Far from haven

The phrase “homeland security” had not been coined when New Yorker Tom Donaghy finished his first draft of a play about an anxious Manhattan mom’s desperate need to flee and create a secure home in the suburbs.

His inspiration, during that summer of 2001, was not the vision of towers collapsing in dust and smoke but his memory of a quiet visit to a friend’s country home. She was remodeling, and Donaghy, acclaimed for his ability to find poetry in dialogue that resembles the fractured, disjointed way most people really talk, was eavesdropping.

What stayed with him was how the friend and her contractor went ‘round and ‘round over whether the changes she coveted would work.

That episode gave rise to “Eden Lane,” whose protagonist, May, is a middle-aged former actress emerging from a “marital bloodbath.” She is trying to rebound in a new place with a new husband -- though she can’t stifle doubts that he’ll prove no more solid than the drunken, womanizing ex who put her through hell. They have landed, with May’s 22-year-old daughter, in a quiet, unnamed burg where the neighbors hold quaint block parties to raise money for the community chest.

“We will not elect to bring any more pain into a house we built with hope that our pain has finally left,” May says. “The ones we elected to love who disappointed again and again are gone ... and the places that we’ve lived that are no longer safe are -- elsewhere. And we build a refuge. And it’s sturdy.” But not sturdy enough, her oddly intense interior designer is telling her, for the house’s frame to support the big picture window May wants installed so she can awaken each day to a vista of her calm surroundings.

When Des McAnuff, artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, took Donaghy’s script home one evening early this year, the then-untitled play hit him as a subtle distillation of much that had happened to the American psyche, post-Sept. 11. He didn’t know much about Donaghy, who, after 10 years of productions at major nonprofit theaters on both coasts, remains more of a contender than an eminence. But he knew he wanted to direct his play.

“It’s not topical, but I think the things that are going on in this family pertain to these troubled times,” McAnuff says. “They’re people looking for refuge and perhaps redemption. Many writers have tried to come to terms with this brave new world, and the thing I love about Tom’s work is that he strikes a glancing blow to these subjects and doesn’t hit anything directly on the head. Relationships and people are still the focus of the play.”

Donaghy (the g is hard, as in McGhee) says the theme of people seeking a haven has resonated with him since his childhood outside Philadelphia, where he was reared by “good and careful people” -- an Irish American roofer and his Italian American wife -- who wanted to create a safe place for their four boys, of whom he is the eldest.

He left to study acting at New York University -- he’d told his family he was gay by then -- and stepped into a crash course in the nature of danger and insecurity. The AIDS epidemic hit while he was an undergraduate. “When there’s a virus killing people that’s affecting your life directly, that’s a basis for paranoia,” the trim, soft-spoken writer says.

Sept. 11 brought all Americans into a circle of vulnerability. But “Eden Lane,” Donaghy says, is informed by his sense that, even apart from specters such as AIDS and terrorism, we must live with the fundamental precariousness of things.

“Even in the most mundane moments of daily life there is a kind of danger to living -- the danger of being engaged with the world and with people we love. I’ve always thought about that, and it’s become more crucial in the last couple of years.”

In “The Dadshuttle” (1993) and “Minutes From the Blue Route” (1997), Donaghy confronted some of his deepest fears by making his young alter-egos HIV-positive, although he is not actually infected (neither play is a topical work about AIDS, their focus falling instead on a persistent Donaghy theme: how families go through the gymnastics of conversational indirection to avoid hitting the nail on the head).

After Sept. 11, Donaghy says, he struggled with whether to mention the attacks in “Eden Lane.” A long time went by before he added a reference. May’s daughter, Ruby, tells a neighbor the litany of reasons they fled Manhattan: “ ....And then 9/11 happened, and Mom kind of freaked out. We lived downtown. It wasn’t good. She wanted peace and quiet ....So we bought, um, peace and quiet. Which is about two acres.”

Donaghy still isn’t at ease with those lines. “People might focus too much on that aspect of the play.” But an in-house reading of “Eden Lane” at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, where another of his suburban domestic dramas, “The Beginning of August,” premiered in 2000, persuaded him that the reference flowed naturally. “It can’t not refer to that awfulness if it’s going to be about these things and be produced in this day and age.”

His early days

Donaghy is talking on a bench in a placid quadrangle at the La Jolla Playhouse’s host institution, UC San Diego. At 39, he looks so boyishly youthful and untrammeled that one might be tempted, on a visit to his Greenwich Village apartment or the 1840s-vintage farmhouse he recently bought in the Catskills with a group of friends, to peek in the closets for a Picture of Dorian Tom.

He grew up wanting to act but only became serious about theater after taking a series of seminars at NYU team-taught by David Mamet and William H. Macy. “Until that point I thought theater was maybe sort of hokey, even though I was involved in it. With those guys, I saw how it could be muscular and contemporary.”

Looking around at the acting competition in New York, Donaghy concluded that he couldn’t measure up. He was a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company, which grew out of the Mamet-Macy seminars, and began writing short plays that the fledgling, cash-poor troupe could stage without having to pay royalties.

Neil Pepe, artistic director at Atlantic, has acted in, produced or directed several of Donaghy’s plays. For him, Donaghy’s hallmarks are naturalistic, broken dialogue in which characters’ trains of thought zigzag and pass one another by, seemingly unnoticed; a honed economy of diction and detail; and an overall subtlety that may have contributed to Donaghy’s standing as a playwright who is respected but not exactly ballyhooed or ubiquitously produced.

Critics have been divided. The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Phillips hailed “The Beginning of August” as mainly “fresh and precise,” casting Donaghy as “someone to watch, and to listen to.” But in his review of “Boys and Girls,” which premiered last year at Playwrights Horizons in New York, Ben Brantley of the New York Times hedged his bets, summing up Donaghy as an exceptionally strong weaver of dialogue who hasn’t mastered the art of spinning a yarn. “Like certain precocious children, Mr. Donaghy’s plays are way ahead of the class in their verbal skills. Now if only they could develop the motor coordination to move forward in a compelling and credible story.”

Pepe and McAnuff see no such lack; the stories in Donaghy’s dramas hit home, they say, if enough attention is paid to their subtle, sometimes oblique details. Pepe says Donaghy’s steadfast devotion to writing tales of everyday domesticity, rather than telling stories with more sensational subjects, probably makes it harder for him to raise his profile.

“I think he’s one of the most underrated writers. He has a passion for trying to understand the nature of familial love and romantic love in a modern society where the whole idea of family has exploded in our faces and we’re reinventing it. Tom’s work suggests that the only place to reinvent from is a position of love, despite the difficulties of communication. I think that’s an incredibly brave and timely undertaking.”

If critics and the marketplace feed him spinach, Donaghy is content to make like Popeye and hew to a philosophy of I-yam-what-I-yam.

“I’m compelled, for better or for worse, by domestic life, and I’m on a little bit of a mission to explore what’s subtle about theater,” he says. “I think life is variants of shards of perception that we then put together and call life. It’s how I experience the world, and I can’t write any other way.”

Still, with his 40th birthday arriving Aug. 21, Donaghy says the time has come to reassess his place in the theater. A part of him, he says, just wants to “grow tomatoes and sit on the porch.”

He had a close-but-no-cigar encounter with series television a few years ago, when he wrote an unproduced pilot for CBS. He’s seeking financial backing for a screenplay he wrote last year about a shotgun-toting teenager who kicks out his parents and barricades himself in their house.

He says he is satisfied with the standard of living he can achieve by supplementing his creative writing with Web journalism for NYU and New York Law School. The only play he has in the works is a translation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” commissioned by the Atlantic Theater Company.

“I have to have a discussion with theater before I write another play,” Donaghy says. “I want to be involved in a democratic art form, and it’s absurd that it costs so much. I would love to create a theater that’s $10 a ticket and everybody gets paid the same.”

Would he still feel the need to wrestle with the nature of his calling if he’d been turning out hits?

“No, of course not,” he says, cheerfully deflating himself. “But I should be grappling with these issues. A hit would certainly make things easier, but I don’t know if it would make things better.”

Donaghy says he has learned that it’s saner not to stew over questions of fame and success.

“For the longest time I didn’t think I was happy because everyone kept saying, ‘You shouldn’t be happy with this. You could be creating a television show or making movies.’ But they were wrong, and I’m quite happy. Now I know better the life I’m fighting for, which is not to turn ‘Eden Lane’ into a sitcom in the fall. Let it be ephemeral. That’s what theater is.”

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‘Eden Lane’

Where: La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive

When: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.

Ends: Sept. 14

Price: $39-$49

Contact: (858) 550-1010