The Only Religious Thing She Knows

As her screenwriting career takes off in London, British writer Lucinda Coxon is getting down in the mud--almost literally--in Costa Mesa, pledging her allegiance to a greater love, the theater.

A mud floor undergirds the scenic design for Coxon’s drama “Nostalgia,” which has its world premiere this week at South Coast Repertory. It is set in 1919 in a poverty-stricken Welsh farming district where life is hard and death is a haunting omnipresence.

One of the four characters is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of Sherlock Holmes was an avid believer in spiritualism. Sir Arthur arrives on the scene in “Nostalgia” because of reports that his son, killed in battle in World War I, is trying to contact him through seances involving one of the Welsh farmers.

Coxon, 38, was cheerfully intense during a recent interview in an office at the theater. She expounded on “Nostalgia,” on her admiration for abstract drama and on her disdain for naturalistic theater.

During the interview Coxon cuddled and mollified her pigtailed 21/2-year-old daughter, Brethia. She also took delivery of an e-mail from her agent in London, suggesting she meet with a Hollywood studio concerning a possible project.

A different project, that is, from “The Echoing Grove,” Coxon’s adaptation of a 1953 novel by Rosamond Lehmann, which was scheduled to begin shooting in London this week with Helena Bonham Carter. And different, also, from “Lily and the Secret Planting,” Coxon’s original screenplay that began production in August with Winona Ryder--until Ryder unexpectedly withdrew from the film. “Lily” is now in limbo, awaiting a new star.

All of that cinematic action raised a question: Since successful screenwriters become rich, and playwrights typically do not, why the detour to a 161-seat playing space at South Coast?

“Because [theater] is the only religious thing I know,” Coxon said. “I could give up film before I could give up the theater.”

The twain, she said, do not tend to meet.

When she writes a play, she said, it is meant for the stage and not the movie screen. Producers have approached her about adapting “Waiting at the Water’s Edge,” another Welsh period piece that is her most frequently staged work in America.

“You’d be surprised how often one is asked for a happy ending on a play,” she said. She isn’t about to tack one on to “Waiting at the Water’s Edge” to help its chances in Hollywood. “I have lots of films [to write], and that’s not one of them.”

Neither is “Nostalgia.” In the play, Tom Flint is a young, illiterate but mentally and physically vibrant farmer who yearns to break free from his circumscribed life; he courts Buddug, the district pariah, who lives in isolation because of her part-time occupation as a prostitute and because of her ancestry. She comes from a line of “sin-eaters,” hired to eat meals served atop the bodies of the dying and the dead so that the deceased’s sins might be expunged.

The cloudburst ending to “Nostalgia” may strike some as particularly bitter, and Coxon joked that it makes her play “movie-proof.” But she said it had to turn out that way. “One thing every [character] learns is that death is not a bogey man, that if you spend your life in fear, you aren’t fully alive.”

In its rural milieu, and in one of its plot mechanisms--two brothers’ rivalry for the inheritance left by a recently dead father--”Nostalgia” calls to mind “The Lonesome West” by Martin McDonagh, seen last spring on the same stage. Insofar as it is a ghost story of sorts, “Nostalgia” also might carry a whiff of “The Weir” by Conor McPherson. Far from wanting her work linked to these two recent successes (both set in Ireland), Coxon bluntly attacks them. She thinks their transparent storytelling robs the audience of a chance to use its imagination.

“They are plays that will do anything for you to love them; I think that really underestimates not just what an audience is capable of understanding, but what they’re comfortable with. I’m happy for plays to be a little open-ended and for what I get out of a play to be abstract. [Audiences] deserve a little mystery.”

Coxon says it remains a mystery to her why she sat down at her dormitory desk at Oxford one morning in 1984--the morning after she ended her academic career by completing a grueling round of final exams--and wrote a comedy called “Mornings After.” She had directed, acted and worked backstage through her teens and through college, but she says she never had considered writing a play.

Although she now considers it a bad play, it got produced in London and helped her land jobs writing for television. Coxon says she matured as an in-house writer for an experimental London theater group called Loose Exchange.

The troupe demanded that she knock out scripts rapidly. “That teaches you not to be too precious. It teaches you to throw away things, that there’s always another rabbit in the hat, and that there are worse things in the world than writing a play that’s not that good.”

Her working pace has slowed considerably. “Nostalgia,” commissioned by South Coast, took her four years to write. After Sept. 11, the theme she developed--”if you spend your life in fear, you aren’t fully alive”--spoke loudly and personally. Coxon had to decide whether to live up to it by flying, post-hijacking disaster, from London to Orange County. “I could easily have stayed home and sent [South Coast] a good-luck fax,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I’m the product of a liberal democracy and I don’t enjoy having limitations imposed on me.”

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“Nostalgia,” South Coast Repertory Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Sundays, 7:45 p.m., Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Previews begin Tuesday, regular performances begin Friday. Ends Dec. 2. $19-$51. (714) 708-5555.