Entering a New Stage

When Cecilia Fannon recently learned she’d won one of the nation’s largest playwriting awards, she was elated--and terrified.

The Newport Beach resident earlier had fetched estimable reviews for her 1994 comedy “Green Icebergs,” which took first place in South Coast Repertory’s California Playwrights Competition that year and gave the theater a Mainstage hit.

But though Fannon has since written half a dozen other plays, none has seen the footlights.

“I was very well received with ‘Green Icebergs,’ ” she says, but “then there was this deadly, deadly wall of silence.”

Will it happen again? To be feted, then forgotten . . . Fannon’s worried.

Abandonment-phobia, she’s got it, and so does Beth, one of the leads in a sequel to “Green Icebergs” that was chosen over 750 other submissions for the 11th annual Lois and Richard Rosenthal New Play Prize.

The $10,000 award (more than triple SCR’s $3,000 prize), endowed by the prominent Cincinnati publishers for whom it’s named, is sponsored by the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, which will give “Red Corners” its premiere in January.

The work she has to do to get there may keep Fannon too busy to fret--even though she also teaches, abridges literature for audio books and writes for Leonard Nimoy’s Alien Voices theater troupe. In addition to working on rewrites and rehearsals, Fannon will fly to New York for casting after Cincinnati producing artistic director Ed Stern, who will direct “Red Corners,” flies here to meet her.

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Stern, the sole judge of the Rosenthal contest, gushed over Fannon’s story of a modern-day, father-daughter relationship for its complex, nonstereotypical characters created with heart and humor.

“She etches characters who are not villains, not heroes, but people trying to sort out their identities,” Stern said by phone from Cincinnati.

Indeed, Fannon wrote “Red Corners” as a stand-alone sequel to “Green Icebergs,” but she plans to pen a third related play because, from the start, she practically imagined each of the characters’ entire life, she said.

“I think that really good plays have a life beyond the end of the play,” said the 40-something writer.

“Red Corners” rediscovers Beth and Claude in Moscow half a dozen years after they met and married in “Green Icebergs.” The 40-something couple is there with Beth’s widowed father, Mitchell, who’s in search of a distant Russian cousin.

When Mitchell, 65, goes off and marries the gorgeous 30-year-old cousin, Beth, who lost her first husband to another woman and was only a child when her mother died, falls apart.

Says Claude (in an early draft): “So your father marries himself a slice of Russian cheesecake. You’re acting like he went bungee jumping off Spassky Tower, like he cracked open his head in Red Square.”

Replies Beth: “He cracked open my heart.”

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Fannon said she never draws on her own life for play fodder, but the glibly quick-witted former soap opera writer conceded that she shares with Beth a fear of having the rug pulled out.

“I don’t know if we all do it,” she joked with a reporter during a recent interview at her home, but “I’m to the point where I just don’t like saying goodbye to anyone--so you can’t leave the apartment.”

Still, where Beth’s father was doting, Fannon’s dad, who supervised a chain of New York City clothing stores, was “absentee.”

“He was an Irish Catholic, ex-alcoholic, Damon Runyon [type], and the most outrageous character of my entire life. He eclipsed me and every member of the family,” she said. “In his drinking days, he would park his cars on lawns or scream terrible epithets at the neighbors, whom he actually liked.”

Fannon, who has been married to technical writer Jonathan Bliss for 25 years, wanted to explore an older man-younger woman relationship in this play because she believes they’re “pandemic,” yet usually viewed in one way only.

“We always assume that [the men] are just old goats, that it’s their last screech or something before death,” she said. “No one ever really believes there’s anything such as love, or that any genuine affection could be cooking.

“Concomitantly, [the women are viewed] just as gold diggers who can’t wait for the men to croak to collect the guy’s money.”

Irina, the woman Beth’s father marries, is desperate to escape the anti-Semitism she encounters in her homeland and to find a way out of Russia’s long-standing economic strife, said Fannon, who learned to speak Russian at the University of Utah and wrote a screenplay about Russian modernist poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezdha Yakovlevna Mandelstam.

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While Irina and Mitchell are new to “Red Corners”--SCR producing artistic director David Emmes said his company chose not to produce it because of its similarity to “Green Icebergs”--the earlier play’s omniscient, God-like waiter resurfaces in the new one too.

And whence came this character, who dispenses sage advise and seems to know everything? Fannon’s not sure but said maybe it relates to her upbringing in “a very patriarchal religion”: Catholicism.

“I always have these male, vaguely charismatic characters, which bothers me to no end--they should be female--but what can I say?” she asked. “Men are scarier, more imposing.”

Indeed, she wishes such a powerful figure could tweak her career. She’s delighted by the recent prize and upcoming Cincinnati production. Plus, on Oct. 25, cable’s Sci-Fi Channel will air “Alien Voices: Halloween Trilogy,” a radio-style dramatization starring Leonard Nimoy, based on classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde that Fannon adapted.

Still, her dream is to have a play produced in her native New York City. Despite the slow spots in her career, she remains optimistic that one day that will happen.

She didn’t go to the Yale School of Drama, like superstar playwrights Wendy Wasserstein and Paula Vogel did. “But neither did Tennessee Williams, so I’m told, or Horton Foote,” she said. “I firmly believe you don’t have to.”

Notes Cincinnati’s Stern: “The pedigree of a playwright is of less interest to me than the content of a play.”