Dramatic Doubleheader

Richard Greenberg, one of the most produced young American dramatists to emerge in the past decade, is in an unusually comfortable situation. He’s got not just one but two new works about to premiere, both at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.

The two works are very different: The first, opening Thursday, is his adaptation of Marivaux’s 18th century comedy “The Triumph of Love,” based on a new literal translation by John Glore and directed by Mark Rucker. The story of a willful princess who disguises herself as a man, it features Harlequin and other commedia dell’arte-style characters.

For Greenberg, working on the Marivaux was a new experience. The commission was “just a surprise that the theater sprang on me,” he says. “I hadn’t done anything like that before, but the play has so firmly established itself, I figured I couldn’t harm it. The play has a wonderful farce energy and yet underneath there’s something shockingly sad.”

Next, Greenberg’s latest work, “Three Days of Rain,” opens on SCR’s second stage on March 7, directed by Evan Yionoulis. This play begins in the present day with the death of a renowned architect, and flashes back to the 1960s as it unravels a generational mystery.

It’s an impressive doubleheader, but perhaps even more impressive is the relationship that’s made the pairing possible--Greenberg, along with a handful of other artists, has received from South Coast Rep the kind of ongoing artist-theater partnership that most playwrights only dream about.

The theater first commissioned Greenberg to write a new play in 1987. He was 28 years old, three years out of Yale Drama School and only a year away from making his much-touted Broadway debut with “Eastern Standard.”

Since then, South Coast commissioned and premiered “The Extra Man” and “Night and Her Stars” before each moved on to New York, and also has given the New York-based writer two additional commissions--more, in fact, than they’ve done for any other single writer.

That ongoing commitment to Greenberg, now 38, is part of the theater’s drive, begun in the mid-1980s, to increase its support of new plays by American writers. “What was very much a goal was long-term relationships with playwrights,” says David Emmes, the theater’s producing artistic director. And Greenberg clearly is South Coast’s kind of playwright. Emmes says he and Martin Benson, South Coast artistic director, are particularly drawn to language and intelligence; “we’re very much a text-oriented theater,” Emmes says. “In addition to the intelligence of his work, Richard is able to reveal genuine feeling beneath the urban gloss and sophistication that some of his characters show.”

Yet for as much good as the relationship has done the theater, having a home-away-from-home such as South Coast has been no less than a godsend for the artist. “It’s been a major anchor,” Greenberg says. “You hold onto those, because there aren’t many of those in the theater.”

Although he writes in New York, Greenberg comes here for the mounting of his productions as well as for preliminary readings. “It’s very calm here, and that makes it a great place to concentrate on a new play,” he continues. “I know I can always come here.”

*

Warm, yet overtly shy, in person Greenberg is given to signs of nervousness, even in a casual interview. When he speaks, words flow in torrents that are both quick and eloquent.

His manner, in fact, bears some resemblance to his creative process: “I like to write tumultuously and with energy,” says the playwright, seated in a conference room at the theater. “I want to write too fast for me to catch up with myself.”

Perhaps that’s why the texture of his work often is more in the interactions between his characters than in his stories. “Plays aren’t about plots,” he says. “For me, a play is convergence of a few ideas, or maybe an image, a feeling, an idea and a character. It occurs to me as a collage. Then all of those things together create enough energy for me to make a play of it.”

“Three Days of Rain” is a case in point. It began with Greenberg’s interest in a “set of actors playing parents and children at the same stage of life” as a way of investigating “the myth of parents to children.”

Greenberg connected this theme to his long-standing interests in cities and architecture. “The idea of architecture and marriage and cities came together somehow,” he says. “Falling in love, making a building--how do you know that it has the content to weather through time? Suddenly, those things belonged together in my mind.”

Complex as this may sound, the mix is united by Greenberg’s sly yet compassionate humor. “Richard’s plays are profoundly witty,” says director David Warren, who directed Greenberg’s “Night and Her Stars” in Costa Mesa in 1994. “A lot of people can write jokes, but a genuine wit like Rich’s doesn’t come down the pike very often. To me, he’s the heir to Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward and Howard Hawks.

“My admiration for his work is very much tied up with my love for him as a person,” Warren continues. “He is such a good man. There is profound wisdom, beauty and poetry in his plays. I worship him.”

Who Greenberg is--and who the young-ish urbanites of his plays often are--is a reflection of the post-war prosperity of American suburban culture.

Born in East Meadow, Long Island, Greenberg grew up in a middle-class Jewish home there, the son of a businessman father and a homemaker mother.

He majored in literature at Princeton before going on to graduate work in English at Harvard. But after only one year in the doctorate program there, he dropped out. Around the same time, Greenberg began writing his first play, and that script earned him admission to Yale’s School of Drama, where he studied playwriting from 1982 to 1985.

Even before he’d completed the program at Yale, however, Greenberg’s professional career began to take off. His play “Bloodletters” was produced in 1985 by the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, and that, in turn, led to the same company’s staging of his “Life Under Water.”

The latter work, a one-act about life in the Hamptons, got noticed, creating an easy transition for the writer into the professional world.

“When I got out of drama school, it was to a fairly opportune world,” Greenberg says.

Emmes and Benson were among the first to support Greenberg, commissioning a work from him in 1987. As it turned out, the pair were just ahead of the curve: Not long after they’d signed him on, Greenberg went on to have a breakthrough year.

In 1988, “Eastern Standard” premiered at Seattle Repertory Theatre, directed by Michael Engler, whose association with the playwright had begun at Yale. The work is set in a trendy New York restaurant and a beach house in the Hamptons and focuses on two young Manhattan couples who find themselves unsettled by the revelation that one of the foursome has AIDS. There’s also the matter of a homeless woman who appears suddenly in their midst.

Greenberg’s characters are usually young, professional and urban. But underneath their ostensibly stable “yuppie” veneer, great insecurity lies. Living in the flux and transition of the 1980s and ‘90s, they face a world where the social and economic paradigms of the ‘50s cry out to be reinvented, if not entirely abandoned.

New York Times critic Frank Rich, writing about “Eastern Standard,” which moved first to the Manhattan Theatre Club and later to Broadway (and seen here at the Coast Playhouse), lavished praise on Greenberg, citing his ability “to fold the traumas of his own time into vintage comedy without sacrificing the integrity of . . . his troubling content.” It’s the kind of notice that can turn a 30-year-old playwright’s head--and bring about a backlash. Dissenting critics accused Greenberg of being a yuppie apologist, and Greenberg suffered a barrage of publicity that ran the gamut from the New York Times to People magazine.

He recalls the experience with mixed emotions. “The play was really controversial,” says Greenberg. “But I found that the attention which I’d always thought I’d wanted was really uncomfortable for me. It was harder than I’d anticipated, by a lot.”

*

The experience prompted Greenberg to rethink his goals: “At some point I realized that what I really wanted was to be somebody who just kept working; I became a little phobic about the success. I wanted to be an anonymous person who wrote famous plays.”

Greenberg’s next major work was “The American Plan,” produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1990. (It had its West Coast premiere at West Hollywood’s Tiffany Theater in 1993.)

Set in the Catskills of the late 1950s and later on in New York, “The American Plan” is about a mother who arranges a match between her smothered daughter and a local cad, only to have her plan thrown for a loop when the guy’s old boyfriend turns up.

The next season, Greenberg had his first production at South Coast. “The Extra Man,” the result of the 1987 commission, premiered in Costa Mesa in 1991 directed by Engler, and moved to the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1992.

The play centers on a woman stuck in a dead-end marriage whose best friend is a writer who’s not writing. The woman eventually begins an affair with her husband’s best friend, a film writer.

But the plot, as with any Greenberg work, is not really the central point of the play. Although “The Extra Man” provides a look at the lives of several people who are dissatisfied, yet fettered by inertia, this play is not a typical adultery drama.

In late 1992, Greenberg had what he refers to with a characteristic lack of self-pity as his “interruption.” Diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, he spent two months in the hospital and underwent extended chemotherapy.

Today, he’s sanguine about the experience. “I had the best sort of little cancer,” he says. “I think all lives should get an interruption, somewhere in the 30s. So I took advantage of it.”

For Greenberg, this meant slowing down, but only for a short while. He was still undergoing chemotherapy, in fact, when his writing began to reappear in the theater world. In 1993, “Jenny Keeps Talking,” a solo show he wrote for Leslie Ayvazian before he became sick, was produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club, although his illness prevented him from doing the rewrites he felt were necessary.

In 1994, the fully recovered playwright returned in earnest with “Night and Her Stars,” a drama about the ‘50s television quiz show scandals. Coincidentally, it was produced in Costa Mesa just months before the release of “Quiz Show,” a movie with the same topic.

For Greenberg, “Night and Her Stars” was an ambitious and atypical undertaking. “It was a departure for him in that it was about an actual event,” Warren says. “It was also a departure in that he painted an enormous canvas, much bigger than he had ever used before.”

The play’s scope also underscored the challenges of the development process. “You come and do the play here first and you have this astonishing support and it really looks more beautiful than it will ever look,” says Greenberg. “But the play is in its early stages and it’s as messy as it’s going to be. Then you take it to New York and they give you sticks and Band-Aids, but the play has been worked on. That’s the irony.”

By the time he and Warren took the play to New York, it had been pared down considerably. But, unfortunately, the real problem was timing.

“Quiz Show” had already been released to much acclaim, and reviews for “Night and Her Stars” inevitably made comparisons. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley wrote: “A little compassion, please, for Richard Greenberg. The very gifted author . . . has had the misfortune to bring to New York an elegant, didactic play about the quiz show scandals . . . after the opening of Robert Redford’s elegant, didactic movie. . . .”

“It was a very important play that happened at exactly the wrong time,” says Warren.

And while the mixed reception didn’t really daunt Greenberg, it did make him all the more grateful for his away-from-the-glare home in Costa Mesa.

“There are all these loci of anxiety in New York because everyone feels so tentative,” the playwright says. “I don’t know what it would be to live in some place so seemingly tranquil all the time. But once you’ve lived in a caldron, there’s something about coming to a place where you can just work.”

*

* “The Triumph of Love,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Opens Friday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends March 23. $28-$41. Also, “Three Days of Rain,” March 7 to April 6. Performance schedule same as above. $26-$39. (714) 957-4033.