Melodramatic and proud of it

Writer and director Colin Campbell and the protagonists in his melodrama “Golden Prospects” followed a similar arc.

Each moved across the country to L.A., drawn by “golden prospects.” Campbell and his future wife, Gail Lerner, headed west from New York in 1997 seeking a holy grail in show business. In his play at the Powerhouse Theatre, a young Midwestern couple relocates in 1901 to become orange farmers.

Compared with the troubled fruit growers in “Golden Prospects,” Campbell, now 34, and Lerner hit the jackpot. After reading a TV spec script by Lerner, an agent had told her that he could get her a job in television if she moved west. The couple decided to test the waters.

“It was a dangerous leap of faith,” Campbell recalled. “It occurred to us that an agent might say that to anybody who has any promise.”

Lerner spent a month scouting the territory and asked Campbell, who hadn’t spent one minute in L.A., to come out for a weekend. “She wanted to sell me on Los Angeles,” he said. “Right off the plane, she took me to [the coffeehouse] Highland Grounds, then to Griffith Park for a hike. We stayed at a hotel in Santa Monica.”

He was sold. Upon their return to New York, they piled their belongings into a two-door car and drove across the country. “We didn’t have a contingency plan,” Campbell said.

They don’t regret their move. After several TV jobs, Lerner became a writer on “Will & Grace.” The couple made a short film, “Seraglio,” that was nominated for a 2001 Academy Award. They and their 2-year-old daughter, Ruby, now live in a Silver Lake home with a view of the Hollywood Hills.

Their fate is in stark contrast to that of the characters in “Golden Prospects.” The would-be farmers begin their stay by meeting a real estate swindler who pins oranges to cactus plants and tries to pass them off as orange “bushes.” They proceed to one calamity after another, as do their twin children 17 years later. Yet despite the machinations of a greedy oil magnate and his film producer son, the melodrama ends on a hopeful note -- although that final upbeat is spiked with irony.

The intense highs and lows of melodramatic characters reflect a condition familiar to young strivers in Hollywood. “All my contemporaries feel we’re on a roulette wheel,” Campbell said. “Things can work spectacularly, or not at all.”

Campbell, a New Jersey kid who received a master’s degree in theater direction from Columbia University, became interested in melodrama when he was trying to write a musical about a doctor who poisons his patients. “It wanted to be a melodrama,” he said.

He began reading old melodramas and attended a New York workshop on the subject, thinking he might direct one of the antiques. But he didn’t think most of the old melodramas were “high-octane” enough. “A lot of them had two or three set pieces where the action all comes to a head. My challenge was to write a play where every scene has that quality.”

After initially setting his own play in the California Gold Rush, he transferred the action to Los Angeles in the early 20th century. “I found the notion of oil more relevant and contemporary than gold,” he said. “I wanted contemporary audiences to be able to connect to it. Our villains are corrupt movie producers and oil magnates because we can get behind booing them.”

The play was publicly read in 2002 as part of the Edge of the World Theater Festival’s Los Angeles History Project. “The audience got it right away,” Campbell said. “They booed, they cheered.”

Powerhouse Theatre’s executive artistic director, Andrew Barrett-Weiss, sent a copy of the script to the Neurotic Young Urbanites, who often perform at the venue.

The company seized the challenge. Paul Wittenburg, one of the group’s artistic directors and a member of the “Golden Prospects” cast, said the play’s “acting on steroids is incredibly liberating and fun.”

He contrasted it to Hollywood auditions, when “90% of the time you’re told to bring it down. It’s ironic that this play is happening during pilot season. It’s like Jekyll and Hyde -- at night we get to raise the roof and act like a fool.”

Campbell is “very even-keeled,” Wittenburg added, “but when he does melodrama, he’s touched by the Holy Ghost. Those still waters run melodramatically deep.”

Campbell passed out his “Melodrama Manifesto” to the cast, which begins with “You are the greatest actor of your generation” and maintains that “Your physical gestures are on top of, and independent of, feeling -- they are for Artistic Effect.”

“Talk loudly and clearly; the audience is drunk and has trouble hearing,” advises the manifesto.

Patrick Fischler, Wittenburg’s fellow artistic director and cast member, says Campbell has “this passion for a genre that no one else had ever told me about.” However, it’s not totally unfamiliar, Fischler said -- he watched old “Dynasty” episodes as research.

Campbell believes that people know how to react to “Golden Prospects” even if they have never seen anything quite like it. “We’re all hard-wired for melodrama,” he declared.

As for that idea about the doctor who poisons his patients? Campbell now plans to write it as a movie -- a silent movie, with all the heightened style of melodrama.

*

‘Golden Prospects’

Where: Powerhouse Theatre,

3116 2nd St., Santa Monica

When: Saturday and March 19-20,

8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.

Ends: March 20

Price: $20

Info: (310) 572-6748