What’s a Family Without History?

Playwright Richard Greenberg was strolling near South Coast Repertory, his artistic home away from home, when a voice stopped him from behind.

“Do you really hate us, Mr. Greenberg?”

The amiable, round, gentle-natured Manhattanite turned to face a friendly but slightly peeved couple from Orange County. He didn’t need to ask what they meant.

It was June 1999, and Greenberg’s “Everett Beekin” had just been given a public reading as a work-in-progress at South Coast Rep, the Costa Mesa theater that has now, with the impending premiere production of “Beekin,” birthed five of his plays since 1991.

At the reading, Orange County playgoers discovered that Greenberg had trained his characteristic satiric wit close to home, starting with a scathing monologue set on the footbridge that connects the county’s artistic hub--South Coast Repertory and the Orange County Performing Arts Center--to its most sumptuous shopping mall, South Coast Plaza.

“The life here is good and free and new, quite new,” intones one of Greenberg’s characters, a tour guide with a sardonic streak that the chamber of commerce types who have enlisted her to indoctrinate visitors probably would not appreciate. “Autochthonous tribes are, I’m afraid, limited to fields of lima beans, and if you wish to meet indigenous people you’d be well-advised to loiter on the high school playgrounds. Don’t do that, by the way. . . . Eat our food, romp on our beaches, eschew irony and have a nice day.”

The play, which opens Sept. 8 on the theater’s main stage after a week of previews, does not eschew irony. It is a complex work with a scope that is cross-generational, cross-continental and inter-ethnic between Jews and WASPS. Though laugh lines abound, it leaves a profoundly sad echo as Greenberg makes us contemplate how a horror of death can drive families to obliterate chunks of their past, leaving their progeny adrift and hollow at the core.

The script reads as something of a companion to “Three Days of Rain,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998. Like “Rain,” which premiered at South Coast Rep in 1997, “Beekin” focuses on the irretrievable gaps in a family’s story. Also like “Rain,” it features one act in which we see forebears, and another about their descendants who live with the void caused by what’s been forgotten or kept secret.

If Greenberg wanted to pitch “Everett Beekin” to Hollywood, the sell could go something like this: “First you see this ethnic Lower East Side Jewish family in 1948, kind of Philip Roth stuff where somebody is munching brisket and the table talk is all daggers tipped with poisonous wit. Jump ahead 50 years and segue to the last part of “Annie Hall,” where an emissary from back East gets to crack sourpuss jokes at how phony and superficial all these Southern California airheads are. Two of them--including Ev, the title character who gets jilted at the altar--are young, sexy Orange County beach kids who can’t muster the vocabulary to utter a complete thought. Laughs all the way.”

Is Greenberg concerned that his play might be perceived as mining comic turf already famously tapped by Roth (whom he adores) and Woody Allen? His answer is as adamant a “no” as can be conveyed in a mild, pleasant tone of voice.

“I can’t not use my material because others have gone there before. I’d have to invent a planet or something.”

Greenberg, who wears a white sport jacket to an interview in a conference room at South Coast Rep, says this while talking comfortably and freely for a newspaper article that on principle he will not read. The playwright was the subject of a small furor in the theater world in 1988-89 when his satire, “Eastern Standard,” touched several cultural hot buttons by interweaving AIDS, homelessness and the upwardly mobile surge of young urban professionals. The fuss netted him a profile in People magazine--and landed him in a funk of nervousness and depression that he labels “a self-diagnosed breakdown.” Ever since, his antidote has been to assiduously avoid reading anything written about him.

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Roth or no Roth, Greenberg, 42, claims a right of ownership in the world of his fathers. The characters in the first act of “Everett Beekin” speak in Yiddish-ized rhythms and inflections that are familiar from literature and screen but have been virtually missing until now from his own work. Greenberg typically has written characters--Jewish and WASP alike--who sound like the urbane, over-educated products of the sort of academic trifecta he hit with degrees from Princeton and the Yale Drama School sandwiched around a brief tenure as a doctoral candidate in literature at Harvard.

Greenberg says he had no problem making his old Royal electric typewriter clatter in a different, unmistakably ethnic, New York Jewish dialect.

“I’d heard it all my life,” the Long Island-raised playwright said. “It was in all the rooms I entered.”

There was a ghost in those rooms--that of an aunt barely spoken of who had died at an early age years before Greenberg was born. His mother told him about her, sketchily--he says he can only speculate about how she died. It was almost as though she had never existed.

The doomed aunt is reborn in “Everett Beekin” as Miri, a young woman who is wasting away while others in her household try to pretend that she has nothing worse than a summer cold. In Act II, not only Miri, but the contemporaries who survived her and erased her memory will be all but expunged from their descendants’ consciousness.

Despite his satire, Greenberg says he has affection for the assimilated Jews of Act II who serve ham at a wedding reception, and for the play’s golden California youth who can barely communicate. (One of Ev’s longer speeches, in which he tries to express feelings of guilt, reads: “Oh. I dunno. You know. Whatever. Things . . . and stuff.”)

“There’s something sad and almost tragic in inarticulateness,” Greenberg says. “I don’t want [Ev] to be some TV idea of a surfer dude. He’s more complicated than that.”

Greenberg sees Ev and the smooth, sunny, undemanding world that produced him as the fulfillment of an American dream that may, in fact, be a candy-coated nightmare.

“Orange County, at least to an outsider, is a model of a kind of graciousness and ease and loveliness and youth and prosperity. If you look at everything America has tried to be or become, it seems this almost embodies it. It’s what parents hope for, what they work toward, sort of the whole project that grips us all. But whatever happens if we succeed? It would probably be unbearable.”

For the record, Greenberg does not find Orange County and its inhabitants air-headed, superficial or unbearable. Along with David Mamet and Craig Lucas, he is the most-produced American playwright in South Coast Repertory’s 36-year history. He has come to Costa Mesa every year for the past decade, staying about a month each time, and regards his trips as marvelous working vacations. He started writing “Everett Beekin” in his hotel room while shepherding the premiere of “Three Days of Rain.”

“There’s a slight tendency I have to satirize everything,” Greenberg says of the tour guide scene and his play’s other barbs about Southern California. But the reading of “Everett Beekin” last year “went over great,” he said. Local theatergoers enjoyed the jokes and showed they could laugh at themselves--or at least at some of their neighbors.

Greenberg certainly doesn’t come across as an Allen-esque, angst-ridden New Yorker who delights in beclouding California’s fabled horizons. His conversation has a nervous, breathy energy, but it is pleasant and gracious, delivered softly with a smile. No tortured artist, he speaks freely of the pleasure and contentment he finds in writing plays. Sure, he’d love buckets of money. But he can live with his present lot as a member of the literary working class--a widely produced, critically respected playwright with no film or television hits who has to keep writing to keep eating. He rents the studio apartment in Chelsea where he lives alone and prefers cooking for guests rather than going out to socialize.

Greenberg calls “Three Days of Rain” his “cash calf,” but the one play he says he wrote with money as a motive was “Hurrah at Last,” which reflexively turned into a piece about a struggling novelist obsessed with making money.

“I’m always thinking about writing. Not in a creepy, obsessed way; it’s just that everything’s always turned into writing,” Greenberg says. “If that’s a sacrifice [of other pleasures, such as the social whirl he avoids] it’s a sacrifice of something that’s ordinary for something that’s extraordinary.”

Besides “Everett Beekin,” Greenberg recently premiered, at Vassar College, a play called “The Dazzle,” based on the almost beyond-belief true story of Homer and Langley Collyer, brothers who boarded themselves inside their New York City mansion, where they were found dead (no sign of suicide or foul play) with 136 tons of useless junk accumulated over the years.

Greenberg’s new passion, cultivated over the past year, is baseball--a sport he ignored as a boy even though his father and brothers were fans. He started watching a game on TV one day last summer during the Yankees’ pennant drive and got hooked. Even after the season ended, “the yearning for it was so severe I just filled it with videos, and I would buy several baseball books a week and read them.”

Naturally, Greenberg already has written a draft of his first baseball play. Perhaps he has hit on the one strain in American life in which the past is cherished and lovingly preserved whole, where the full story is known and there are no baffling, haunting gaps as to who our forebears were and what they handed down.

“Baseball seems so endless, there are so many statistics, and so much history. I felt, ‘This could last me forever.’ Every game tells a different story that relates to all the games that went before.”

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“EVERETT BEEKIN,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Dates: Previews, Friday to Sept. 7. Opens Sept. 8.

Tuesdays through Sundays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturday and Sundays at 2 p.m. Ends: Oct. 8. Prices: $18-$49. Phone: (714) 708-5555.