An idea that just felt like home

Catherine BUTTERFIELD admits she was an unreliable teenager. “It was a big source of anguish for my mother and father that I was such a flake. I remember my father calling me a flake rather frequently.”

But “somewhere along the line,” the screenwriter-playwright says, “I acquired a work ethic.”

And that, as much as anything, propelled the creation of “Brownstone,” which just opened at the Laguna Playhouse, with Butterfield directing. After years as a stage actress, she re-launched herself as a playwright in 1992 with the off-Broadway success of “Joined at the Head.” About two years ago, she accepted a commission from the Playhouse, which was then staging her post-Sept. 11 comedy, “The Sleeper.”

At the time, Butterfield already was working hard enough, it would seem, to answer any parental put-downs still buzzing in her subconscious. In addition to raising a daughter, now 13, with her entertainment-agent husband, Larry Corsa, she was writing episodes for the CBS television series “Ghost Whisperer.” She also had landed an assignment from issues-oriented Participant Media, producers of “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Fast Food Nation” and “Syriana,” to research and write a film about Susie Scott Krabacher, Playboy’s Miss May of 1983, who now runs a charity in the slums of Haiti.

It’s not unusual for theater companies to be lenient about deadlines for plays they’ve commissioned; sometimes they wait for years. But Butterfield wasn’t about to flake out. With time ticking toward the play’s December 2006 due date, and no idea or inspiration having grabbed her, she switched off her bedroom light in Santa Monica one night. When she awoke, there it was: the road map to “Brownstone,” a drama whose structure is as distinctive as the New York City town house architecture that gives the play its setting and name.

The playhouse’s lone, economically driven stipulation was that Butterfield submit a script that could be performed on one set. After she had racked her brain for months over how to make inventive things happen in one place, her slumbers yielded the following, which she quickly whipped into a finished draft:

Setting: the second floor of a brownstone on Manhattan’s West Side.

Time: 1937-39, 1978-79 and 2000-01, with the action cutting freely back and forth.

Characters: a pair of residents in each period, until the final scene when one more person turns up. The late-’70s and 21st century inhabitants know almost nothing about their precursors. But in the end, using plot maneuvers one might expect from such benders of theatrical time and space as Tom Stoppard and Alan Ayckbourn, Butterfield makes a bid to bring the stories together.

She isn’t claiming that her play’s triple-tiered shape is a theatrical innovation, and even speculates that performing in a couple of Ayckbourn plays years ago may have planted an unremembered seed. Beyond her experiences visiting with friends who lived in brownstones, or working in some fancy ones in her long-ago day job as a caterer’s helper, she can’t pinpoint an inspiration. “I woke up and had it. I just said, ‘This may be fun.’ ”

Echoing the eras

Part of the fun was making characters in different times speak differently. Butterfield wanted her charming, seemingly mismatched 1930s couple to volley with the wit and flair of their era’s film icons. And through them and the 21st century pair, she marks the coarsening of the language of love, “from ‘Darling, you’re shivering’ to ‘Let’s have floor sex.’ ”

The economic stakes in the characters’ lives are more apparent than in her past plays -- “money is a topic very much on people’s minds right now” -- and she brought in historical events to lend scope and ballast to the show’s three intimate stories. “That’s new ground for me,” Butterfield says. “When I first started writing, I was interested in just telling a fun story. As I’ve gone on, I’ve wanted to take on bigger issues.”

Somewhere, Richard Butterfield, who died about 30 years ago, must be smiling: Clearly, Butterfield’s father raised no flake. In fact, his presence hovers over “Brownstone,” although never in it. “Joined at the Head” also broached father-daughter issues, but they remained mostly beneath the surface in an autobiographical play based on Butterfield’s friendship with her old high school flame and his cancer-stricken wife. She acted the role of the terminally ill woman, rather than her alter ego, and was playing the part in New York on the day her friend died.

Her father, Butterfield says, was a gregarious, larger-than-life figure who acted in community theater and, with a wife and five kids to support, regularly used his gambling skills to supplement their income. He managed TV stations for CBS, transplanting the family from Catherine’s birthplace, New York City, to Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Oregon. He was 54 when he died of a heart attack while playing golf. Catherine, the oldest child, was 24.

She says she owes him a father-daughter play: “I’ve tried to capture the dynamic and have failed every time.” It might show her, or a stage facsimile, bridling under her father’s high expectations for his tall, pretty but shy girl. “He was always pushing me out there: ‘You should be running for class president, you should be auditioning for this play.’ He wanted to decide what college I went to. He was kind of a controlling guy, but I knew he loved me a lot.”

Their biggest row came when Butterfield, having graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was getting nowhere trying to make it on the New York stage. Her dad summoned her to Portland to try out for a newscasting position at his TV station. She deliberately blew the audition; he offered the job anyway. She wanted to be an actress, not an anchorwoman, so she went back to New York. “It caused a rift,” she says, “and I felt the weight of his disappointment.”

The ending writes itself: Butterfield landed a couple of plum roles at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, her father saw the shows and was “thrilled, thrilled, thrilled.” He and his wife, Virginia, who now lives in Santa Barbara, had been planning a trip to Seattle to catch Catherine playing Salvation Army officer Sarah Brown in “Guys and Dolls” when he died. Butterfield says her performance had special meaning because the show mirrored her folks’ own courtship, in which a strait-laced girl (who would turn herself from a homemaker into a writer-editor after her husband’s death) fell for a gambling man.

She has an important wager on the table now, but it involves television rather than the theater. Her proposed series “Canyon Girls,” about four L.A. sisters who span the economic spectrum from riches to medical-expense-induced poverty, is being considered for a slot on the Lifetime network. Writing for the theater, including that father-and-daughter play, probably would have to wait. Plays are her first love, she says, “but I’ve got a kid I want to put through school.”

In “Brownstone,” Butterfield says, the presence of four fathers who are spoken of by their daughters, but never seen or heard, reflects the unscratched creative itch concerning her own dad. The 1937 character is determined to defy her rich, controlling father. But an aspiring actress in 1978, modeled on a golden-girl roommate from Butterfield’s days at SMU, acquiesces to paternal pressure and pays a price.

As the late-1970s scenes unfolded in a rehearsal room between Dorothea Harahan as the troubled rich girl, Deena, and Kim Shively as Maureen, the playwright’s more grounded alter ego, Butterfield took a bent-over, hands-on-knees stance and gazed at the action, looking like a pony-tailed football coach awaiting the snap of a game-deciding play.

Later, her eyes wet from witnessing what was more or less a replay from her past, she had no trouble keeping the vow, kindled while performing in more than 50 plays, that as a director she would try only to build her actors’ confidence, and never tear them down.

“That was beautiful, guys. I cannot watch that scene without, like . . . .” With no words to add, the playwright-director-screenwriter-actress-mother-wife-daughter shook her head and let out a sigh.

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mike.boehm@latimes.com

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‘Brownstone’

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

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Call for exceptions.

Ends: April 27

Price: $30 to $65

Contact: (949) 497-2787