Write Man for the Job

Richard Greenberg once savored the idea of being little known, satisfied that the obscure life of a working playwright was more than enough to make him happy.

He even went out of his way to deflate his sudden national prominence a decade ago at 30--”That oppressive cultural instant,” he called it--as the witty author of “Eastern Standard,” a satirical comedy hailed by the New York Times for its dazzling summation of the post-crash ‘80s.

Obscurity, Greenberg now admits, turned out to be somewhat overrated.

“I used to say I wanted to be the anonymous writer of famous plays,” he recalled, during a breakfast interview recently in Costa Mesa. “I don’t want anonymous anymore. Now I want the name attached.”

If money came, too, he wouldn’t complain. The desire for material success happens to be one of two major issues for Laurie, the central figure of Greenberg’s new comedy, “Hurrah at Last,” which opens tonight in a world premiere at South Coast Repertory.

Like Laurie--regarded by others in the play as “a writer’s writer” and therefore underpaid--Greenberg has no illusion that money buys happiness any more than fame does. “But,” as Laurie, who is clearly Greenberg’s mouthpiece, says in the first act, “it upgrades despair so beautifully.”

Though he knows that writing plays will make him neither rich nor famous, Greenberg persists. “Hurrah at Last,” the fourth play that SCR has commissioned from him, is his 10th full-length work to be produced in roughly a dozen years.

“Nothing pleases me as much as playwriting,” he said. “Even when I attempt something else and start out to write in some other form, I usually end up writing a play. It’s not as sick as a compulsion; it’s a proclivity.”

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His last SCR commission, “Three Days of Rain,” was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in drama and last season won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award for best new play produced in L.A. and Orange counties. (His two other SCR commissions were “The Extra Man” in 1991 and “Night and Her Stars” in 1995.)

Two weeks ago, the 39-year-old Long Island, N.Y., native received the newly created Laura Pels Foundation Award for drama, given by the PEN American Center in New York to an American playwright in mid-career. (Arthur Miller received the new Pels/PEN award for a master American dramatist.)

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Greenberg’s citation, which came with $5,000, notes that he “upholds the tradition of great chroniclers of social manners and mores.”

The judges who picked him for the prize--playwrights Wendy Wasserstein and Lanford Wilson, along with Pels--write in the citation: “After seeing one of his plays, any theatergoer knows exactly what value money, love, literature, and even real estate have at the turn of this century.”

They might have been describing the latest play as well. In “Hurrah at Last,” Greenberg dissects the posh milieu of an upper-middle-class Jewish family that has gathered on Christmas Eve in the sprawling Manhattan loft where Laurie’s sister, Thea, lives with her Irish husband, a successful businessman.

The only the thing the citation doesn’t mention is how funny Greenberg’s plays can be. Just about everything goes wrong in this one as secrets come unglued, plunging all the characters (especially Laurie) into a catastrophe typical of farce.

As set down on the page, “Hurrah at Last” resonates with the humor and speed of grand farce, but without the slamming doors.

“There’s an immediacy to writing plays,” Greenberg said. “You can take big swallows of them at a time. You can charge ahead with them. The first draft of this came in five days. There’s such an overhang when you write a novel. A play makes me feel like an action painter, like Jackson Pollack.”

Besides the matter of money, Greenberg mines pure gold from the play’s other major issue: life-threatening illness. It’s a skewed reflection of what he calls his own peculiar “interruption”--a bout with Hodgkin’s disease that put him in the hospital during the early ‘90s.

“Experiencing an illness of that kind, the energy of what happens, is by nature more farcical than turgid,” he explained. “It’s really concentrated. It’s constantly wakeful. There’s no rest in it.

“You never sleep in the hospital,” he added. “No one ever sleeps in the hospital. Your mind is on steady overdrive. Farce is the form that’s natural to it, because it’s all about distortion--distortion and exaggeration.”

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Looking back on the experience, Greenberg views it as a riot of “waxing and waning consciousness.”

At the time, though, whenever he thought of writing about it, “It just was not interesting. All the ideas I had seemed so mundane. All I could think of was a literal account, and that seemed so familiar and tedious.”

But later, looking at his bank account, he realized “it would be nice to have the [SCR] commission money.” So he started writing “Hurrah at Last” on the spur of the moment, which led to something unexpected.

“I wrote so quickly because the coffer was empty,” Greenberg said. “Then I decided that I wanted the speed of the composition to become an aesthetic property of the play. And it has, I think. You’re always looking for ways to get free. Speed is one of the ways to do it.”

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Added material notwithstanding--largely a scene in the first act and a scene in the second to bind the two acts--tonight’s “Hurrah at Last,” as directed by David Warren, is structurally “not all that different” from the first draft, Greenberg said.

“I don’t want the play to look over-crafted,” he said. “There’s a quickness, a boldness that I like. Often when plays come to you like this, they’re in pretty good shape. That’s why they come to you whole.”

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He recalled a teacher’s remark: “If you’re writing quickly, it doesn’t mean you’re being glib. It means you’re just writing out of the freest part of yourself.”

As for the play’s humor, Greenberg hopes it’s as pleasing to others as it was to him and his director.

“David and I have agreed that we have no patience for people who don’t like jokes,” he said. “There’s something joy-killing about that. The joke is a wonderful form. It’s more concise than a poem. So if you don’t like jokes, please stay away from us.”

* “Hurrah at Last” opens tonight on the Mainstage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. Regular schedule: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. $28-$43; pay-what-you-will performance at 2:30 p.m. Saturday. Ends June 28. (714) 708-5555.