Here’s a thought... and soon it’s another play

“I can do plays whenever I want,” says Alan Ayckbourn.

The tall, affable British writer and director is often described as the world’s most prolific living playwright -- 69 plays in 66 years -- and the most widely performed were it not for dear departed Mr. Shakespeare.

His secret?

“A playwright needs a home,” he says in his tastefully beige room at Le Parker Meridien. Nearly all of Ayckbourn’s plays have premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England, where he has been artistic director since 1971.

“I can write them, and nobody says, ‘I’ve got to read it.’ I say, ‘My new one is called ...’ and off I go! Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But I have this wonderful thruway to the audience that is permanently open.”

Ayckbourn is in New York for the U.S. premiere of his British repertory company’s original production of “Private Fears in Public Places” at 59E59 Theaters until July 3. Said the New York Times’ Charles Isherwood: “A minor-key comedy about six Londoners leading lives of quiet desperation, it is rueful, funny, touching and altogether wonderful.” Newsday’s Linda Winer was one of the critics to point out the advantages of seeing Ayckbourn’s “very English characters” performed by “stylists to the manor born.”

More than 30 of Ayckbourn’s plays have been produced in London’s West End since his first hit, “Relatively Speaking,” opened in 1967. But it is at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, named for its founder and his mentor -- who gave him jobs as a stage manager, sound technician, lighting technician, scene painter, prop maker and actor and who was the first person to encourage him to write -- that Ayckbourn feels he does his best work.

“I’ve got more and more convinced the older I’ve got that my remaining future is in company theater,” says Ayckbourn, who mentions his senior citizenry more than seems necessary for someone with his palpable energy and seeming good health, a slightly bum leg notwithstanding. Knighted in Britain in 1997, Sir Alan has been translated into 35 languages and twice nominated for a Tony (seven of his plays have been performed on Broadway, as was a flopped musical collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber, “By Jeeves,” that he refers to as “this foolish musical we opened next door to ‘The Producers’ ”). “I’ve done all that West End stars-plus-three business, and I don’t enjoy it anymore. I’m gonna concentrate my remaining years in just the company and trying to widen its range so it reaches more people.”

Unlike his contemporaries Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, Ayckbourn has never worked in TV or film (though his work has been adapted for the screen in English and French). All he has to do is look at the proportion of theater coverage in the newspapers to realize he’s working in an increasingly marginalized medium, he says. “But where I think theater is continuing to score is when you have a community with their own theater that is a social center used for many purposes. It seems to me, without being too grand about it, to be one of the few things that replaces the church -- it’s where people go to discuss the nature of humanity, really.”

A few days later at the 59E59 Theaters complex, Ayckbourn is teaching an afternoon of master classes -- one in which he coaches volunteer actors through scenes of one of his plays, another in which he discusses playwriting and signs copies of his book “The Crafty Art of Playmaking.” During the acting workshop, he watches and listens intently as actors read, their booming American voices sometimes drowning the subtle English characterizations. He directs them afterward by chatting about the characters, not the performances.

“You can swamp an actor with notes and details about a performance,” he had said in the hotel. “If you say, ‘I think this man’s more jealous than you’re making him’ -- if you can give those sorts of notes, it can make all the difference.”

Ayckbourn believes that economy is a theatrical virtue for direction, lighting design and “writing dialogue that leaves space. Some plays are so dense, there’s no room to act!” Writing plays, he says, means “putting away all the English grammar you learned at school” and punctuating text with dashes and full stops and ellipses, like musical notations in a score.

During the playwriting lecture, he describes the challenges of planting information in dialogue that allows the audience to follow the story while keeping it moving and how to write for characters knowing that people, “especially we English, never really say what we mean.”

An eclectic cast of muses

People often ask where he gets his ideas, he tells the group. “I always feel like telling them, ‘I don’t know, but if I did know, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.’ ” As they laugh, he lowers his glimmering eyes in a gesture he repeats when he says something witty, which is often: one arm folded over his Santa belly, a smile hovering at the corners of his mouth. Then he adds that sometimes he simply forgets where he gets his ideas -- until an acquaintance approaches him after the show to scold, “I thought that was a private conversation!”

Back in the hotel room, talking about his characters as if they were possessed of beating hearts, he lets a few of his muses slip: A guy he knew years ago who lived to please his father. The waiter who served him breakfast. A fighting couple at the next table in a restaurant. A girl his son met on Hampstead Heath. His younger self.

A scene in “Private Fears” in which a woman tells a man she no longer loves him was prompted by a love letter he found in an old wallet. “It was this passionate letter from a girlfriend I’d almost forgotten,” he says. “I thought, ‘I can’t remember feeling like that.’ The feelings had gone, and I was horrified.”

Like many of his plays, “Private Fears” explores discrepancies between people’s inner lives and how they present themselves to the world. With its uncharacteristically short scenes and interlocking characters, each fumbling for love and connection, Ayckbourn calls “Private Fears” “filmic -- it’s a little chamber piece, really. I love the idea that we are all walk-on parts, using a theatrical term, in other people’s lives. I wanted this idea, without being too preachy about it, that we’re all responsible for each other.”

Ayckbourn thinks for a long time before sitting down in front of the computer, keeping his now three-week writing period at bay. “If you don’t have an ending, don’t begin!” he tells the aspiring playwrights. “Because you will soon run out of steam.”

As for running out of steam himself, Ayckbourn says he will retire when he runs out of ideas. In the last decade, the father and grandfather has branched out into writing children’s plays, including the award-winning “Mr. A’s Amazing Maze Plays” and “Invisible Friends.”

“Kids give you about two seconds before they say ‘Boring’ and turn to talk to their friends,” he says. “But if you engage them, they believe anything!”

Ayckbourn’s wife, Heather, a gregarious, soft-spoken former actress who is constantly at his side, has urged him to slow down, and he consented by ceasing to direct other people’s work last year. In Scarborough recently, before the premiere of his latest play, “Improbable Fiction,” someone commented that he seemed rather tense.

“I said, ‘I’m frightened,’ ” Ayckbourn recalls. “And they said, ‘You can’t be frightened -- it’s your 69th play, for God’s sake!’ But yeah, I’m frightened. Because, hopefully, I’m going somewhere I haven’t been before.”