Costly Substitutes for Replacing Love of a Human Being

Things aren’t going too well for Luton and Patina Mears. Their grown daughter has moved home to the family trailer and is on her way to establishing a bad reputation. You see, Patina is submerged in religion. And Luton is into his pet turtles, which he frequently brings inside to watch “Bonanza” with him. He used to have dogs until Patina “accidentally” poisoned them. Now she’s on a campaign to set the turtles free.

That’s the sorry situation in Boron, Calif., in Thomas Strelich’s “Neon Psalms,” opening this weekend at Theatre West in Studio City.

“The premise I wanted to explore was: Is there a substitute for the love of another human being?” said Strelich, a Santa Barbara playwright. “Can pets, can memories, can religion--can any of those things--serve as a substitute? And if they are used as substitutes, what is the price exacted?”

In this case, it’s a high one.

During the Vietnam War, Patina had persuaded their only son to enlist in the Army, saying his father wouldn’t respect him if he didn’t serve his country. “She didn’t want him killed,” Strelich noted, “but that was the result.” Now she turns on her daughter, probably driving her away for good. “She tells Luton, ‘He keeps taking things away from us, till all we have is Him.’ But what she’s really doing is stripping things away so that--even by default--he’ll pay some attention to her.”

Strelich, 36, who supervised the play’s staging at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre in 1985 and New York City’s American Place in 1987, has since rewritten its ending, which he described as “very bleak, a stalemate: the battle’s over and no one’s a winner.” In the new ending, Patina has a physical breakdown: “I wanted a feeling that the last thing she could take away from Luton was herself and that when she did, he finally comes to her.

“It’s very much a playwright’s conceit to have it be dark and mean,” he added. “But I wanted a sense of resolution, a sense of conclusion. I always think, ‘If I was sitting in the audience, would I be satisfied? Would I feel good about that?’ ”

Strelich, whose last play, “Dog Logic” (about a nonconformist pet cemetery owner doing battle with land developers), played at South Coast Repertory in 1988, says that characters, rather than plot, are often his motivation.

“Psalms” also benefitted from some real-life observations. When Strelich was a graduate student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, he too lived in a ramshackle trailer. His girlfriend was from Boron and her father, like Luton, had driven a truck in a Borax mine.

“We’d go back to visit her mother. I’d go on walks around Boron,” Strelich said. “One time I was in an alley and passed a back yard with maybe 10 turtles in it, each with a number painted on its back. So when I was writing this, a couple of images from back then clicked.”

With his third play ready to open (he also got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts last year, plus a commission for a new work for South Coast), Strelich admits that this wasn’t a career he’d counted on.

“I love play writing,” he said. “But when I was in college, I had to take bonehead English--like ‘This is a sentence.’ Well, I was good at science. Still, I always knew I wanted to write. But you’ve got to eat first, then philosophize. So I majored in biology.”

Nearing graduation, Strelich realized that there weren’t many high-paying jobs for marine biologists and got a double major in computers. He’s been working as a systems analyst ever since.

“It works out really well,” he said of his job at General Research Corp. in Santa Barbara. “I come and go as I please. As long as I get the job done, I earn my keep. When we were with this play in New York for two months, I just took my modem along.”

Strelich lived in Los Angeles from 1984 through 1988, but commuted at least once a week to Santa Barbara. Now he’s doing the commute in the other direction, regularly driving in to check on rehearsals.

“I was acting in college and I had a habit of changing lines,” he said of his theater beginnings. “There was this grizzled old director named Murray, an ex-Marine, 5 feet tall, 300 pounds. He’d say, ‘Strelich, if you can write a better play, write it. Otherwise, leave it alone.’ So I wrote a one-act, and arranged to produce and direct it. I wanted to be sure if it stunk, I’d have nobody to blame but myself. It ran for one night. People laughed when they were supposed to laugh. And I thought, ‘OK, I can do this.’ ”

Becoming a published playwright, though, was far from easy.

“I had no connections in the theater world--nothing,” said Strelich, who was born in Bakersfield. “So I had to do it all on my own. But I’ve been very fortunate: In the last six years, I’ve always had something in production. I’ve also been lucky in working with really good theaters. I’ve even gotten good rejection letters, hand-signed letters like, ‘We really like your work; if you have anything else, we’d like to see it.’

“A good rejection letter can keep you going for a couple of years.”