Finding Her Muse Amusing

Tears filled Amy Freed’s eyes, her throat seemed to tighten and she sniffled once as she sat in an empty rehearsal room and talked about her new play, “The Beard of Avon.”

As a man from Stratford-on-Avon once wrote (although, as we shall see, in certain literary quarters that is a matter of intense dispute), “parting is such sweet sorrow.”

Yes, Freed, who had just finished her last rewrites and was about to head home to San Francisco, was having a Shakespearean moment as she prepared to let the most beloved of her brainchildren make its way into the world. The play, a highly speculative frolic through the life of William Shakespeare, has its premiere this week on South Coast Repertory’s main stage in Costa Mesa.

From the early signs, the theater gods seem to be smiling even as Freed weeps bittersweetly. Five theaters already have snapped up “The Beard of Avon” for next season, among them San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, the Seattle Repertory Theatre and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

“I’ve never taken so much pleasure in a play,” said Freed, 43, whose career, though not yet in orbit, has had a promising launch.

In 1995, “The Psychic Life of Savages,” a literary fantasia based on the lives of doomed poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, won the Joseph Kesselring Award for emerging playwrights--an honor previously bestowed on Tony Kushner, Howard Korder and Anna Deavere Smith.

In 1997, South Coast commissioned and staged Freed’s follow-up work, “Freedomland,” a funny but unsettling account of a strange, messed-up family. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1999.

Those laurels came at some emotional cost, Freed says. “Plays like ‘Freedomland’ are excruciating because they come from inward and personal material, and it’s like opening a vein.”

Not so “The Beard of Avon.”

“It’s been just giddy and fun, and I’ve loved it,” she said. “I was just in love with the world of it, and I don’t want to leave.”

Freed’s joyful interlude with “The Beard” began about three years ago. She was again in the throes of painful creation, trying to write one of those vein-tapping relationship plays, tentatively called “My Bastard.” She was struggling, she said, because after the close-to-the-bone “Freedomland,” she wasn’t ready to be absorbed again in the inner world of what she calls “my own unknowns.”

Her rescuer was an old friend interested in conspiracy theories. He raised the Authorship Question: Did a poorly educated English rustic named Will Shakespeare really write the greatest body of verse and drama in Western civilization? Or was William Shakespeare just a front for one or more of the refined men of the time, nobles of great learning and experience who penned the plays but claimed not the credit?

Dabbling in the rude, rough, disreputable world of the Elizabethan theater was considered below the station of the well-born. So, as the iconoclasts and conspiracy theorists would have it, such erudite, worldly courtiers as Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and used that common actor fellow, Shakespeare, for cover.

Freed dived into her research, envisioning a play about scholars and conspiracy cranks obsessed with the question. But as she read, the Elizabethan stage itself drew her in, and soon it alone became her subject.

Freed is adept at assimilating and parodying the styles of literary heroes in her plays. Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson figured as protagonists in two of her early works. In “The Psychic Life of Savages,” she wrote verse that cavorted with the poetic styles and sensibilities of Plath, Sexton, Ted Hughes and Robert Lowell, the templates for the play’s main characters.

With “The Beard of Avon” she is at it again, often in iambic pentameter. The play is both a sendup and a loving appreciation of a world in which almost everybody is drunk with words and stories and the enchantment of language as a bouquet and a plaything.

“The Beard” also celebrates and pokes fun at the conventions and foibles of the theater--not just the Elizabethan stage, but today’s.

For the devout Shakespearean, the second act contains an elaborate, play-within-a-play spoof of “The Taming of the Shrew” in which all the vexing conundrums of that “problem” play are wryly unraveled.

One thing “The Beard of Avon” is not is a serious foray into the issues of the Authorship Question. Freed said that she made sure to immerse herself in all the controversies, then pretty much set all that erudition aside so she could write an entertaining play with Shakespeare, his wife, Anne Hathaway, Queen Elizabeth and De Vere as central characters.

There is one serious current that she hopes will emerge: that great artists are not born, but made through heroic acts of will.

“It does not do [Shakespeare or whomever] justice to say he was sort of struck by lightning and just had the ability to channel that kind of language with that kind of skill, as if it was a freak of personality,” Freed said. True art, she thinks, comes from labor, preparation and “a collision between your will and the world” in which some personal wreckage is inevitable.

As light and spirited as it is, “The Beard” has something poignant to say about the cost incurred by Hathaway while her husband fulfills his creative drive.

Freed, a tall, slender woman with an intense but solicitous manner, says her own battle of wills takes place within: “I feel like I’ve really got two people inside of me. One is a completely uncontrollable eye and ear” that turns all she encounters--including friends and family--into grist for drama.

“The other side is the nice girl saying, ‘You can’t do that, you can’t say that, nice people will hate you.’ ”

Freed says that while writing other plays, she has felt “in a constant state of sin, because you’re kind of cannibalizing other people’s privacy.” Hence her great pleasure in “The Beard of Avon,” a lark that promises to put no noses out of joint save those stuck deep into the Authorship Question.

For “Beard” director David Emmes, the South Coast co-founder who also directed “Freedomland,” Freed’s signal talent is her ability to serve two masters: intellect and passion.

“Sometimes you have writers who can create blood-and-guts characters but can’t grapple with more challenging ideas and concepts. Others deal with philosophic concepts but lack sweat and grit. [Freed] is so visceral, but it’s all held together with a force of ideas.”

Freed, whose mother taught acting, tried for 12 years to make it as an actress. She first turned to writing in the late 1980s to provide herself with a performance piece for her master’s thesis at the American Conservatory Theater. The result, “Still Warm,” about the life of the ill-fated TV anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, premiered in 1991.

Although she has accumulated honors since then, the stage has bloodied Freed a bit: After “Freedomland” won critical huzzahs at South Coast, a different production under a different director was greeted coolly in New York.

Consequently, despite the Pulitzer finalist status, Freed says, the play has had only two productions since it bombed off-Broadway.

Her ambition now is to reach a large, diverse, mainstream audience while continuing to write complex plays; as her model for a satisfying career, she cites Tom Stoppard, who has gone to the Shakespearean well for two big hits, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and the screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love” (a film Freed loved).

But Freed, who teaches undergraduate acting classes at Stanford University and is married to Mick LaSalle, film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, does not crave fame.

“The best place to be is never quite having arrived but around long enough so that you’re sort of given consideration,” she said.

“I feel like I’m getting there now. My job is that I teach acting, and my hope is that I will continue to feel as strongly as I do about the plays I write, because that’s where my heart is.”

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“THE BEARD OF AVON,” South Coast Repertory, 55 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Dates: Opens Friday; closes July 1. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Prices: $18-$49. Pay-what-you-will matinee, Saturday. Phone: (714) 708-5555.