To Err Is His Specialty

NEW YORK —  On a recent afternoon, writer Kenneth Lonergan, Kenny to his friends, rushes into a Greenwich Village cafe near his apartment, apologetic for being late, wearing the rumpled sleeplessness of what he has recently become: a new dad. Nellie Sharp Lonergan is his weeks-old baby daughter with actress-wife J. Smith-Cameron.

Told that the moniker sounds like a stage name, the 39-year-old Lonergan replies, “Yeah, for vaudeville. The instinct is to say, I hope she doesn’t go into show business, but I like show business. But if she does, I’ll know that I will have done something wrong because all the actresses I know had either neglectful or dead fathers.”

For someone who admittedly hates change and who has cultivated something of the image of the crabby writer in interviews (“And the Whiner Is ...” was the headline of a New York magazine profile last year), Lonergan appears to have taken the seismic shift with aplomb, even cheer.

“The expectation was horrible, but the reality is wonderful,” he says of his new role as a parent, with an element of surprise in his voice. “The full impact has not yet come down on us, but I’m very happy--which isn’t always the way I feel.”

Indeed Lonergan seems to share the skittish discontent--the suspicion that life could very well be about to play a dirty trick on you--of his most memorable characters. Those include the erratic Reagan-era stoners in “This Is Our Youth,” which first catapulted him into the first ranks of New York playwrights six years ago. Or like Samantha and Terry, the tragedy-stricken siblings of “You Can Count on Me,” the acclaimed independent film he directed and appeared in two year ago that earned him an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. (His two previous films, “Analyze This,” which was a box-office smash, and “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle,” which was a turkey, have their own species of blighted characters. But Lonergan doesn’t lay claim to either of those films because his original vision was diluted in the development process by subsequent writers.)

Lonergan’s deft explorations into the psychological complexities and moral quandaries of people struggling--and often failing--to do the right thing extend to two of his recent plays that are being produced on the West Coast. “Lobby Hero,” about a hapless security guard who finds himself implicated in the possible cover-up of a murder, is at South Coast Repertory through March 24. “The Waverly Gallery,” a harrowing portrait of an elderly woman’s descent into senility and its corrosive effect on her well-meaning family, opens in June at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Lonergan is drawn to writing about these types of characters because this is what he sees around him. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t self-destruct constantly,” he says, zestfully digging into a very late lunch of provolone and prosciutto. Between bites, he stops to qualify what strikes him as a bit exaggerated. “If you’re existing at a certain level of economic comfort, if you’re not worried about starving, or being blown up, or trying to pay the rent or feed your 10 children that you can’t afford, then your problems become self-generated or at least are helped along....”

Pointing to the character Terry in “You Can Count on Me,” he adds, “You get insulted when no one’s insulting you or you’re depressive or just go down the list. Of the people I know well, I don’t know anyone who does not have some inhibiting characteristics of some kind that get in their way more often than external forces do. There are people who get hit by disease or bad luck and hardship or crime, but I know more about the other kinds of trouble.”

The trouble that invades “Lobby Hero,” springs from the misguided attempts of all of the characters--an immature security guard, his besieged and fault-finding supervisor, and the two cops on the beat, a female rookie and a slick professional--to make sense of the murky challenges they can’t hope to sort out. Jeff, the security guard who sleeps on the job and must suddenly decide whether to back an alibi for the ne’er-do-well brother of his boss, is the “hero” of the title. But the word--which has been so much a part of the popular discourse these days--is one Lonergan uses without sneer or irony.

“Kenny is the master of the small moment, but he doesn’t belittle or condescend to the misfits and outsiders he writes about,” says Mark Brokaw, who directed the New York productions of “This is Our Youth” and “Lobby Hero,” which premiered last March at New York’s Playwrights Horizons. “He captures their full range in a magnanimous and truthful way, especially the humor.”

In “Lobby Hero,” some of that humor stems from Jeff’s naivete, alienating others even as he tries to ingratiate himself. “Isn’t it stupid that you’re the captain when there are no other ranks?” he asks his boss.

“I think one of the things that this story is about is that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to be a hero for your whole life,” the writer says. “I don’t think there’s anything ambiguous about a fireman running into a burning building to save people. That’s pretty straightforward. But it’s usually not as simple as it may appear. For most of us, it’s not as clear as all that. Often, whatever you do that seems like the right thing to do in one way is quite likely going to do somebody else some harm in a way that you can’t control.”

Indeed, the unforeseen consequences of such decisions, defiant as they are of such black-and-white moral resolution, is a major thrust of one of his most recent projects: the film adaptation of T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King,” a quartet of works completed between 1938 and 1958, with a fifth published posthumously in 1977. The tale of Arthurian legend may at first seem an unlikely choice for someone who has come to the fore as a chronicler of contemporary malaise. But Lonergan says the book has been a favorite since he was a child in Manhattan, the son of a doctor and psychoanalyst who divorced when he was 5. At 18, before he attended New York University’s playwriting program, Lonergan turned the first chapter of the work into a movie scene as an exercise.

“It’s a delightful but very sad book,” he says of the novel that became the basis for the stage and film musical “Camelot.” “It starts out as a children’s story, beginning with Arthur as a young boy, and the style of the book itself matures as the character grows older. It’s just a great, massive medieval tapestry of a tragedy and all the stuff of armor and jousting and relationship are just very rich material for a movie.”

Although White’s take on the legend was to compare the events of Arthur and his court to the mid-20th century England in which he was writing--suggesting that the knights were the cricket stars of their day and that donning a suit of armor was similar to getting into a diving suit--Lonergan says he has no desire to bring a contemporary sensibility to his adaptation, which he is writing for producer Mark Gordon and Warner Bros. He wants his screenplay to be a faithful adaptation of “Once and Future King”--indeed that is his raison d’etre for taking on a story that has already reached the screen in many other guises.

But Lonergan sees its resonance today in other, more human terms.

“White is also trying to say that this was the first attempt to create a civilization,” he says, “and that it fails because people are imperfect and we haven’t yet managed to create a civilization. Like Jeff [in ‘Lobby Hero’], the characters in the King Arthur story are trying very hard to do what is right, to be better people. And in being active in that, with all their faults and desires, they bring wrack and ruin down around them.”

Lonergan’s defiance of easy resolution in his work would seem to make him something of an anomaly to the major studios. But not only is he adapting “Once and Future King,” but the writer has taken on “Time and Again,” Jack Finney’s 1970 novel about a young illustrator who time-travels to 1882 New York in a scientific experiment. Lonergan says he was so taken by the credibility and historical detail in the book that over the years he would ask his agent (whoever that happened to be at the time) to inquire of the film rights holder, Robert Redford, if he could write the screenplay. Finally, after the success of “You Can Count on Me,” Lonergan got the job.

“The plot is a bit rickety and the characterizations aren’t that great,” he says of the novel, “but that doesn’t matter because Finney captures so vividly the sheer excitement and fascination of time-traveling. The guy is so excited about it that he, literally, almost faints.”

Lonergan has also been spending time in the 19th century for Martin Scorsese, doing brush-up work on the filmmaker’s “Gangs of New York,” which is set in the 1860s. The film is due for release this summer. Scorsese has been something of a mentor, showing early interest in “Analyze This” and commissioning a screenplay, as yet unproduced, about an amateur archeologist. “I love the period and the material and working with him,” Lonergan says of “Gangs” and its director. “But it wasn’t a case of pursuing an artistic vision of my own.” What fascinates him, he adds, are “these full-blown personalities moving through a historic milieu that has not been seen before in any American movie. The politics of the time affect what they do, and yet they really don’t notice the world around them. It’s a hard thing to balance, and Scorsese is wonderful at it.”

For Lonergan, his first stop on a time machine would be 1770s Europe--”You could go to Mozart and Haydn concerts, travel to America and meet George Washington and Thomas Jefferson”--but for now he’s content to be exactly where he is: New York in 2002, husband and father and playwright and screenwriter who is trying to avoid the pitfalls and blandishments of success to keep pursuing his iconoclastic visions.

Believing in his press--which he admits he enjoys reading--is likely only to make him destructively self-conscious. “I’ve always had the grandiose fantasy that if I ever were successful, it would ruin the quality of my work,” he says with a characteristic half-smile. “I do think the more you struggle, the more you tend to be doing your own thing. But if someone writes something nice, then you’re at your typewriter, thinking, ‘Oh yes, this is so characteristic of my understanding of the mentality of outsiders,’ and that’s not good. What you’re writing is likely to be quite bad in fact.”

The pabulum that is often doled out to the public, he says, is not only condescending but terribly misguided. “It’s like they do a story about your situation and then they lie about it; they put this phony-baloney salve over it,” he says with some passion. “And the truth is, it doesn’t feel so good. I don’t like movies that are all bleak and bad--we know life is tragic--but there are billions of people who have experiences that end horribly, and they’re stuck trying to figure out what it all means and how they’re going to get on with it. And one of the ways they get on with it is the fact that they like each other a lot.”

In fact, that is the story of perhaps Lonergan’s toughest play, “The Waverly Gallery,” in which a former lawyer-turned-art dealer, a woman with a terrific zest for life, falls victim to the confusion and horrors of Alzheimer’s. Ben Brantley of the New York Times called the drama, which opened in 2000 at the Promenade and turned out to be the swan song for the late Eileen Heckart, “a stirring and soulful comic drama ... painful and hilarious.” It was based on the experiences of Lonergan’s grandmother. At one point, the woman’s grandson turns to his mother and tells her suddenly, out of the blue, “Mom, I love you” as a hedge against the uncertain future.

“I think that is the only redemptive thing to be had out of that experience, and I think that’s a lot,” Lonergan explains. “If there’s anything good to be had from that problem, mental decay and death, it is the fact that people try so hard to help the person going through it and how hard people struggle to stay alive. While it’s tragically upsetting because they don’t get to, it does tell you something good about being alive. It has great value and it’s admirable, all those people in hospital rooms all over the world holding each other trying to get through the crappy hands they’ve been dealt. What else do we have?”

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“Lobby Hero,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends March 24. $19-$52. (714) 708-5555.

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Patrick Pacheco is a regular contributor to Calendar.