Playwright Is at Home With ‘The Extra Man’ : * Theater: Richard Greenberg says he’s more comfortable with the ‘leveled-off,’ less moneyed characters of his latest work, which opens at South Coast Repertory next week.

COSTA MESA —  To the extent that he savors his relative obscurity and goes out of his way to deflate the aura of success surrounding “Eastern Standard,” his best-known play, by describing it as “that oppressive cultural instant,” Richard Greenberg is a publicist’s nightmare.

“There’s this myth that gets put out in the publicity that I had this wonderful Broadway hit,” he says. “It’s in all of the brochures here. (But) ‘Eastern Standard’ was a bomb. It ran for three months. There were times you could have catered a reception in the balcony. It lost money, and no one came to see it.”

Greenberg pauses to sip from a glass of water. “Here” is South Coast Repertory, where his latest play, “The Extra Man,” opens Oct. 25 in a world premiere. Previews start Friday.

During the pre-Broadway run of “Eastern Standard” three years ago at the Manhattan Theatre Club, a brief burst of unwanted celebrity engulfed the playwright when Frank Rich, the chief drama critic of the New York Times, hailed it as a dazzling summation of the post-crash ‘80s.

Greenberg not only caught “the romantic sophistication of the most sublime comedies ever made in this country,” Rich noted, but he defined an entire generation of urban professionals in all their privilege (beach houses- cum- fancy restaurants) and trauma (AIDS- cum- homelessness).

“For anyone who has been waiting for a play that tells what it is like to be more or less middle class, more or less young and more or less well-intentioned in a frightening city at this moment in this time zone,” Rich declared in his review of Oct. 28, 1988, “ ‘Eastern Standard’ at long last is it.”

Such extraordinary praise, coming as it did from a much-feared curmudgeon with a reputation in theater circles as “the butcher of Broadway,” put both Greenberg and his play on a very high pedestal in a very bright limelight. It also invited attack. What Rich lauded, other daily critics decried.

“The whole thing ended up being bigger and more, uh, controversial than I anticipated or was prepared for,” recalls Greenberg, who was 30 at the time. “Theoretically, that’s what you want. But when you’ve never experienced it, and you’ve had no emotional preparation for it, and you’re not necessarily that secure to begin with, it can be sort of shocking and debilitating. I was getting too much publicity.

“I remember I was at an interview and the publicist turned to me and said, ‘Have you heard about People magazine?’ It was the thing I was most dreading. It must be awful to get genuinely well-known. I think it would be intolerable.”

Greenberg, who was born and grew up in a Long Island suburb of New York City, does not remotely resemble the suave image of urbanity projected by his characters. He wears his shirt tails out and his long hair gathered in a ponytail. His physical heft alone probably would disqualify him from the world of wafer-thin chic personified by “Eastern Standard.”

Except for his Ivy League education--which includes a bachelor’s degree in literature from Princeton, a year of grad school at Harvard (before he dropped out) and a degree in playwrighting from the Yale Drama School--Greenberg, now 33, doesn’t seem to have anything in common with the self-absorbed Manhattanites of “The Extra Man,” either.

“Actually,” he says, “I’m much more at home in this play than I was in ‘Eastern Standard,’ where I was never at home at all. In this one it’s an apartment-and-restaurant world, and if the restaurant is too nice one of the two people at dinner is going to be uncomfortable. I don’t think these people are as moneyed as they were in ‘Eastern Standard.’ I think they’re operating on a lower rung of the urban intelligentsia.

“They’re people whose lives began with engagement, who are decently intelligent and all of that, but there’s a sense of dissatisfaction and stasis. In the other play there was a slick, youthful, forward-going quality to the characters. In ‘The Extra Man’ I think they’ve leveled off. I don’t think they’re going to have a ton of money. I don’t think they’re going to have enormous fame or success.”

Moreover, this time he purposely has written “a much less funny play,” he says, cognizant that the deft witticisms of “Eastern Standard” are out of character for perhaps all but one of the people in “The Extra Man.” Indeed, it is just that person--Keith--whose glibness provides an indirect echo of the earlier play.

Keith, portrayed here by Peter Frechette (who was Drew, the gay painter, in “Eastern Standard”), is gay and a writer and the fulcrum of this play inasmuch as he arranges and manipulates other people’s relationships. If by definition “the extra man is a social convenience in the guise of a friend,” as Greenberg notes, then Keith fulfills the title role with a vengeance.

Yet two other men are prime candidates for that function as well. One is Jess, a film writer, played by Kario Salem; the other is Daniel, a lawyer, played by Jonathan Emerson. Each is the other’s best friend and, as it turns out, both are in love with Daniel’s book-editor wife, Laura, definitely the non-extra woman, played by Kandis Chappell.

“The director and I think the extra man is all three,” says Greenberg. “But beyond that, a sense of extraneousness permeates the play, a sense of people being somehow beside the point of their own lives.”

Characters in a play like that do not scintillate.

“I wanted to write something where meaning accrues from the most trivial interchanges,” Greenberg says. “What happens is that their whole sense of reality and truth and of themselves become imperceptibly but completely altered in the petty details of daily existence.

“So this play is made up of what I think life is chiefly made up of--70% trivia and 30% deep talk.”

When SCR gave Greenberg a commission to write “The Extra Man” in 1987, the original production of “Eastern Standard” had yet to be staged. (Michael Engler, who directed “Eastern Standard” first at Seattle Repertory Theatre and then in New York, is also directing this play.)

“It’s the longest lead time I’ve ever had,” Greenberg says, noting that he finished the first draft of “The Extra Man” more than 1 1/2 years ago. In the meantime, he also wrote “The American Plan,” which was produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club last season. A romance set in 1960 in the Catskills, it revolves around a mother and daughter who attempt to find salvation in each other, although they’re essentially misfitted.

Greenberg says that because of his experience with “Eastern Standard,” he kept a very low profile with “The American Plan.” The day it opened, he unplugged his phone and left it unplugged for another two days. He simply didn’t read the reviews. (He no longer reads any review, he says.)

Finally, to escape cabin fever, he had dinner with his agent, Helen Merrill, at a diner across the street from his downtown Manhattan apartment. “She didn’t say anything about the play,” Greenberg recalls, “and then in walked (playwright) Terrence McNally, whom I don’t know, and he came up to us and said, ‘Congratulations.’

“And I turned to my agent and said, ‘Oh, was it good?’ Because I really had no idea. What I enjoyed was writing the play and rehearsing it and rewriting it. It was wonderful to allow those things--not the reception--to be the event.”

Greenberg intends to keep it that way with “The Extra Man.” The day after it opens at SCR, he’ll be on a plane back to New York where he is scheduled to begin rewrites on the libretto for what could become a Broadway revival of “Pal Joey,” the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical.

“It’s not that I lack ambition,” he says, reflecting on his preference for obscurity. “I just want to be a working playwright. I discovered I don’t want to be the star. I think at one time I wanted that, before I got a taste of it--and all I got was a taste. But I thought, ‘If this is the taste, I don’t want the meal.’ ”

* Preview performances of “The Extra Man” by Richard Greenberg begin Friday at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $15 to $22. The regular run begins Oct. 25 and will continue through Nov. 24. Tickets will be $23 to $32. Information: (714) 957-4033.