The therapist is in ... production

Therapist + patient = drama.

The equation has clicked since Sophocles, when the blind seer, Tiresias, correctly diagnosed literature’s first Oedipus complex. It worked in “Spellbound” and “The Sixth Sense,” “Equus” and “Ordinary People” -- and right up through “The Sopranos.” But don’t get Bob Clyman started on that.

For more than 20 years, Clyman has juggled careers as a playwright and a clinical psychologist. Now, for the first time, the therapeutic encounter is the focus of one of his plays as “Tranced” has its world premiere at the Laguna Playhouse.

The situation: A graduate student from Africa seeks out a famed hypnotherapist to treat her debilitating anxiety. Putting her under, he learns of a human rights atrocity in her impoverished homeland -- which its technocratic leader, trying to speed his nation’s modernization, may be covering up. Along with the therapist, a newspaper reporter and a diplomat must decide how to deal with this apparent bombshell.

Clyman, who lives in Essex County, N.J., says his stage work is “the most elective” of his three main pursuits: the two-headed career, in which psychology is far the better-paying, and being a husband and father (he and his wife, Judy, also a psychologist, have twin sons who are 25).

“There’s an assumption people can easily have: ‘How serious a playwright can you be?’ ” Clyman said in an interview. “I remember getting a crack in one early review, ‘You’d expect a psychologist to know more about people than Clyman.’ ”

Still, to charges of dilettantism he can offer a track record of productions and respectful reviews. And even the most monomaniacal playwright might be impressed by the action this polymath has been getting lately.

“The Secret Order,” a drama about cancer researchers slogging through ethical dilemmas, had a well-received East Coast revival late last year in Boston and New York, incorporating rewrites Clyman did after the show’s West Coast premiere 4 1/2 years ago at the Laguna Playhouse. Now the finished version is bouncing back to Southern California, in a Jan. 16-20 staged reading at the Skirball Cultural Center, for later radio broadcast on LA Theatre Works’ nationally syndicated show, “The Play’s the Thing.” Richard Schiff (“The West Wing”) plays the institute’s director, and Ed Asner is his nemesis, a scientist with an instinct for organizational turf war -- a role Clyman beefed up in rewrites.

“Tranced,” meanwhile, will have a second staging later this month at San Jose Repertory Theatre, with a different director and cast. Clyman has penciled in face time to help rehearse both productions of his new play, but he will have to skip “The Secret Order” at the Skirball because of his other career.

Clyman got the idea for “Tranced” from a friend’s use of hypnotherapy with patients from Latin America who had been victims of political torture. Other elements of the story grew out of interviews he saw on “Charlie Rose” with authors who discussed dam-building in India and the history of U.S. foreign policy responses to genocide.

As he sits side-by-side with director Jessica Kubzansky at the head of a long table, facing the four actors who’ll do the show in Laguna, Clyman, small and stubble-chinned, is in a doubly powerful position. The actors’ job is to solve riddles of personality and vividly perform the answers. And here, sometimes grinning as they say their lines, is the Answer Man himself -- not just as the author, but as a credentialed psychological authority.

Erica Tazel, who plays the grad student, and Thomas Fiscella, as the hypnotherapist, are working on an exchange in which she slyly insults his looks.

“We could cheat and ask the actual psychologist we have here in the room,” Kubzansky says. “So, Bob, would people get all hissy with you?”

“With lesser psychologists, maybe,” Clyman jokes, before giving a real hint: “In a case like this, [the insult] is so clearly defensive on her part, you wouldn’t struggle with it. You’d be mildly amused.”

But the director wants her cast to work through other issues on their own. She vetoes Tazel’s request for an instant psychological consult on how people act when they’re in a trance. “We’re looking for discoveries in the moment, and I don’t think it’s time for you to go there,” Kubzansky rules.

If anything, Clyman says later, being a psychologist inclines him not to give too many answers, instead allowing actors leeway to explore their characters’ possibilities. As a therapist, “I’m used to letting people express themselves, and intervening when it’s the right time.”

Clyman grew up in and around New York City. He started writing plays as a senior at Brown University, and kept at it while working as an assistant at Napa State Hospital in Northern California. In 1973, his first full-length play was picked by the Office for Advanced Drama Research, a Minneapolis play-development program that shepherded new scripts toward productions in regional theaters. But the timing was wrong, and Clyman let the opportunity slide because it would have meant delaying the start of his graduate studies at American University in Washington, D.C. He didn’t resume writing until the mid-1980s, when he had his own practice outside Boston. There, he began the regimen he still follows, working on plays in his office during gaps in his appointment schedule.

Juggling careers

In 1988, Clyman took his first step toward national visibility: An early version of the script that would become “The Secret Order” was chosen for a reading at that year’s National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. By the early 1990s he had moved his practice to northern New Jersey, to be more plugged-in with the New York City theater scene.

The juggling act could grow nerve-wracking. Once, in the middle of workshopping a play at the Denver Center Theatre Company, he was summoned to take a call from a suicidal patient. “I thought, ‘This isn’t working for the play I’m trying to help, or the patient I’m trying to keep alive.’ ” The answer, eventually, was to focus his psychology practice on an area with fewer sudden crises and more flexible hours. So while he still does some individual therapy, Clyman mainly serves as a court-appointed expert who evaluates splintered families in divorce cases and makes recommendations to Family Court judges concerning child custody.

Only once, he says, has he grabbed a plot point from his practice -- in “The Council of 30,” when a divorcing mother accuses her husband of molesting their child.

It was a worrisome sight when Clyman found the woman’s real-life inspiration -- who had gotten the worst of it in his custody recommendation -- taking notes at the show. Fearing he might be in for legal trouble, he approached her at intermission.

“I said, ‘How are you doing with this?’ She said something to the effect of ‘You listen better than you seemed to.’ So in other words, the play struck her as a more sensitive understanding of people than my report had been. I thought, ‘OK, that’s fair enough.’ ”

Tony Soprano’s therapist doesn’t get off so easily. Clyman, whose family has had many a meal at the North Jersey eatery where the crime boss and his closest kin were gathered when the screen went black in the HBO series’ last moment, frowns on the fictional Dr. Jennifer Melfi. “She’s an embarrassment to the field. She’s out of control, and her judgments seem to be bad. I could go on for hours; I feel maligned by association to her.”

For Clyman, there’s not much dramatic appeal in the extremes of mental illness and personality disorder that psychologists sometimes encounter -- and that are frequent fodder for other writers.

“I like to see people who are really good at what they do and fundamentally intact, psychologically, but challenged by events that would overmatch just about anybody,” he says. “That, to me, is more interesting than seeing frail people fail as only they could. Life’s pretty difficult, even for the best of us. People who are pretty smart can all be trying to do the right thing, and still end up in a mess.”

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mike.boehm@latimes.com

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‘Tranced’

Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; 2 and 7 p.m. Jan. 27

Ends: Feb. 3

Price: $30 to $65

Contact: (949) 497-2787