Mary Fengar Gail’s Weird Worlds

“Keep it real” is a cultural watchword for our time, invoked by rappers justifying outrageous lyrics, pundits lampooning the truth-spinning of political handlers, and playwrights dissecting the internal dynamics of the family.

To which Mary Fengar Gail replies, in so many words, “Enough, already!”

The Irvine playwright, who remains obscure despite having won a spate of cash awards and honors for her scripts, is no friend of the real.

“I think I’m a fantasist. A perverse fantasist,” she said in a recent interview in her townhome’s bright living room, where the decor does nothing to dispel her self-assessment. Gail has turned the place, which she shares with her boyfriend, South Coast Repertory’s dramaturge, Jerry Patch, into a museum of her own fantastical artwork.

The downstairs walls are covered with colorful, distorted, medieval-influenced paintings of harlequins, demons and agitated steeds. The living room provides a stage for similarly painted mannequins of boy jugglers. More than 30 primitive masks stare from the wall of the nook where Gail writes.

Her latest fantasy, “Carnivals of Desire,” begins Thursday in Santa Ana as the first full-length play staged by New Voices Playwrights Workshop.

This is the second chance for Orange County audiences to enter Gail’s strange worlds: In 1999, South Coast Repertory staged a reading of “Drink Me,” in which a Sherlock Holmes-like detective tried to solve the disappearances of thousands of homeless men, and found that the trail led to three weird sisters--witches all--and to his own properly British aristocratic mother and a sordid secret from her past.

After “Drink Me,” South Coast awarded Gail a commission to write another play; she recently submitted the result, “Pandora’s Kiss.” Last year, “Drink Me” made the top-10 list of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s theater critic, Clifford A. Ridley, who was impressed with its world-premiere staging by InterAct Theatre Company, a small professional troupe.

Now comes “Carnivals of Desire,” in which a woebegone, Depression-era traveling carnival in the Deep South is saved through the psychic powers of its seemingly weakest member. The character, Louisa Gambollini, is an ailing, ancient object of ridicule for her fellow carnies, who would like to leave her behind to die; she saves herself--and them--by conjuring, then struggling against, a magical, younger incarnation of herself.

“Drink Me” last year helped Gail win a $5,000 fellowship from the California Arts Council; she also has won honors from, among others, New Dramatists, a prestigious New York-based playwrights organization.

All of which has yielded nothing so far in the way of high-profile productions. The reality is, Gail said, that reality is what sells, and though the dramatists who judge contests may like her work, the producers who have to sell tickets consider her “perverse fantasies” too out there to stage.

“It’s one thing to win a competition. It’s another to convince an artistic director to take a risk,” said the slender, soft-voiced Gail. She is dismissive of the dominant strain of realism in theater: “There are all these carpet-slipper plays that tread softly and offend none. They’re all family-dysfunction plays, and they’re small, imitating the reality of our own quotidian life. Theater should create its own reality.”

How to Stage Fantasies Without Special Effects?

How, though, can a small theater do justice to a climactic scene in which tormented, entombed souls howl from the maw of a place even worse than hell--as “Drink Me” demands? How can the sudden transformations in “Carnival of Desire” be dramatized without special effects?

Gail said she always finds herself removing scenes that are impossible to stage. But she said the talents of actors and the imaginations of audiences still present a broad palette of fantastical possibilities.

“You can say, ‘This beach ball is the planet Neptune. This three-legged stool is a seat on a Ferris wheel.’ The audience has to co-create.”

She shrugs at being out of the mainstream and keeps letting her fancy roam--but only after grounding it with a great deal of research.

“If what you’re doing does not coincide with what the theater world is doing, you can’t stop.”

Gail’s youth and education apparently contained a good deal of the family dysfunction she would like to drive from the stage; she wasn’t about to detail it in an interview.

“I’m a really private person,” she said. Her father was in the Army and later worked as an oft-transferred civil engineer. Gail said she attended five high schools and became “a basket case.” She went to college and graduate school but prefers not to give details because “I feel like I was in a coma at the time.”

Reading, writing and painting were her refuges. By 1992, she said, she was married and living in Pawtucket, R.I., selling paintings and writing for a small theater in nearby Providence. The prestigious Sundance Theatre Lab, a program of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, accepted a script she sent, “Planet of the Mutagens.” That led to a romance with Patch, who was directing the summer program; in 1994, she joined him in Irvine.

“I came West to reinvent myself,” she said. Her invention is a self-professed “homebody” who can go days without seeing anybody but Patch and their immediate neighbors. She makes most of her money on computer stock trades for an hour each morning and tries to spend five hours a day or more writing--first in longhand, then typing her drafts into a computer.

In a separate interview, Patch, who has earned a national reputation as an expert shepherd of new plays, said he lets others at South Coast evaluate the scripts Gail submits.

“I pretty much stay out of it. To me, there’s a fairness issue. My approach is to try not to let our personal relationship color what the choice of the theater is.”

The carnival manager in “Carnivals of Desire” is named Patch Rubenstein. Gail said it is not an homage to her boyfriend; she found in her research that carnival managers in the old days were nicknamed “patchmen” because it was their job to patch things up when sweet-talking or bribery was needed to stay on the good side of the police.

Gail said she takes pleasure in writing about “people unlike myself,” but that doesn’t mean they don’t carry important imprints of her. Part of the inspiration for “Carnivals of Desire” was the slow, difficult death of a friend’s mother. Gail became interested in issues of how the old and frail are treated.

She thinks there are also some intimate personal clues about herself in these far-out plays--although she is still trying to figure them out.

“The arts tell you who you are. Almost all my plays have several [recurring themes]. One of them is fragmentation, a splitting of the self. I didn’t notice it until I wrote enough plays to look back. These are the dark issues. I can’t quite pinpoint yet what happened in my life that makes them my themes, but they are my themes.”

* “Carnivals of Desire,” Don Cribb Theater at the DePietro Performance Center, 809 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Preview Thursday, 8 p.m., opens Friday. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m. (no show June 16), Sundays, 7 p.m. Matinee, June 17, 2 p.m. Ends June 24. $10 to $12. (949) 225-4125.