or difficult for the modern ear to follow. Hopefully, it will be as it is in a musical when someone breaks into song.”

Although he cannot read a single note, music is vitally important to the 58-year-old playwright, both as a recurring theme in his work and in the rhythm that shapes his words.

“I tend to look at any long speeches as arias,” explains Murphy, whose opera-influenced modern Faust story “The Gigli Concert” was produced at South Coast Rep in 1984. “I am fond of opera, although I don’t listen to music for any literal meaning. One of the reasons I listen is for the simultaneousness of emotion. My favorite composers are Schubert--although he’s almost unbearably sad--and Haydn. I think I love all kinds of music, except Irish country-and-Western.”

Surely he must jest? “Oh no,” the writer says merrily. “There are more cowboys here than in Texas. I lived in London in the ‘60s, and when I came back to Dublin in 1970, it was already sweeping the country.”

Far more disturbing to him is the intermittent bout with writer’s block.

“I wake up early, look at what I’ve written--and if it’s not working, I take to my bed and stare at the ceiling,” Murphy says glumly. “Summer is a terrible time for work. If there’s a bit of sunshine, I have to take advantage of it.”

It’s much more practical to write after dark, he confides: “My favorite time to work is 4 a.m. I drink gallons of coffee. I’m done by noon, I go out for lunch, and the cork’s out of the bottle by 6. Then in the evening, I watch a few movies. I absolutely love ‘40s gangster films: Cagney, [Edmund] O’Brien, Bogart. The other night I watched ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ for the fourth time.”

M urphy was born in Galway County in a small town named Tuam (pronounced Toom ) and became attracted to the stage at 16.

“I don’t know what I would’ve done with my youth and young manhood if amateur theater hadn’t taken hold,” says Murphy, whose plays have been translated into French, German, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Russian and Japanese. “I haven’t stopped being surprised that I’m still doing it.”

After writing his first play (a joint effort with a friend) at 21, Murphy moved to London, where he worked for the BBC and Thames Television. “I tasted real freedom there, had money for the first time,” he recalls happily.

Yet in 1970 he packed up his family and returned to Ireland. Although he’s since detoured to different writing forms--his first novel, “The Seduction of Morality,” was published in 1994 and issued this past June in paperback--Murphy’s career has largely been devoted to the stage, and specifically to Dublin’s Abbey Theatre (the Irish National Theatre), where 18 of his plays have been produced.

“I think I’ve become geared towards heavily subsidized theaters,” he says. “Without that [government subsidy], there’s very little luxury for people to be naturally expansive. But I love painting on a big canvas. And I’m very familiar with the Abbey--although it’s changed quite a lot over the years.”

Certainly there’s been a growing American presence: The lineup at the Abbey this season included Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” Brian Friel’s “Philadelphia, Here I Come” (a true blend of Ireland and America) and Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”

On the flip side, Murphy--who counts a recent sojourn at the Sundance Institute’s Playwrights Lab as a singularly “wonderful” experience--has not been a stranger to American audiences. His plays have been produced in New York; Chicago; San Francisco; New Haven, Conn.; Louisville, Ky.; Charleston, S.C., and Denver--and the writer is often in town for the premieres.

Yet each visit, he says, “is still a bit of a shock.

“Costa Mesa, especially, is so pristine and so clean, it’s unnatural,” he says. “It’s unreal. You don’t even see newspapers on the streets.” He clearly prefers the familiar surroundings of Dublin. “One million people,” Murphy says proudly, “so you can have anonymity yet the virtues of a small town. And I can walk to the Abbey Theatre in 35 minutes.”*