Complex With a Complex : His own apartment-house experience inspired Mark Troy’s new comedy about neighbors met with crisis.

NORTH HOLLYWOOD â€”  Apartment living is a given in modern urban life. Another given is that apartment dwellers rarely get to know their neighbors. That can be a mistake, or a boon, according to playwright Mark M. Troy.

Troy’s serious madcap comedy “Belladonnas of the Court� opens tonight at American Renegade Theatre, and Troy hopes the adventures of his courtyard tenants will send audiences home thinking about getting to know the long-haired guy downstairs who plays his music too loud, or the large girl upstairs who does her exercises on a trampoline.

When Troy moved to Los Angeles from New York a few years ago, he lived in a courtyard in the Miracle Mile. The world he existed in was the Wilshire-La Brea neighborhood. Brown’s Bakery was just down the block. Tommy Lasorda ate there and the bagels were fresh. Troy’s neighbors were shadows that passed silently through the smog. He sat at his computer writing plays that have been done on both coasts, and screenplays for Lorimar, Columbia and Castle Rock Entertainment.

Then his peaceful play-making was interrupted by the advance of progress, other courtyards in the neighborhood being torn down and replaced with, as he says, “these huge boxes with 45 apartments as big as this table at $1,200 a month, with a sauna on the roof the size of my shoe.�

The neighbors started coming to him and screaming about stopping the destruction, keeping the integrity of Los Angeles and saving Brown’s Bakery from the wrecking ball.

“I realized,� Troy says, “that I didn’t want to talk to my neighbors. I really didn’t want to get involved. The more people talk, and the more they get involved, the more trouble they get into. I like to stick to myself. I just live my life. It wasn’t going to change anything anyway.�

Maybe not in real life, but the brouhaha set him to thinking about courtyard living, and what would happen if the court tenants got together and made a united front against taking down the buildings.

“The more they talked to each other,� Troy explains, “the more they started telling each other about their lives. The more interaction took place, the bigger the headache they got. Everyone has secrets.� Those secrets are at the core of Troy’s comedy. He says the moral of the play is that there’s always tomorrow, always another place to move.

“It’s a sort of warped world I’ve created for this courtyard,� the playwright says. “It’s like people who have one political cause or another, and you see them on TV, and you wonder what were they doing before they had this political movement going. That’s what happened in our neighborhood. This became their life. I don’t know what they did to make money, but their life was to save Brown’s Bakery.�

To Troy’s characters, and his neighbors, the courtyard was their whole life. The humor comes out of the trauma of what happens when that world disappears.

“It’s a scary thing,� Troy says. “The other thing is the interpersonal relationships between these people. We had a couple of relationships that never would have happened if these people had just shut up and moved.�

The star of the play, of course, is the courtyard itself. The stories of the tenants intertwine, as Troy says, like the plays in a soccer game, “when someone kicks the ball off to the next story line. The old woman may kick the ball to her husband, but he’ll take it in a whole different direction. It’s a follow-the-bouncing-ball type thing.�

The show’s producer, Clancy Halsey, says that is one of the reasons he decided to handle the play. “The person who drives the action in this play continually changes. It’s like a tag-team wrestling match. That’s one of the challenges. It’s an ensemble piece, but each person takes center stage and keeps the play going.�

Troy has been working on the play for almost a year and a half with his director, Larry Gilman. He says there was a sense of outlandishness, zaniness, to the script.

Gilman admits his affection for the outlandish. He says, “Real people are really outrageous. These people are outrageous, and now they’re coming slam-dunk against each other from different worlds. They know they’re talking English, but somehow it doesn’t make sense. It starts them spinning in a totally different way. That’s what happens in life if people let it. Now they’re up to an event and they have to let it happen.�

And what did happen?

With an ironic laugh, Troy recalls the final result of the turmoil in the Miracle Mile. “Brown’s Bakery moved just a block up. Now it had chairs and tables, and it was a lot cleaner. Tommy Lasorda didn’t go there anymore, but the bagels were just as fresh a block away.�

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Belladonnas of the Court.�

Location: American Renegade Theatre, 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. Thursday benefit performances are 8 p.m. May 11, 18, 25, June 1, 8. Ends June 11.

Price: $12 to $15; benefits $20.

Call: (818) 763-4430.