Marriage? Don’t get him started

The cigarette Lewis Black just smoked outside apparently has failed to calm him down.

Inside Burbank’s Falcon Theatre, where his new play “One Slight Hitch” opens Saturday, the writer and comic bounces his foot in an apoplectic rhythm. He fidgets in his seat like a critic already mentally composing his negative review before intermission.

God help theater if Black were a critic. Though he began his career as a playwright, he has made perpetual outrage into a lucrative career as “America’s Foremost Commentator on Everything” on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” starring Jon Stewart.

In addition to his “Daily Show” gig, he just completed a national tour for Comedy Central, and will soon film his first HBO comedy special at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Broadway. And he says he takes his fury up a notch for his live performances. “ ‘The Daily Show’ is like a 6 or 7 in terms of my rage,” he says. “Onstage, it’s a 9 or 10.”

It’s hard to believe that this same Black wrote “One Slight Hitch,” a quirky but relatively gentle romantic comedy about a wedding day gone awry. “People may come in expecting to hear a lot of swearing ... ; it’s not that,” he muses. “But it is kind of edgy in a sense, because these people kind of go at each other, and they’re really smart.”

In “Hitch,” upper-class Midwestern suburbanites Doc and Delia Coleman (Granville Van Dusen and Michael Learned) are juggling caterers, florists and the arrival of future in-laws for the nuptials of daughter Courtney (Sherri Parker Lee). Then, her former boyfriend Ryan (Todd Babcock) shows up on the doorstep, knowing nothing about the wedding and needing to use the bathroom. No matter how hard Doc tries to hide him, Ryan’s uninvited presence wreaks havoc on an already stressful day.

Even if it qualifies as a light-as-air comedy, “One Slight Hitch” is theater -- and theater is something that, over the years, has made Black very, very angry.

His life plan was to be a playwright. Stand-up “was something that I did as a way to let off steam, because working in theater is about as frustrating a place as there is.” Black became frustrated by theater under the most illustrious circumstances: As a student at Yale Drama School, the classmate of such soon-to-be-successful writers as Ted Tally (screenplay, “Silence of the Lambs”) and James Yoshimura (producer/writer, “Homicide: Life on the Street”). Completing their final year when Black entered the program were Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang.

“It was horrible,” says Black of Yale, which provided him with three years of artistic authority figures against whom to rebel. Among his horror stories: a letter of recommendation from a faculty member that accompanied his fellowship applications. “Eight years later, I was driving my dean of students home and he admitted that he had written in my letter that he never thought I’d be a playwright,” Black says. “If I’d known at the time, I would have sued.”

What he got out of Yale was the campus cabaret, where he honed his stand-up skills. He later became the associate artistic director of the West Bank Cafe’s Downstairs Theatre Bar in New York City, devoted to presenting sketch comedy, music and one-act plays, a space where many of his own plays came to be produced.

While he has also had plays produced at regional theaters (including “Crossing the Crab Nebula” at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, Ga., and “The Laundry Hour,” co-written by Mark Linn-Baker, performed at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre), Black says he found it difficult to sell the “very dark one-acts” he began writing fresh out of school. “You might as well put a note in a bottle and drop it in the Pacific; nobody has an interest in one-acts,” he grumbles.

Black wrote “One Slight Hitch” in the 1980s, and was pleased to have finally come up with a lighter story that lent itself to a full-length play. But one regional theater that had rejected his darker, surreal early work now accused him of “giving up his vision” and selling out by writing a commercial play.

“One Slight Hitch” has had several previous productions, but Black has continued to rewrite over the years, so he considers the Falcon Theatre production “a kind of premiere.” He is glad to have a forum to polish his play without any Yale professors peering over his shoulder.

“It’s kind of nice to be able to work in this atmosphere,” he says, sounding surprised to be even marginally content. “I never had a desire to write for film, or TV. This really almost clinically insane form of playwriting is what intrigues me.”

Black, single at 55, is also pleased to have an opportunity to comment on the institution of marriage: It enrages him.

“In this country the spectrum of what a family is continues to grow and grow, but they focus it down to this one thing, marriage,” he fumes. “Under this [president] you’d better be heterosexual, and you’d better be looking for someone to hook up with.

“I don’t know why my generation went through the ‘60s, I don’t know what the self-examination was for, if nothing was going to come out of it.”

Although he was married during his Yale years -- a tale of two horrors that provokes a double expletive -- Black is not keen on doing it again. “This was more important to me than that; theater was more, in a sense, my family,” he says.

His theater “family” -- at least, the play’s director, Daniel DeRaey and cast member Learned -- sees Black as a far less dysfunctional member of the clan than he seems to view himself. Like the best playwrights, Learned says, he’s been collaborative during rehearsals at the Falcon. He’s not hanging around to defend his work.

“His anger and his passion are real, but there is a real human heart beating under all of that,” DeRaey says. “He’s a sweetheart and a softie -- but maybe you’d better not print that. Maybe that’s not what his fan base needs to hear.”

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‘One Slight Hitch’

Where: Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank

When: Opens Saturday. Wednesdays through Saturdays,

8 p.m., Sundays, 4 p.m.

Ends: March 14

Price: $25-$37.50; $20 student rush tickets on sale half an hour before curtain

Contact: (818) 955-8101, www.falcontheatre.com