The WASP Chroniclers

Playwright A.R. (Pete) Gurney, 67, and director Jack O’Brien 58, sit next to each other, tired from a long day in the rehearsal hall, with the ease of old friends--which they are. The writer best known for chronicling the twilight of WASP culture in America (“The Cocktail Hour,” “The Dining Room,” “Love Letters,” “Sylvia”) and the peripatetic, Tony-winning Old Globe Theatre artistic director have worked together intermittently for a decade, during which time 10 of Gurney’s plays have been produced at the Globe, including “The Cocktail Hour” and “The Snow Ball” staged by O’Brien himself. Currently, they are preparing the premiere of Gurney’s latest (and 23rd full-length) work, “Labor Day,” which opens at the Globe on Thursday. The play focuses on an older playwright and the young director who comes to visit him at his country home on Labor Day weekend, urging him to make some revisions in the work.

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Question: You’re both quite prolific. But other than that, is there something that you share that has brought you together professionally?

O’Brien: The first shocking thing to me [about Gurney’s work] was that it was my world. I knew who these people were. They were like my own family, with the same breeding, prejudices and vulnerability. Literally. I come from very similar strata of society, in Michigan. In spite of the fact that a lot of the work is centered around the East Coast, Pete’s from Buffalo, and there’s a great similarity between that part of New York state and certain pinnacles of civilization as we know it in the Midwest. The texture of life was immediately understandable to me.

Gurney: I had had “The Dining Room” done here [in 1983]. I didn’t come out to see that, but I heard what a good production it was. Then I brought “Another Antigone” out here, and that’s when I got to know Jack and the theater and got comfortable. So then I was eager to work with him. And it’s been a very fruitful collaboration so far.

O’Brien: There is a chilling parallel between the amount of plays you write and the amount of plays I direct. We’re the two maniacs.

Gurney: We both have a lot of energy, that’s one thing. I think Jack has a compulsion to create theater. I think he loves to do it. And I have a subject which I have been obsessed with ever since I can remember, and that subject is the gap between the world I thought I was growing up in--the genteel assumptions of my youth--and the contemporary world. People who were brought up that way, how do they survive?

O’Brien: Add to that the question of civil behavior--how we behave toward each other, how we greet each other, how society instructs us to behave. All of those things are fodder for what I do. Pete presents me with a dry script--and by that I mean just that there’s no gesso, no color or texture on it yet. So what I have to do is match his mentality with a behavior form that will allow his message to come across.

Pete’s favorite example of how he knew I was the right director for him was when, in “The Cocktail Hour,” Nancy Marchand walks onstage and I had her son stand up, because in our society, when your mother comes into the room, you stand up. I don’t care how old you are, or how long you’ve been away from home. When your mother comes into the room, you stand up. That’s what we do. We share that, and he recognized that and it spoke volumes to him. That’s why it’s a good match.

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Q: Yet isn’t there a certain irony in the fact that a writer who focuses on the remains of East Coast WASP culture finds his creative home-away-from-home here in Southern California?

Gurney: I’ve been occasionally nailed by the critics for limiting my sights to a small entity, but I’ve always believed that if you’re accurate and true to what you’re writing about, the play will have a larger human dimension. People are people. It didn’t worry me. I’ve never had the sense that the audiences here are aggressively Californian. There are a lot of different types of people and they can respond to it.

O’Brien: No matter what people say about why they choose material, you choose material that you respond to. You either hope this is relevant, or you hope to prove its universality and relevance by the way you do it. We choose material that we get excited about, and when we get excited about a writer, we are responding to the way they write. That particular point of view was not imposed on me but influenced by [executive director] Craig Noel, who always felt that this was a theater where the bottom line had to be the quality of the writing, as much as we could do that. Pete’s a very elegant writer.

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Q: How has your working relationship developed and changed over time?

O’Brien: We’ve been friends now for 10 years. Even when we’re not working, we check in and see each other. It’s a very comfortable relationship and that kind of comfort is where the real fun starts, because then you don’t care if you make an idiot of yourself in front of the other person.

Gurney: When I was writing this play, I thought Jack would be the ideal director--and not simply because there are echoes of “The Cocktail Hour” in it. Having seen him direct “The Cocktail Hour,” I knew exactly what he could do with the sense of detail that makes this kind of play land. The bedding of the play is hard-core realism, and Jack is a master of hat.

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Q: One can’t help but notice that there’s a playwright and a director in “Labor Day.” Are there shades of your relationship there?

Gurney: Actually, there’s very little parallel there. It’s not at all our relationship. And the leading character is partly me, but not totally me.

O’Brien: You can’t pick up a script like this in which there’s a director and a writer discussing familiar territory without thinking ‘God, am I in this?’ Just as I’m sure Pete’s family thinks this, and everybody else thinks this. But Pete doesn’t just ride one horse. He puts himself in a stable of people. And I dare say that all of the directors who’ve worked with him over the past 10 years are going to see angles of themselves in this argument, but it certainly doesn’t provoke any particular moment.

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Q: With fewer and fewer people raised with the habit of going to the theater, did you worry about writ ing a play that’s about creating theater?

Gurney: It’s not in the “backstage” genre. That’s a wonderful genre and I wish I could write that. But this is about the process of the theater. It asks, in a sense, for the audience to participate, and it’s a way of enabling the audience to participate in the creative process. Playwrights have to find ways of enabling the audience to come into the play. This approach--I don’t even want to call it a device--asks the audience to collaborate in the process.

O’Brien: It doesn’t just say “peer in through this glass.” “The Cocktail Hour” didn’t do that either. In that play, the writer brought a play home to his parents. That wasn’t just about theater, it was about families. It’s like dropping a stone in a still pond. Things happen as a result. This too, by dint of the fact that the writer is using a certain amount of his life as material, is about families more than it’s about theater.

Gurney: I agree. I have a large family of my own--four kids, six grandchildren. I came from an extended family in Buffalo, N.Y. I was looking at my father-in-law’s genealogy and seven out of eight of my great-grandparents were born in Buffalo or in the farms around Buffalo . . .

O’Brien: Whoa! Seven out of eight?

Gurney: Seven out of eight. So when I was growing up, there were grandparents and uncles and aunts and a lot of cousins around.

Q: Does it feel as though the audience for theater has changed much in the past decade or two?

Gurney: It has a little different feel. Plays can have a tough time today. Audiences tend to sit back. They’re used to watching a lot of television and movies. My particular constituency has gotten older and sparser. The younger audience comes with some skepticism, if it comes at all. But I’ve always tried to find various ways of throwing an arm around the audience, putting them together and pulling them into the play. There are many ways you can do that: direct address, or you can play with a myth that you hope they all know. In “Overtime” [for example] I hoped or counted--perhaps wrongly--that the audience would at least know the basic story of “The Merchant of Venice.” But it’s harder and harder to find a common story that you can play with or against.

In this case, I do hope the audience will feel participatory because the play is so much about process. It’s about how you make things happen onstage. The audience has to play that game with you. I have to ask myself, “How is the audience going to be there? Why are they there?” I’m hoping that they’re there because they can, in a sense, participate in the theatrical process.

“LABOR DAY,” Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Dates: Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends March 15. Prices: $22-$39. Phone: (619) 239-2255.