Family Circle Is His Sphere of Influence

Tom Donaghy learned early in his playwriting career that telling the truth about family life could have serious consequences.

His father, Tom Sr., went to his son’s first play, “The Dadshuttle,” recognized himself in it, and wouldn’t speak to him for months. Eventually, Donaghy’s mother interceded to break the freeze.

“I thought it was a very genuine and loving portrait of him,” said Donaghy, whose latest look at family life, “The Beginning of August,” opens Friday at South Coast Repertory.

“I think he thought he was being made fun of. Sometimes people laughed, but in recognition, not from scorn. I think he thought I was exacting some sort of revenge, and it was just the opposite.”

Far from making Donaghy gunshy, that 1993 rift with his father, who died five years later, spurred him on.

“I felt an immense power I didn’t realize I had. I was upset he was upset, but I didn’t feel any guilt about what I’d done, and I continued to write using my life as source material.”

Donaghy’s mother, Ann, was delighted to be the model for a character in his 1997 play, “Minutes From the Blue Route.”

“She thought it was her ticket to immortality or something,” he said. “One of my brothers delights in very close readings of my texts” to ferret out links between Donaghy’s real family and his stage families. “He’s often wrong.”

Donaghy--he pronounces his name with a hard G--is a wiry, curly-headed 36-year-old New Yorker so young-looking that he says he is sometimes mistaken for a delivery boy in high-powered precincts such as his agent’s office. Subjects other than family life interest him, but critics particularly have praised his ability to write the way real families talk.

“The communication between people who are in a family is very rich and complicated and coded,” Donaghy said during an interview last week in the plaza outside SCR, which is mounting the world premiere of “The Beginning of August.”

The play centers on a man whose wife has abandoned him and their infant daughter. The suddenly single dad, Jackie, is an overwhelmed, pathetically obsessive would-be control freak who struggles to come up with a plan for raising the baby and reorganizing his desperately jumbled life.

As the play progresses, an assortment of flawed, mutually antagonistic, wildly disparate relatives and neighbors gathers in Jackie’s suburban backyard. They are like colliding atomic particles seeking to form a stable nucleus--call it a family--to care for the baby and to escape their isolation.

A communal “Yes,” affirmed by each character, is the play’s last word.

Donaghy stumbled onto the ending when an intern at Manhattan’s Atlantic Theatre Company, where he is a founding member, forgot to copy the last three pages of the script for its first in-house reading. When there was nothing more to read after the volley of yeses, Donaghy decided there was nothing more to add anyway--even though the device has been used more than once since James Joyce famously deployed it at the end of his epochal novel, “Ulysses.”

The playwright, however, says he is not necessarily a yes-man as to whether this impromptu little instafamily can pull it off.

“It’s an immense undertaking, an immense investment in hope,” he said. “Within that affirmation, it’s very complicated. Any number of things could happen.”

Donaghy knows what it’s like to be part of an alternative family of sorts, and for him the experience has been nothing but affirmative.

In 1984 he was a senior majoring in drama at New York University when David Mamet gave a lecture series. The playwright invited students to apply for a handful of spots in an intimate symposium he planned at his home in Vermont. Donaghy made the cut and was treated to Mamet playing Socrates or Plato, “but with a cigar in his mouth. We sat around a tree and he talked about whatever he wanted to talk about.”

Out of that group grew the Atlantic Theatre Company, with Mamet providing the guiding philosophy and Donaghy signing on as one of the founding members. Actor William H. Macy, who directed “The Dadshuttle,” is also a co-founder; Neil Pepe, another longtime Atlantic member and now the theater’s artistic director, is directing “The Beginning of August” at SCR; and Mary McCann, also a founding member of the Atlantic, plays the new mother, who feels so overwhelmed that she bails out of the family. The lead role of Jackie is played by Geoffrey Nauffts, an old friend from Donaghy’s student days at NYU.

In 1985, when he helped launch the Atlantic Theatre Company, Donaghy was an actor who never had written fiction, plays or even journalism. He began writing short sketches and monologues to provide grist for the Atlantic’s stage because the fledgling theater didn’t have enough cash to buy the rights to many established works.

“It was a goof until people said, ‘You’re pretty good at this,’ ” he recalled.

He started writing about family as “a bit of a purgation, slightly cathartic, and it was what I knew best when I started to write.”

Donaghy is not a father, but in recent years he has found himself surrounded by kids--which sowed the seeds of “The Beginning of August.”

“I’m a godfather, my best friend in the world just had a child, one of my brothers has two small children and another desperately wants a child. They’re everywhere the last couple of years, they’re underfoot.”

Donaghy said the play is not meant to be a social broadside or a piece of advocacy in favor of unorthodox family arrangements.

“I don’t think [advocacy] is a function of drama. I recoil when anybody tells me what’s what or how things should be. It sends me fleeing.”

“I just try to evoke on stage what I see in life, so people can have an emotional response to it.”

BE THERE

“The Beginning of August,” by Tom Donaghy, at South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays through Sundays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Preview performance tonight, opens Friday. $18-$45, with a pay-what-you-will performance Saturday, 2 p.m. Ends May 28. (714) 708-5555.