Big Splash From the Little Pond

Regional characters, those home-grown products of America’s heartland, are frequently exploited by dramatists of every stripe. Whether they need a villain or a buffoon, writers tend to trot out the same generic prototype, too often filtered through a smug, urban sensibility.

However, for a taste of fully developed small-towners with their own special challenges and dreams, look no further than the works of playwright Ed Simpson. Home-grown yearners don’t come any more fully developed than they do in “Additional Particulars,” Simpson’s poignantly funny pair of one-acts now playing at the Third Stage in Burbank.

Both plays concern the constricted circumstances and modest aspirations of the employees at a small-town discount store. In the opener, “Glenda & Warren,” a sweet romance unfolds between a low-level store manager and a repressed clerk. In “Kenny & Raymond,” the wrenching closing piece, a stock clerk grouses to a co-worker about his wasted life--until a shocking revelation teaches him that he is not alone in his pain.

Comically floundering, the characters are small fish in a little pond, gasping for more water.

“All my characters are ‘little pond’ people,” agrees the 48-year-old Simpson, speaking by phone from Pennsylvania. “I was born and raised in Lewisville, a tiny speck of a town in North Carolina just outside Winston-Salem. My hometown was 500 people when I was growing up. Then, for the last 20 years or so, I’ve been living in a college town of about 21,000. The people I interact with, the people who teach my kids, the people I deal with every day are all from a small town. I certainly don’t want to sound pretentious, but these people, the ‘little pond’ people, have a tremendous amount of dignity. All the plays I’ve written deal with these kinds of people. I guess it’s because of where I grew up.”

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“Particulars” is set in Randolphsburg, Pa., a fictional community loosely based on Indiana, Pa., the small college town where Simpson lives with his wife, Barbara Blackledge, and their two teenage children. Simpson and Blackledge, who met in school in North Carolina, work as theater professors at the local university, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Once aspiring actors, the couple spent several years in New York City before moving to Pennsylvania to teach and raise a family. It was years, however, before Simpson tried his hand at writing. His first play, “The Battle of Shallowford,” a comedy about how residents of a small North Carolina town get swept up in the “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, won him a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and was published by Samuel French. Other plays and productions followed. Simpson estimates that “Shallowford” alone has been produced between 50 and 60 times.

Simpson’s comedy “Elephant Sighs” made a critical splash in Los Angeles when it opened Theatre/Theater’s new Hollywood space in 1998. Also set in Randolphsburg--the setting for many of Simpson’s plays--”Sighs” derives its title from a curious natural phenomenon. When distressed, elephants have been known to emit sighs, inaudible to the human ear, which apparently summon other sympathetic pachyderms for a little mutual support and bonding.

Themselves an endangered species of sorts, the mostly blue-collar men in the play have reason to sigh. In an era of mechanization and rising divorce rates, they are losing jobs, wives and a sense of purpose--not to mention their hair. Their fumbling attempts at intimacy and connection form the fulcrum of the play.

“Sighs” grew out of an incident that occurred while Simpson was vacationing with his wife and another couple. “I had finished a pretty intense period of writing and production,” Simpson recalls. “I didn’t have another project lined up, so I was feeling my own sort of middle-aged male disconnectedness.

“My friend and I decided to try and hook up with our wives, who were out walking. We wandered into this little women’s boutique to see if they were there. And there was this batik T-shirt that read, ‘Every time I go out with a man, I know why I love my cat.’ And I said, ‘I’m so tired of that stuff.’ The woman owner heard me and snapped, ‘If I could find a man as good as a cat, I wouldn’t sell that shirt!’

“Eventually we found our wives, then I went out by myself later for a walk. I saw all these guys like myself, walking around alone. And these middle-aged men all had the same dazed expression on their faces, which said, ‘What the hell happened?’ ”

If Simpson was the victim of male bashing, he resolved not to return the insult in his play. “My rule was that at no point was a man allowed to bash a woman. If these men had women in their lives, they had to love them. I didn’t want to write about a bunch of guys drinking beer, scratching themselves in manly places and talking about sports and chicks. I wanted to reflect the men I know--compassionate and decent men who bend over backward trying to do the right thing.”

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Simpson’s updated take on male bonding stems from his days in the theater department of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he attended graduate school. There, he and his buddies were far more likely to engage in discussions of “Waiting for Godot” than boozy sports banter.

It’s fitting that some of Simpson’s most vital friendships and artistic collaborations came from the creative pool of the Greensboro college green room. Longtime L.A. resident and North Carolina native Michael Lilly, who has known Simpson since their university days together, scouted “Sighs” at a theater department reunion. He immediately knew he had fished a keeper out of Simpson’s small pond.

“There’s a lot of theater being done in L.A., and a lot of it is bad--especially the new plays,” says Lilly, who directed the play. “But Ed doesn’t write about stock markets or cell phones or dot-coms. Ed writes about people. God knows what’s going on in their lives--it could be complicated or simple. Yet the whole time, you are focused on these people and pulling for them, and hoping that they are going to come through it all OK.”

After “Sighs” closed, Simpson sent Lilly the rough drafts for “Particulars.” Once again, Lilly was sold on the depth and scope of the writing. David Wells, Kirk Baily and Jack Kehler, three actors from “Sighs,” quickly signed on for another Simpson stint, along with new cast member Susan Mackin.

Wells, another North Carolina native, first met Simpson while attending Guilford College, a small Quaker school in Greensboro. Their friendship deepened in graduate school, and they have remained in close contact over the years. In fact, Simpson created Warren Grippo, the lovelorn store manager in “Glenda & Warren,” specifically for Wells.

“I think Warren is like a lot of people in this country,” Wells says. “There are a lot of good people who are doing their best under difficult conditions--trying to contribute to society in their own ways. Maybe things work out for them, and they are rewarded. But a lot of times good people get used and abused.

“That’s why Warren is so attracted to Glenda. He sees in her someone who cares about their job, who has integrity and heart and character. There are so many people who never make that human connection, but who spend their lives trying. These characters are right on the edge between happiness and sorrow. For a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck, it’s a very thin line between the two.”

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Though he specializes in small-town heroes, Simpson has a keen sense of the bigger picture. “I’m sure many would dispute this,” he says, “but when I was in New York City, I found it more parochial than the small town I grew up in. In Lewisville, there was an awareness of a larger world out there. In New York, there was no sense of anything beyond New York. Even in New York, people would form pockets, communities. In my one building, 30 or 40 people formed their own small town that was every bit as colorful as Mayberry. I looked at New York as a series of many, many small towns, with the same kinds of local characters. So I was never overwhelmed by New York. It was a great opportunity for me to grow and learn.”

Simpson’s characters are a long way from Mayberry. Full of angst and unfulfilled desires, they are heartbreakingly imperfect. Yet under the darkness, Simpson’s works shine with an essential sweetness that is often a rarity in the modern theater. “A lot of theater reflects the darker side of our world and society. I don’t deny there’s evil in the world, and I will probably write about that someday,” he says.

“When my daughter was 4 or 5 years old, she gave me a giant Rand McNally wall map of the United States for Father’s Day. She told me, ‘No matter where you are, you know where you are.’ I’ve kept it up in my office for years. The big dots are these big cities all throughout the country. And then there are all these tens of thousands of tiny dots. But whether or not those tiny dots are in Kansas or Pennsylvania, they are the center of somebody’s world. And that’s what’s important.”