A Chip Through the Old Writer’s Block

“Our Boy” is, among other things, a play about how stories should and shouldn’t end. But the excruciating thing for author Julia Jordan was getting started.

South Coast Repertory commissioned her five years ago; tonight her belated script will have its first public airing--in a staged reading at the Costa Mesa theater.

In between, Jordan said, she coped with writer’s block, took on other, simpler projects and kept circling back to the play she wanted to deliver, but couldn’t.

She said that patience on the part of South Coast and some astute advice from a highly qualified source--her good friend David Auburn, whose play “Proof” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award--helped her finally get off her mark. So did the knock-it-out-fast demands of working on deadline for an unrelated project: writing the book for “The Mice,” a mini-musical based on a story by her fellow native Minnesotan, Sinclair Lewis.

Jordan spoke over the phone last week from a houseboat docked on the Hudson River in Manhattan. It has been her home since her college days at New York’s Barnard College. The saga of “Our Boy” dates to 1995, when Jordan met South Coast Repertory’s dramaturge, Jerry Patch, while having her play “Smoking Lesson” workshopped at the Sundance Institute in Utah. That led to her first commission and to a long struggle to write a play she could stand behind.

The first deadline came after a year. “I called Jerry and said, ‘I have something, and I hate it.’ He said, ‘Make it good, send it when you’re ready.’ I called him a year later and said, ‘I don’t have anything.’ He said, ‘Do what you have to do.”’

Part of the problem, Jordan said, was that she had hit a fork in her writing and wasn’t sure how to proceed. Three earlier plays that had brought her notice were, she said, concerned directly or indirectly with “young women and sexuality.” That subject “wasn’t striking me emotionally as it used to,” she said. She was ready to move on to other themes and approaches, but the lines weren’t coming.

She also was just plain scared of the idea for “Our Boy.” The play hits close to home. Among the five characters are a middle-aged English professor and her husband, a psychiatrist--modeled partly on Jordan’s own mom and dad. Their son, Mick, can’t seem to find himself; having abandoned his stab at acting in New York City, he has returned home to Minneapolis. There he woos Sara, a medical intern he dumped three years before to follow his show biz fortunes.

The linchpin of the play, referred to in the script simply as “Boy,” is a talented, acutely intelligent but deeply troubled teenager who has placed himself in the other characters’ orbit. Will Mick reconnect with Sara? Can he and his parents reach out to the desperately hurting Boy? And, after Mick, his mother and the boy spend ample stage time musing on literary theory--specifically the question of what makes a legitimate ending to a story--can Jordan pull off an ending of her own that is truthful and packs a wallop?

“I wanted to write this play, but a piece of me was a little afraid of it,” she said.

Famed theater producer Harold Prince came to the rescue. He hired her as part of the team for “The Mice,” one of three short musicals he folded into a single production dubbed “3hree.” Jordan had to write frantically to get the show ready for its October 2000 premiere in Philadelphia (it also played last spring at the Ahamanson Theatre in Los Angeles). That sprint toned up her muscles to take on the marathon of “Our Boy.”

She also borrowed a trick from Auburn, her friend since they were playwriting fellows together for two years at the Juilliard School in the mid-1990s, working under program directors Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang. Auburn told her that switching the gender of a lead character had helped get him unstuck when a play bogged down; Jordan took the advice and changed Mick, her alter-ego in “Our Boy,” from a woman to a man. She delivered the finished script to South Coast a few months ago.

According to Patch, Jordan’s delayed fulfillment of a commission--playwrights usually get 35% to 50% of the fee up front and the rest on delivery--puts her in some eminent company at South Coast. David Henry Hwang holds the record for lateness: “Golden Child,” produced in 1997, arrived 11 years after it was commissioned. Phillip Kan Gotanda’s “Ballad of Yachiyo,” produced in 1996, took nearly as long, Patch said. Heather McDonald, whose “An Almost Holy Picture” is scheduled to have its New York City premiere in January with Kevin Bacon starring, is the current leader for tardiness, with an open commission dating to 1993.

South Coast’s philosophy in these matters is that, as the noted procrastinator Hamlet, put it, “the readiness is all.”

“We would rather have a play the writer feels good about and feels is completed than have them writing to a deadline,” Patch said.

Debates over the craft of writing recur throughout “Our Boy.” Mick can’t get over how George Eliot suddenly kills off her main characters at the end of “The Mill on the Floss.” Instead, he holds out Sam Shepard’s unresolved, enigmatic ending to “True West” as the way to go. The Boy, meanwhile, writes stories about his own traumatic experiences that conclude with a forced rosiness.

After all of that, Jordan said, she couldn’t just cheat and fall into one of the traps her characters discuss. “It would have been so weird and fake to have a totally happy ending.”

As for the author, she is still looking for her first full production after many workshops and readings in high-profile venues. But several of her early plays have been published in anthologies, and she is up and cranking again on new ones. “The Mice” led to another assignment to write the book for a musical--this one an adaptation of “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” a children’s book that was turned into a 1991 TV movie starring Glenn Close. The Manhattan Theatre Club and the Cleveland Playhouse have commissioned her; another commission from South Coast is also in the works, Jordan said, “but I can’t take [five] years to do it this time.”

With plenty of paid assignments and cheap living arrangements on her boat (she shares it with her boyfriend, actor Dallas Roberts), Jordan is writing full time now after spending several years managing a restaurant. Part of her defense against writer’s block these days is a playwrights group called Primary Stages that requires her to bring in 10 fresh pages a week. “If you want to start writing,” she said, “you’ve got to start writing.”

*

“Our Boy,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tonight at 7:30. $8. (714) 708-5555.