NOTHING DINKY IN ‘OCTOBER 22’

Suzanne Lummis was writing a play about three middle-class couples, but she didn’t want it to be “just another play about relationships.”

Too many playwrights “expect me to wrack my heart over their teeny-tiny characters and their dinky problems,” Lummis said. “I resist.” She wanted her play to touch on a theme that was “larger than these people, that went beyond their living room.”

The theme she selected--the creation of the world and what humanity has accomplished since--certainly isn’t dinky. Yet Lummis’ play--”October 22, 4004 B.C., Saturday,” at the Cast at the Circle Theatre through May 10--flies over this giant theme like a butterfly.

Lummis took her title and her play’s organizing principle from a Los Angeles Times Book Review reference to Bishop James Ussher of Trinity College. In 1650, the bishop calculated that the world was surely created on Saturday, Oct. 22, 4004 BC. Lummis senses a similarity between his effort to nail down the creation and the struggle of her character, Jennifer, “to create order out of chaos, to name the unnameable.”

So Lummis has Jennifer throwing a party to commemorate the creation of the world on Oct. 22. Jennifer knows the date isn’t accurate, but it provides an opportunity for her and her more reluctant friends to measure their own progress--and, if they can ever stay on the subject long enough--the progress of humanity.

Lummis regards Jennifer as “the conscience of the playwright, someone who is trying to pull all the disparate parts of her life together.” The play offers a sense of hope, Lummis said--”I have to believe my characters are pushing in the right direction.”

But she also recognizes the futility of their (or Jennifer’s) quest. A large part of the play is “about human folly,” she said.

“The real and the surreal run side by side in the play--and in day-to-day life.”

Lummis is the granddaughter of Los Angeles pioneer Charles F. Lummis, whom she describes as “a man about town, founder of the Southwest Museum, a syndicated columnist, a terrible poet, a marvelous translator of Indian stories and defender of Indian rights.”

But the 35-year-old playwright was raised far from the city, “on the top of a mountain in the Sierra Nevada,” where her father managed a ski club. “We didn’t have a TV set until I was 14. I missed all the ‘Leave It to Beavers.’ ”

Like her character Lucy, whom she plays in the Cast production, “I was very protected from anything that was sordid. I never heard four-letter words. Lucy is the part of me that’s still innocent.”

Her family moved to Berkeley “at the birth of the hippies,” she said. “It was an extreme culture shock. It took me three years to fit in, because I was just the mountain girl. But by the time I was 18, I was a flower child. I made beads for all of my men friends.”

Lummis received a master’s degree in creative writing from California State University at Fresno, then spent a year hitchhiking through Europe “having Moll Flanders-style adventures” and another year in San Francisco. But she spent most of her adult life in Los Angeles--an office worker by day, a poet by night.

She reads her poetry at Beyond Baroque and other local venues, and her collection of verse, “Idiosyncrasies,” was published in 1984. She also writes a column of commentary for Downtown News and occasionally acts in small theaters in such unlikely roles as the mother in “Barefoot in the Park.”

“The background in poetry is irreplaceable” in her education as a playwright, Lummis said. “It gave me an eye for detail and a feeling for the rhythm of language.” She took a screenwriting course to learn dramatic structure.

“It was about 1980,” she said. “There were 10 men and two women in the class. Both of us women were writing about love, friendship, marriage. Every one of the 10 men was writing about cocaine smuggling. I kept thinking, ‘Baby, we are never going to get along.’

“Sometimes there seems to be this irreconcilable gulf between men and women”--a gulf that is vividly portrayed in “October 22.”

Yet the play also gives the impression that Lummis believes in marriage.

“For everyone except me,” she confirmed. “I’m like an old bachelor, too set in my ways.”

Those ways include a seven-year residence in a small walk-up flat in an east Hollywood building she aptly described as a “tenement,” adding cheerfully, “I do my best to make it look like the Taj Mahal.” She expects her home to crumble in the next big earthquake.

If so, it won’t be the first traumatic event for Lummis: “I’ve had a loaded gun held to my head. I’ve been dragged down an alley by two men. I try to be careful, but this is part of living in the city.” She said she likes the “glamour and excitement of the city--the feeling that any day, anything can happen.”

She wants her next play to reflect the urban jungle.

“I want to write about people with titanic problems, people struggling to survive on a brute, elemental level. What will people do just to live?” She has tentatively set her play in “a seedy bar in Pittsburgh in 1951.” It seems a long way from the world of “October 22.”

“I don’t think this is going to turn out to be a comedy,” she said. “Tell people not to hold their breath till it’s finished.”