‘Going for the Whole Bag’ : Murray Schisgal’s ‘Songs of War,’ to Premiere at Gem Theatre, Has ‘Everything I Know How to Do in It’

Murray Schisgal is pacing, his hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans. When he pivots you can read the words “Dunlop Tires” on the back of his shirt. If not for his white beard and the overgrown monk’s fringe of gray hair on his shiny, bald head, he might pass for an eager kid in a schoolyard.

“There is nothing more important than putting on a show,” he says, halting momentarily to peer into the rehearsal hall where his latest play, “The Songs of War,” is being readied for its world premiere Friday at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove (previews begin Wednesday). “You can’t feed yourself on hits and flops, because that’s not where it’s at. Where it’s at is that I’m still working in the theater. Why else would I be here?”

Why indeed. Everybody who’s anybody in Hollywood knows that Schisgal is justlikethis with his old pal Dustin Hoffman, who employs him to develop movie projects. He co-wrote the smash hit “Tootsie.” He was onto the idea for the phenomenally successful “Rain Man” so early in the script process that he remembers when the autistic title character was conceived as a paraplegic. Schisgal could be taking meetings at the Polo Lounge till the cows come home.

Instead, the 62-year-old Brooklyn native has resumed pacing like a caged playwright in the funky dimness of the stage manager’s office at Cal State Fullerton. There is such urgency in his voice and fervor in his eyes, you wonder whether he hasn’t been drafted by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland to put on a show in an old MGM musical.

“Listen to that!” he says as the zippy, lilting strains of a World War I song, “Oui, Oui, Marie,” filter into the office. “We were always into these numbers as part of my growing up. Listen to that! If you do zees for me/I will do zat for you. My father knew all the songs from the First World War. My sister used to sing at bond drives during the Second World War. That’s how I got to know these tunes.”

But while Schisgal’s latest play is filled with song and dance, he hesitates to call it a musical. He doesn’t know how to describe it without reaching for the kitchen sink. “It has everything I know how to do in it,” he says. Comedy. Tragedy. Autobiography. Family conflict. Vaudeville. Americana. Philosophy. Absurdity. Hyperbole. “I’m going for the whole bag in this one,” he says. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll be singing and dancing.”

In fact, Schisgal contends he is “afraid of throwing all these seemingly disparate elements together, but that’s the very reason I’m doing it.” He compares his motive with that of Hans Hoffman, the abstract painter, who used to claim that he never began a painting unless he was afraid of it. What worked for Hoffman he hopes will work for him.

If “The Songs of War” is indeed his “most ambitious play,” as he insists, then it has vaulted to the top of a huge catalogue of works. For Schisgal happens to be one of the most prolific playwrights around, having penned 50 works for the stage since achieving instant acclaim 29 years ago in London with his first one-acts, “The Typists, and The Tiger.” Best known for “Luv,” an enormous 1963 Broadway hit that eventually ran for 900 performances, Schisgal has lost the esteem of the critics over the years, but he has never let that stop him. Another new play, “Oatmeal and Kisses,” will be produced Off Broadway in New York next winter, he says. An earlier play not yet produced in this country, “Popkins,” will be mounted in Paris next fall.

“I never know why I choose to write what I write,” says Schisgal. “I just go the way it takes me. I’ve had plays open everywhere, from Texas to New Jersey. The critics have their job. I’ve got mine. I just keep moving. That’s all you can do. Whether ‘Luv’ was a hit or not, I don’t think it matters. You have to get your satisfaction from what you’re doing and that’s a day-to-day thing. It’s writing. It’s going to rehearsals. It’s a whole gestalt.

“In my opinion, one of the best things I ever wrote is ‘The Pushcart Peddlers’ and nobody knows it like they know ‘Luv.’ It’s unfortunate, but that’s how it is. After spending 30 years in the theater, my feeling is that there are no rules. Experience doesn’t mean that much, because sometimes inexperience and luck are sufficient to give you what you can’t get in a million years through all the hard work.”

Even so, Schisgal isn’t leaving the long-term prospects of “The Songs of War” to chance. He says he has invited everyone he knows in the theater from both coasts to see the Grove Shakespeare Festival production, in the hope of transferring it after its five-week run at the Gem. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says. “But if this thing doesn’t work, it’s nobody’s fault but my own. The cast is absolutely right.”

The play revolves around a 60-year-old performer who reminisces about his life on a bare stage with all the props visible, and moves back and forth through time, not unlike in a Pirandello fantasy. It stars Steeve Arlen as the central figure, Paul Keith as his father, Connie Danese as his mother, Juliet Landau as his sister, Hale Porter as his grandfather and Raymond Lynch as his friend.

The Grove production came about through director Jerome Guardino, a close friend of Schisgal’s since 1963, when he understudied Eli Wallach in the Off Broadway version of “The Typists, and The Tiger.” Along with Dustin Hoffman and actor Bob Dishy, Guardino is one of the small circle of people whom the playwright asks to read his new work. Guardino staged Arthur Miller’s “The Price” at the Gem last season.

Schisgal calls his writing for the stage an “obsession and an addiction,” but he didn’t begin as a playwright. He only turned to the theater after producing three novels that nobody wanted to publish. Ironically, he began his career as a lawyer--after a Navy stint during World War II--in the belief that it would allow him plenty of spare time for writing. When it didn’t, he changed careers.

“I took all these part-time jobs,” recounts Schisgal, who lives on New York’s Central Park West. “I was an office temporary. I pushed a hand truck in the garment industry. I finally ended up teaching at a junior high school in East Harlem. It was a rather contorted, convoluted way of getting to be a writer.”

After “Luv,” which was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Wallach, Anne Jackson and Alan Arkin, Schisgal’s work made it to Broadway again but never drew the wild raves of that maiden outing. There was “Jimmy Shine” (1968), which starred Hoffman soon after he gained fame in “The Graduate,” “An American Millionaire” (1973), “All Over Town” (1974), which Hoffman directed, and “Twice Around the Park” (1982).

Although Schisgal has been lumped in with the postwar absurdists--Eugene Ionesco, Edward Albee and Arthur Kopit, among others--he is not fond of being pigeonholed. The “absurdist school” has pretty much come and gone, after all, and the current crop of leading American playwrights--David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Christopher Durang--can’t be identified with any particular school.

“The theater today is a hodgepodge,” he notes. “There’s no one clear line superseding any other. I actually feel closer to Gogol (the 19th-Century playwright and novelist) than to anyone else.”

Because of a tendency to dash off short works of screwball parody, Schisgal has set himself the task in recent years of creating one full-length play every 12 months. “I’m trying very hard to do more thinking than writing,” he says. “So now I put things in the drawer and leave them there for a couple of months. Then I’ll go back to them. I haven’t done that in the past. Whether it will prove successful, I don’t know.”

So far, the system has brought forth “Roadshow,” about an artist who sold out for success, which premiered in 1987 at an Off Broadway theater in New York, and “Oatmeal and Kisses” which Schisgal describes as “an out-and-out comedy about a guy who becomes a Frankenstein of low fats and carbohydrates.” And now it has yielded “The Songs of War.”

“I hope this play reaches people on a couple of levels,” he says. “There are two wars going on, the conflict in the world and the conflict in the family. But whatever happens, whether people like it or don’t like it, I know the Grove has already given it a life. And I am thrilled.”

Schisgal pauses from what has been an hour of almost nonstop pacing to listen again to the rehearsal piano that can be heard faintly through the glass window of the stage manager’s office.

“You hear that?” he asks, beaming like a goofy kid. “I love that stuff. I told (them), when the cast takes curtain calls, we ought to throw the lyrics up on a screen with a bouncing ball and have the audience sing along.

“If we can’t do that, we ought to give away dishes. I mean, the hardest thing in the world is to get people to go to the theater nowadays.”

The Grove Shakespeare Festival production of “The Songs of War” opens Friday at the Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, and is scheduled to run through Aug. 5. Previews are Wednesday and Thursday. Curtain times are: Wednesdays to Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays (July 9 and 30) at 3 p.m. and (July 16 and 23) at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $10 to $20. Information: (714) 636-7213.