‘Buick’ Runs on Autobiographical Fuel

“These are parents who wanted to be Donna Reed and Carl Betz--or Ozzie and Harriet or Rob and Laura Petrie,” said playwright John Bunzel.

“The husband was going to go to work and bring home the bacon, the wife was going to have babies and keep house. Then it all flew out the window. The kids grew up and started taking drugs, women started working, free sex exploded. The old rules no longer applied.

“There was a day when the father would take great pride in driving home from the dealership in a new Buick, and he’d honk the horn and every one would say, ‘Wow, he bought a Buick.’ Now people don’t want to be caught dead in a Buick.”

Appropriately, Bunzel’s newest work, opening Sunday at the Pasadena Playhouse, is titled “Death of a Buick.” In it, the locally based 28-year-old writer chronicles the emotional trials of the Hopkinses, an affluent Southern California family who wake up in the ‘80s “and discover life is no longer ‘Leave It to Beaver.’ ” And as in Bunzel’s kids-on-cocaine play “Delirious” (which had runs at the Pilot and Matrix theaters in 1985), the subject matter is clearly personal.

Bunzel began writing “Buick” in 1982; it has since gone through “about 15 drafts” and a showcase production last year at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club. He thinks the play has not only diffused the autobiographical element, but taken on more ambitious scope.

“ ‘Buick’ is about more than ‘Delirious’ was about--life and death, the failure of the American dream, the disintegration of the American family and weathering the storms--because at the end, the family does weather them.

“There are big themes involved. It’s also painful. In the play, the eldest son in the family has died in a car crash. This motivates the father to try to commit suicide by driving the family Buick off a cliff. But he fails at it, just as he’s failed at everything else in life.”

Bunzel also had a brother who died in a car crash. But beyond that emotional specific, he has tried to put as much theatrical distance as he can on the material.

“If I’m going to write about a family, there’s only one family I know about for real, and that’s my own,” he said. “So I had to take it away from just being about my family and create this other family--making them characters on their own. It’s taking it from the autobiographical and using more and more invention, fictionalizing.”

Even now, Bunzel admits there’s some trepidation from his family.

“I don’t see my family up there,” he said. “Of course, they might. There’s a feeling of (airing the family’s dirty linen) among some members. It’s hard for them to see beyond the autobiographical things that still remain, the touchy subjects, and see that there’s a whole play there, a whole subject.

“But I think that when they see the production, see people laughing, see that it’s a story about an American family, their attitude will change.”

Make no mistake about it: Bunzel does expect laughter from his audience. In spite of the grim subject matter, “Buick” (like “Delirious”) is billed as a black comedy.

“It’s always a struggle to play black comedy,” Bunzel said. “Black humor has an underbelly of pain and hostility--but you have to play the bright side. You can’t play the hurt, or it’s not funny. The pain and anger have to come at the end. It’s hard to do that, because the words on the page are angry, but the actor must play against (them).”

As an actor, Bunzel knows whereof he speaks. Growing up in Los Angeles as the son of former Times Opinion editor Peter Bunzel, he attended the Harvard School and met Pasadena Playhouse producing co-director Susan Dietz, who was his teacher and became one of his staunchest supporters. After graduation, Bunzel went on to four years of acting studies at Juilliard but hasn’t gotten much acting work since.

However, he has found solace in the subsequent writing detour. After “Delirious,” Bunzel got some screenplay offers and has high hopes for a movie he wrote, which is on hold due to the writers strike. But for now, he’s happy just being “Buick’s” supervising playwright.

“I really have no desire to be in it or direct it,” Bunzel said. “I’m not one of those guys who wants to be the playwright/director/star at 28. Maybe someday I’ll do that. But I think things can take their time. I’m not in a hurry.”