A Calling He Could Ignore No More

A year ago, Gregory Murphy avoided answering his telephone for fear it would be one of several credit card companies calling to dun him.

The playwright had achieved modest success with his first work, “The Countess,” a historical drama about a strange-but-true romantic triangle among eminent Victorians. But there wasn’t any cash coming in from the production--even though it had run six months in small off-Broadway theaters.

His dreams as a writer had been too long deferred. At 47, Murphy had his first whiff of public acceptance, so the Manhattan resident plunged ahead. He cut back on, then quit, his longtime job proofreading legal documents so he could concentrate on his writing--including a screenplay of “The Countess.” He got three months behind on his rent and charged other living expenses.

“Once you’re involved in something like that, it’s like being a drug addict,” the tall, lean, soft-spoken and unassuming Murphy said during a recent afternoon chat in the cubbyhole bar at South Coast Repertory. “The Countess” will have its West Coast premiere on the Second Stage at the Costa Mesa theater, with previews beginning Tuesday.

“You enjoy it so much you create a fantasy world,” where everyday realities, such as working to pay the bills, can fade away, said Murphy, now 48. “Fortunately, the fantasy came true for me.”

As it turned out, 2000 was a good year to have a well-reviewed play about John Ruskin on the boards in New York City. Ruskin was Victorian England’s leading taste-maker for art and architecture, a rare critic whose writings are themselves considered great literature. He also wrote on social issues, and his salvos against the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution influenced George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, Tolstoy and Gandhi.

Ruskin died, insane, in 1900, and the centenary brought a couple of major retrospective exhibitions to New York featuring Ruskin’s manuscripts, correspondence, sketches, and artwork by those he championed. “The Countess” benefited from the confluence just as it moved last spring from a 100-seat house to a 350-seat theater.

Now the play is nearing its 600th performance off-Broadway. It soon will open in Cincinnati, and the Old Globe in San Diego has it scheduled for next year. In all, says the now-solvent Murphy, 15 productions--including one in Finland--have been approved or are under consideration.

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Murphy’s is a triply unlikely success story.

He spent his teens and 20s shirking his dream of becoming a writer because he didn’t think he was good enough to even try.

When he started writing “The Countess” nine years ago, Murphy was an unpublished novelist who had no knowledge of--or taste for--the theater.

And his subject, though a remarkable story, was, well, eminently Victorian, which in the popular mind generally translates as “probably stuffy.” While Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy have had their innings as founts for stage and screen productions, John Ruskin is a name that for most educated people is nothing more than a name--vaguely remembered from a college survey course on art or literature.

Indeed, that’s what it was for Murphy, who had majored in English at St. Bonaventure University in New York state.

The seventh of 11 children raised in Amityville, Long Island, by an aerospace worker and his wife, Murphy was considered the family’s least likely to succeed.

“I always knew in my heart I wanted to write, but when I would mention that to someone in the family, they’d say, ‘Are you kidding? Be serious.’ ”

Murphy went to work in insurance and advertising. He went through a bleak time about 1983, sick of his job, shaken by his mother’s death and feeling depressed. He concluded that he had nothing to lose by doing what he had only dreamed of.

“I said, ‘I don’t care what happens, I’m going to write, and if people laugh, they can laugh,” he says. “And nobody laughed.”

The unpublished novel he finished in 1988 and has refined since then bears the stamp of his affection for Victorian writers. He traces the love back to his mother, Helen. While raising her 11 children, she never let a day go by without reading, and she occasionally dashed off stories that she sent--without success--to the Reader’s Digest.

When he was in high school, Murphy says, he avoided George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” by cribbing from Cliffs Notes. But his mother found his copy of the novel lying about, read it and encouraged him to read it too.

Eventually, Murphy grew into the kind of reader who would absorb everything by and about Eliot or Dickens. He bought Phyllis Rose’s 1983 study, “Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages” for the chapter on Dickens, then read further and learned the story of John Ruskin; his young wife, Effie; and Ruskin’s painter protege, John Everett Millais.

In 1853, the threesome spent four months living together in a thatched cottage in the Scottish Highlands. When they returned to London, Millais and Effie were embroiled in an unconsummated love affair. Effie also was caught in an unconsummated marriage. Ruskin had fallen for her when she was a pre-adolescent girl and married her when she was 20. It seems Ruskin was fixated on young girls and could not function sexually with an adult woman; Effie (and, for that matter, her husband) remained a virgin five years after their wedding, when the play’s action takes place.

“The Countess” (Millais’ fond name for Effie) depicts a Ruskin who nearly destroyed his sexually naive wife by trying to convince her that her body was “diseased, foul . . . and so formed as would disgust any man.” In the final scene, he discovers that his wife, belatedly enlightened as to her normalcy, has sued to annul their marriage. Effie won her suit, married Millais, and they had eight children--although she was ostracized from high society, and, according to Murphy, “is disparaged to this day [by Ruskin partisans] as a shallow social climber mainly interested in going to parties and balls. I think for a lot of Ruskin people, the more they can explain her away as this creature, the less culpable he seems to be for what happened in their marriage.”

Murphy figured the tale would have its truest realization on stage--not that he knew anything about the stage. He had little interest in seeing plays. His actor acquaintances struck him as dilettantes and histrionic personalities.

The script, based on exhaustive research, found its way, by happy coincidence, to Ludovica Villar-Hauser, a transplanted Englishwoman who owns the Greenwich Street Theatre, a 74-seat off-off-Broadway house.

The Ruskins’ troubles, Villar-Hauser says, hit home with her: “I had been in a relationship in which, even though I loved him very much and he tried to love me the best he could, he was quite cold.” She directed the show as well as producing it. Earlier this year, she says, she mortgaged her theater as part of the $500,000 financing package needed to transfer “The Countess” to a bigger, more prominent stage, the Lamb’s Theatre.

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Murphy paused a long time when asked what in the Ruskins’ story resonated inside of him. “I think it’s some kind of Freudian thing,” he said at length. His parents had a long and solid marriage, he says, but at times he thought his father was unjustly critical of his mother, while his mother, a charming, funny woman, didn’t get the recognition she deserved for her wonderful qualities.

Dad as Ruskin, Mom as Effie, Murphy himself as Millais. He can see, in these rough parallels, why the story matters so deeply to him--although he says he wasn’t conscious of it while writing the play.

Murphy says that his father, James, a 90-year-old man who runs 10K races, has seen the play and “is thrilled, absolutely thrilled. I think he thought I was the darkest of the dark horses.”

Murphy says his chief dramatic challenge in honing “The Countess” was to give Ruskin depth and dimension--even as a story unfolds in which the great man and his unspeakable parents try to convince Effie that she must be clinically insane if she can’t be happy in the marriage.

“When I started, I couldn’t stand Ruskin,” he says. “But I have come to have a lot of respect and compassion for him. He suffered tremendously, and he did love Effie”--whose half-century-old love letters were discovered under his floorboards after his death. The play’s climactic scene of tragic recognition belongs to Ruskin.

Murphy says the five years since he began working with Villar-Hauser have provided him with a theatrical education. He now admires actors immensely--at least the ones who are committed--and his girlfriend is a stage director he met through the production. He has gotten back to work on his second novel, but also has another play in progress, this one set in 1967 about an American family. “The Countess,” he says, is due to be filmed by a British company, with a great-great-great granddaughter of Effie and Millais as one of the producers.

“I think in the beginning he would rather have died than have anything to do with theatrical types,” Villar-Hauser said recently from backstage at the Lamb’s Theatre. “I still don’t think he’s a man of the theater. I think he’ll write more plays, but it’s not his temperament. He’s quite a stable individual.”

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“THE COUNTESS,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Dates: Opens Friday. Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 and 7:45 p.m. Ends Dec. 3 Prices: $18 to $47. Phone: (714) 708-5555.