It Doesn’t Hurt to Laugh

What’s funny about infertility? You could build a new Wailing Wall for couples who’ve exhausted their savings pursuing the latest in reproductive technology. Buckets of tears flow at support groups for frustrated aspiring parents.

For Lisa Loomer, even the most painful journey is better with a sense of humor. So she’s written a play that mixes satire with sadness, wit with wisdom. “Expecting Isabel,” which opens Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum, is the latest in this prolific playwright-screenwriter’s ongoing exploration of the plight of her generation.

Consider this: “I’ve never had a favorite sport because I don’t have . . . pep,” Miranda, “Isabel’s” central character, says at one point. “But I always liked sex because, for one thing, the other player is usually more complimentary than adversarial . . . and you get to lie down a lot . . . and there’s minimal risk. Except for pregnancy, of course.”

Loomer’s voice has been honed by years of writing not only for the stage, but also for several sitcoms, including “Hearts Afire,” a show produced in the early ‘90s by Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and set in Washington. More recently, Loomer has focused on film work, with credits that include “Girl, Interrupted,” for which she wrote the first draft, and “The Falconer,” an upcoming project with Forest Whitaker for Fox.

As a playwright, Loomer is best known for “The Waiting Room,” her critically acclaimed cross-cultural tale about women and medicine seen at the Taper in 1994. Her current saga of baby boomers who want babies is told through the eyes of Miranda and Nick, a 40-ish couple who are complacently happy until they start “trying.” When they’re unsuccessful using natural means, they enter a world of medicine they never expected to encounter and at the same time become recipients of a lot of well-meant advice about some pretty private stuff. The experience, written in a mix of direct-address monologues and flashback dramatic scenes, portrays a test of their marriage as well as of each one’s sense of self-worth.

“Expecting Isabel,” whose characters also include a doctor, relatives of both Miranda and Nick and potential birth mothers, is a story about options for bringing a child into a family, whether through pregnancy or adoption. It’s also an investigation of what “family” means. By tapping into a culture in which challenge is the norm, Loomer explores spiritual and philosophical questions about procreation that otherwise could get left behind in the pleasures of sex, baby showers and setting up the crib.

*

Sitting at a table in the kitchen of her Pacific Palisades ranch-style house, Loomer is surrounded by evidence that a 2-year-old lives here, too. A coffee cup bearing a picture of the boy’s smiling face, a panoply of toys neatly stacked in every corner indicate that issues of parenting are more than just academic for Loomer and her composer husband, Joe Romano, who wrote the music for “Isabel.”

Loomer and Romano’s son was born in 1998, just after the play was completed, and the couple is clearly close to the same age as her characters, though Loomer won’t say exactly how close. But while the timing of her play might seem uncannily similar to the couple’s personal history, Loomer is quick to point out that Miranda’s story is not her own.

“People say, ‘Are you one of the characters in this play?’ I feel like I’m everyone in this play,” she says. “I so understand everybody’s position.”

Loomer explains that she never experienced the surgeries, injections or even many of the choices that Miranda encounters, yet all of the internal questioning was very real to her as she wrote the play.

“I think the initial impulse came because I was thinking about having children,” Loomer says. “At first I thought maybe I’ll do a show called ‘Why Bring a Child Into This Lousy World?’ and look at why we even do it. With overpopulation, kids getting shot in high school, all of those questions. It’s such a human and irrational impulse. And while you’re thinking about it, instead of just going on impulse, as I might have at a different time in my life, a lot of those questions were very real for me.”

Reluctant to talk about her own family out of concern both for their privacy and for the fact that the play might be misconstrued, Loomer reveals only after much conversation that her son was adopted. She also admits that her own happy experience in adopting influenced her writing of the play.

“The question that kept emerging for me as the most interesting question as I was writing the play was that with assisted reproductive technology, and with adoption, we suddenly have the illusion of choices about who we’re going to parent,” she says. “So, it comes down to: Who do you think you can love? It’s a good question for people who are in the process of becoming parents, because ultimately I agree with the character, Nick, who says it doesn’t matter whether the child comes from a test tube or the old-fashioned way of having a child, or whether you adopt. What makes you a parent is: Can you love?”

*

Once a stand-up comedian, Loomer doesn’t appear offhandedly funny in person. She’s friendly, but she carefully considers each word as she speaks. By contrast, her writing voice is filled with fast-paced repartee and humor that can be both raucous and cuttingly on the mark.

Given the poignancy of the topics she addresses, humor might not seem an obvious approach. “Girl, Interrupted” finds ways to laugh at teens in an asylum, and “The Falconer” promises humor in its treatment of a woman dying of cancer. The same can be said of her plays, which tackle breast cancer (in “The Waiting Room”) and now reproductive failure. Other plays about infertility and adoption, such as David Rudkin’s “Ashes,” Jane Anderson’s “The Baby Dance” and Murray Mednick’s “Freeze,” have been far more serious in tone.

Yet Loomer says attacking difficult subjects with a light touch comes naturally. “It’s just the way it comes out of me. Sometimes I don’t even know it’s going to be funny until the audience starts laughing. In this one, I didn’t worry about it too much, but in ‘The Waiting Room’ there were people who said to me, ‘Cancer is not funny, how dare you?’ And I certainly, God knows, never thought cancer was funny. I just feel that the human condition is sometimes painfully funny.”

She believes humor can help audiences face important issues, too.

“People say, ‘I went through this and thank God I can see your play and laugh at it.’ I also think that humor is a great way to get people to open up. When people start laughing, you have an opportunity to really talk to them about something.”

“Falconer” director Whitaker says Loomer’s knack for mixing comedy and tough subjects made her the right choice for the story about a woman whose discovery that she has cancer radically changes her life. “She’s dying, and you have to find a way of looking at the world that makes you smile, that makes you giggle. And that’s one of the things that Lisa brought to the script. That was a hard thing to crack, and she did it.”

*

Corey Madden, associate artistic director at the Taper, was among the first to champion “Isabel,” after hearing the first act at an early reading. Madden says the play owes a lot to avant-garde performance art. “It’s a stand-up, solo story that’s blown open to have a set of characters that are satiric. They’re seen through the point of view of the two people who experience the trauma. At the same time, it is truly a dramatic story with a great deal of traditional suspense: What will happen to this couple? Will they have a kid?”

“Isabel” director Doug Wager also sees more than just humor in Loomer’s approach. “Comedy is a weapon she uses to go after things that concern her that are social and political and moral. She uses humor critically,” he says. “Her craft as a writer serves a personal search, and the things that she’s drawn to write about are things that have a universal tap root. Even though her work tends to be very stylized and very surreal or hyper-real, she understands that great comedy comes from very deep places.”

Wager has shepherded the play since its first public reading as part of the Taper’s annual New Work Festival in 1998. Although the play was commissioned by the Taper, Wager staged its premiere at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., soon after the reading, before the Taper could find a slot for it on the main stage. At the Taper’s invitation, Wager is staging the show again here, and he is also working with Loomer to transform it into a screenplay.

“Isabel’s” complex structure has kept him engaged, Wager says. He calls it “Pirandellian,” after Luigi Pirandello, the early 20th century playwright who invented the genre of theater-within-theater. “It requires an incredible amount of discipline for the actors, because they want to be rooted in every moment, whether it’s a talk to the audience moment, or an emotional moment or a comic moment that requires basic timing issues,” he says. “It’s sort of an acting decathlon.”

“Isabel” is set in New York, where Loomer grew up when she wasn’t living in Mexico. But Loomer has lived in L.A. since 1987 and has become very rooted here. And her high-profile, lucrative work in Hollywood has not kept her from spending time on projects whose payback is primarily the reward of connecting with people she cares about.

For example, she is an active member of a Taper-sponsored program called Writers’ Workshop, a group of 19 Los Angeles-based, mostly mid-career writers that also includes Jose Rivera, Chay Yew and Kelly Stuart. The group meets monthly in writers’ homes, and has a weekend retreat once a year where each writer’s best efforts are read cold by a group of actors.

She also recently wrote “Broken Hearts: A B.H. Mystery,” for Cornerstone Theater, the L.A. group that mixes professional actors with members of a community in issue-oriented productions. “I loved it,” she says of the experience, her voice rising with enthusiasm. “It made me really love L.A. for the first time.

“To me, Cornerstone is catharsis, more so than any other theater, because you’re working with people who haven’t done theater before. Presenting to people who haven’t seen theater before. And the theater you’re presenting is closer and more relevant to their lives than a great deal of theater that we normally see in that you’re writing a play for the community about the community.

“For instance,” she continues, “there was a scene about a man whose brother was killed in a drive-by. One of the actors was a professional actor, and the other was someone who came from the community. And when we started rehearsing, each time he couldn’t get the words out; he would cry. He knew something about that experience. Chances are if we hired an actor to play the part, he probably would not have known. There was a richness to his performance that was even closer to the bone.”

*

All of Loomer’s work appears to be driven by a deep sense of her mission.

“I want to do what’s important to me,” she says. “I think it would be presumptuous to say that what’s important to me is important with a big I. But I do know what’s important to me, and I don’t want to fool around with a whole lot that isn’t.

“I find it’s too hard, and I also find that I’m coming to a point now where I’m getting offered enough things that are important to me, that I don’t have to. I also tend to look back, and I can see that the years I spent on sitcoms--four years--would I like a couple of them back? Sure. Would I like the 10 years I spent as an actress? Sure. But I also know that everything I learned as an actress goes into my writing. And the same thing for sitcoms.

“I left being an actress behind saying I’m not getting roles that are interesting for me. And I’m not eating. I think I was good at it--I think about this a lot--I think I was very funny, I’m an actor-comedian. But I was not Meryl Streep, and I had something else to do. I had a better place to put whatever gifts I have.”

*

“Expecting Isabel” opens Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 628-2772. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2:30 p.m. No evening performance Aug. 12. Ends Aug. 27. $29-$42.