Still getting used to the idea of ‘Mr. Playwright’

What worries Noah Haidle is not the newness and suddenness of having his play “Mr. Marmalade” staged by a major regional theater company -- an extreme rarity for somebody who is just 25, is still in graduate school, has never had a professional production and is now the youngest playwright ever produced at South Coast Repertory.

It’s not the thought that critics and audiences who catch his debut at South Coast Repertory might not like it or get it -- although there’s clearly that risk. The comedy, which opens Friday, revolves around a pair of preschoolers (played by adults) who are saddled with coming-of-age issues that fiction usually reserves for teenagers. Sexual knowledge, suicide attempts, depression and worse intrude on 4-year-old Lucy and her 5-year-old playmate, Larry, thanks to a bunch of inept and self-involved grown-ups. The worst of them is Mr. Marmalade, Lucy’s drug-and-porn addicted, violence-prone, workaholic menace of an imaginary friend.

No, what concerns this affable, earnestly but not pretentiously intellectual fellow from the Juilliard School is the sense that, after seeing his work dramatized and meticulously analyzed through weeks of rehearsal, what he’s written is starting to make too much sense to him.

When he sits at his black 1940s Corona manual typewriter, Haidle wants to be able to summon the freedom of an unselfconscious imagination.

“The difficulty now is to go back the next time and have access to that same unconscious, those same impulses,” he says. “That’s what I think separates professionals from one-time wonders.”

One of Haidle’s mentors, the comic playwright Christopher Durang, agrees that his strength lies in letting his mind wander where it will.

“He has a very wild and playful imagination, and an extremely theatrical one. The plays he thinks of very much belong on the stage as opposed to wanting to be a television show or a movie.”

Haidle (rhymes with “idle”) brings his yen for the unusual to everyday realms too. Faced with his first media interview as a playwright, he chuckles readily but thinks carefully, pausing to collect the right words. Several times he pulls out a yellow- covered, spiral-ringed notebook he keeps in his backpack. The pages are full of cursive scrawling -- quotations and observations from books he’s been reading. He quotes Friedrich Durrenmatt on the advisability of inflicting the worst possible woes on a play’s characters, and Sam Shepard on the Rolling Stones. He enlists poet Theodore Roethke to support his notion that it’s important to insert his emotions into plays but leave out his personal experiences. He approvingly reads a quote from another poet, John Ashbery, on how the highest artistry comes from achieving a beautiful and evocative structure, not a clearly discernible meaning.

Haidle grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich., the second son of a radiologist and a stay-at-home mom. He was pretty much oblivious to the theater until he was 15 or 16, when he shelled out a buck at his Boy Scout troop’s used book sale for “In Their Own Words,” David Savran’s 1988 compilation of interviews with contemporary American playwrights -- among them Durang and Marsha Norman, who now are Haidle’s teachers at Juilliard.

“It’s still the book I’ve read most, and I still return to it in times of need,” he says. He began a regimen of trying to read a play each day, starting with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, and kept it up through high school and his four years at Princeton.

“I had the instinct that I could write plays pretty well, even though I had no idea what I was doing and figured it would take me years to get good at it. I would read plays, and hopefully something of my own would come out.” His first, written at age 17, remains the only one based on an episode from his own life. The second, “Epistrophy,” was a winner in the Young Playwrights Festival, an annual national competition for writers 18 and under established in 1982 by Stephen Sondheim.

Haidle was barely 24 when he wrote “Mr. Marmalade.” It began as the gesture of a thoughtful boyfriend. When his girlfriend, Gillian Jacobs, an acting student at Juilliard, remarked that she’d always wanted to be onstage in a pink tutu, “I said, ‘Well, I’m in sort of a position to try and make that happen.’ ” The image of a man in a suit carrying a briefcase also popped into his mind; thus were born the tutu-clad 4-year-old and her briefcase-toting imaginary friend.

Haidle’s agent sent the script to Jerry Patch, and the veteran South Coast Repertory dramaturge says it was hard to believe a 24-year-old had written it.

“You don’t see work that fresh and of that caliber from somebody that young very often.” The theater’s brass checked out Haidle last year, deemed him, as Patch puts it, “a very bright kid with his head screwed on straight,” and added him to SCR’s large list of playwrights under cultivation.

“Mr. Marmalade” originally was slotted for a workshop production at next weekend’s annual Pacific Playwrights Festival, but when a scheduled, dance-oriented production, “The Studio,” was withdrawn because a key actress-dancer was unavailable, theater leaders Martin Benson and David Emmes decided Haidle and his play were ready. At this time last year, South Coast premiered another work by a young writer in his second year of graduate school. “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow” by 30-year-old Rolin Jones earned raves, and last month was voted by the American Theater Critics Assn. as the year’s best new play by an emerging writer. The Old Globe in San Diego is staging it next month.

Patch acknowledges that “Mr. Marmalade” is one of South Coast’s more daring gambits -- a show that, if reduced to its bare-bones scenario of preschoolers being subjected to horrors, would seem tough for mainstream audiences to stomach. “If it was done in a realistic way it would be very uncomfortable and unfortunate,” Patch says. But he thinks the “incongruity” Haidle has created by having grown actors play ultraknowing, hyperarticulate little kids is a springboard for barbed comedy.

Patch finds in “Mr. Marmalade” a morally infused satire in which “we’re being tweaked for what we let happen to our kids,” but also a celebration of youthful imagination and an affirmation of kids’ drive to just be kids.

Haidle says he has come belatedly to realize that themes such as the elusiveness of happiness and the need for childhood innocence reside in his play, but he firmly denies that he wrote it with any meaning, moral or satiric point in mind. Watching and listening during rehearsals as others pick over his every word for meaning and intention has, he says, “been one hell of an education.” Haidle, who has neither a television nor an Internet connection in his Manhattan apartment, says he has written six or seven plays in the past year. They include “Princess Marjorie,” commissioned by South Coast Repertory, and “I Try to Be Happy,” a one-act commissioned by the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.

Prolific as he has been, he says he is just getting used to the idea that he really is a professional playwright. Until lately, he resisted that notion and preferred to think of himself as “just a guy.”

After a recent game of tennis, Patch introduced Haidle to somebody at the club as the playwright of SCR’s next production. “It was very shocking. I was in my tennis clothes with my tennis racquet, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess that’s how I identify myself.’ I’ve been feeling more and more comfortable about it.”

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‘Mr. Marmalade’

Where: Julianne Argyros Stage, South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Tuesdays to Fridays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. and 7:45 p.m.

Ends: May 16

Price: $27-$55

Contact: (714) 708-5555