Not Just a Woman Thing

A few weeks before Monica Lewinsky was even a blip on the world’s radar screen, Theresa Rebeck’s “View of the Dome,” a play about a politician’s tawdry sex scandal with a low-level campaign worker, premiered in Chicago. “I got trashed in the New York Times,” says the playwright. “Like, this could never happen, like the story was too disgusting,” she rubs in, playfully relishing her prophetic vindication. “A friend of mine said I’m the Cassandra of the American theater.”

As she drinks coffee in her spacious kitchen in Pacific Palisades, Rebeck’s 4-year-old son, Cooper, watches cartoons in the distance, her black Labrador, Mrs. Boffin, (named after a Dickens character) sleeps at her feet.

“I think we have a cultural difficulty with looking at our problems,” says Rebeck, 39. “I’m not ashamed of being American, I’m very proud. We have this powerful ideological basis to the country that I don’t think any other country in the world quite can brag about. It’s a very complicated nation and it’s very fertile. [But] writing about the contemporary world seems threatening--maybe more so coming from a woman.”

If Rebeck says she would like to be known as an American playwright, she is most often labeled a female one. “Why is being a female having an agenda any more than being a misogynist--which David Mamet most certainly is?” she asks.

“Everybody’s got their point of view, that little window of subjectivity. I don’t think that I write less well for men any more than Chekhov’s perspective was compromised by the fact that he was a man. He embraced humanity, but he saw the world through his own keyhole. My voice is female and American.”

Her eight short plays in “Rebeck Revisited: An Evening of One-Acts,” currently running at the Hudson Theatre in Hollywood, have never been staged together. Actress Rebecca O’Brien, who is an assistant to Rebeck and a member of Theatre Neo, a group of actors in residence two nights a week at the Hudson, proposed the idea.

“The company is so filled with strong women,” O’Brien says. “And finding funny, ballsy, wonderful women characters, hey, it’s like finding gold.”

“I thought it was an exciting idea to see how [the one-acts] worked as an evening,” Rebeck says. “The first time I saw it I thought, ‘Boy, I write about gender all the time!’ It was like ‘Je-sus, this is my subject.’ I went, ‘It’s in everything!’ You know, gender and power relations.”

In “What We’re Up Against,” two male colleagues rail against a female co-worker; “Sex With the Censor” is about a prostitute’s psychologically complex encounter with a client. Gender and power relations, yes, but with a sharp emotional edge and a comic inevitability. “I always feel a little more comfortable when [the audience is] laughing,” she says.

“When they’re having a good time, you can say a lot of shocking things.”

Rebeck is intrigued by the relationship between horror and comedy. “I think a lot of my characters get in situations so desperate that they either have to tell a joke or they’re just not going to make it to the next minute of their life,” she says. “I do think comedy is about redemption. I’m not somebody who has a tragic world view. Before I slit my wrists I always go, ‘Oh, what are you going to do?’ And then I start telling jokes.”

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It was as a high school actor that Rebeck first fell in love with theater, and later as a student at Notre Dame, where she majored in English and photography. After graduation, she dabbled in magazine writing for a few years before going to Brandeis University to get a master’s in fine arts in dramatic writing and a doctorate in Victorian melodrama, writing plays in her spare time.

“I learned a lot about propulsive storytelling,” Rebeck says. “I am interested in the way that psychological reality intersects with social commentary. That’s why I’m attracted to Chekhov, Dickens and Moliere, who achieved real elegance while remaining accessible. I’m not interested in writing theater for like 12 people. I’m also not interested in writing something banal and silly. I truly believe audiences are hungry for strong storytelling that’s about something.”

The second half of “Rebeck Revisited” consists of a series of works titled “The Bar Plays,” in which various constellations of lonely hearts struggle with relationships. Rebeck says she began working on the plays a decade ago, writing in the evenings after working at a temp job at AT&T; in New York City.

“That was the hardest it ever was for me,” Rebeck says. “I feel bad that that’s the writer’s lot.” Since then, Rebeck has produced more than half a dozen full-length plays, winning several awards including the Peabody. Work as a television and film writer on “NYPD Blue” and “Brooklyn Bridge” and the feature film “Harriet the Spy” has blessed her with a viable income. Not to mention some pretty rich material.

Rebeck moved from New York to L.A. in 1990 to work as a sitcom writer, an experience that inspired her 1994 play “The Family of Mann.” Critics called it a biting satire of the television industry; Rebeck calls it documentary. “[For] a couple scenes in that play, I just wrote down what people would say to me verbatim,” she says. “People who have been in the business howl with laughter, and people who are outside the business [are] horrified.”

One scene, in which a disenchanted sitcom writer lies immobile on her floor in a pile of dirty laundry, was autobiography. “I did have that moment,” Rebeck admits, setting her voice at a comic pitch. “I was lying on the floor talking to my friend Kate, and I said, ‘I can’t get off the floor.’ And she said ‘Theresa, you’re depressed, this is depression.’ ”

Rebeck found a therapist, moved back to New York and swore she’d never work in television again. So naturally, in 1995, shortly after giving birth to her son, she was offered a staff writing job at “NYPD Blue.” “My husband said, ‘If you don’t, you’re making a decision to never work in television again. This is the offer.’ ”

They moved to L.A., and her husband, Jess Lynn, a New York stage manager, agreed to be the primary caretaker for the baby. Rebeck says she had a much more positive experience during her two seasons on “NYPD Blue,” where she got to indulge her “secret yen to write for a cop show.”

Rebeck says that she takes her inspiration wherever she can find it. “Someone once said to me that writers rip off everything, and I do, I rip off everything. My husband read the first 35 pages of ‘View of the Dome’ and said, ‘You don’t have an original thought in your head,’ because I had ripped off everything from different pieces of my life.

“I just started reading about [how] Brecht appropriated other people’s work. I don’t think it takes away from his brilliance, but it is a fact that he didn’t write those things alone. We tend to look at pieces of art as expressions of one person’s psyche, and they are not that.”

On Sept. 17, Rebeck’s comedy “Spike Heels,” about sexual harassment and misplaced love, will have its Los Angeles premiere at the Victory Theatre in Burbank. This comes as she and her family shift their base of operations back to their apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “I got my son into a really good school, and I want him to be educated on the East Coast. And I truly have never felt really comfortable out here,” she says. “I’m interested in having an intellectual life, and it’s very hard to find an intellectual community out here.”

Rebeck says she will keep up the bicoastal lifestyle. She’s currently writing a script for a Warner Bros. project, “Cat Woman,” as well as a play inspired by her paternal grandfather, a butterfly collector who died young.

While Rebeck says she feels fortunate for the lucrative studio work, it is for theater that she reserves her reverence. At a recent performance of “Rebeck Revisited,” actor Alan Rickman was in the audience. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ I can’t watch this, the god of theater is here,” she says, recalling Rickman’s London performance of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”

“Moments in the theater, I think about them.

“Nothing ever achieves its full magic,” Rebeck admits, floating back to earth. “But a huge agent at CAA [Creative Artists Agency] once said to me--and he’s really cynical--that when theater works it’s the most powerful [art form]. When you’re watching actors find a scene, you can truly see the richness of the human spirit. I think I actually said to someone, ‘I think the world would be a better place if we all went to the theater more.’ I believe that.” *

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“REBECK REVISITED: ONE ACTS,” Theatre Neo at Hudson Avenue Theatre, 1110 Hudson Ave. Dates: Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 31. Price: $12. Phone: (323) 769-5858. “SPIKE HEELS,” Victory Theatre, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. Dates: Opens Sept. 17. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Limited run. Prices: $18-20. Phone: (818) 841-5421.