Gilded Age’s Got You, Babe : Stage: Playwright highlights excessiveness of the 1880s, and symbolically the 1980s, in ‘Great Day in the Morning,’ now at SCR.

“We all knew this bubble of a time couldn’t last.” --”Great Day in the Morning” Thomas Babe wasn’t even looking for the subject of his next play when his daughter Charissa began attending high school in Darien, Conn., where Babe has lived for several years.

“I met many of her peers,” he recalled recently, “and sussed their values. Their vocabulary had a sleek cynicism to it. For them, altruism was a shell game, and money defined who you were. These values--or non-values--didn’t grow in a void, though. It came from their parents’ money-based ethos.

“It was all a little unnerving, but it inspired my curiosity about their glittery wealth on the outside and what was going on inside.”

When one of Charissa’s schoolmates died suddenly, her friends gathered for what Babe called a “ ‘Little Chill,’ when they realized that it may not be true that with money, and youth, you’ll live forever.”

The incident, though unnoticed by the larger world, also seemed to symbolize the end of the Reagan Era, the Insider Trading Era, the Get-It-While-It’s-Hot Era. And the beginning of “Great Day in the Morning,” Babe’s sprawling drama currently in its world premiere production at South Coast Repertory.

The play might be called Babe’s assessment of the ‘80s, except for the fact that he has substituted one era of capitalistic excess for another: the 1880s for the 1980s, the Gilded Age for the Keating Age.

Babe says he is attempting to get a grip on our time by fancifully telling of the period of extravagant consumption by a society that floated between New York City and the palatial estates of Newport, R.I.

“To be honest,” the playwright said, sitting in a small, book-stuffed SCR office, “I’m laying off all of my feelings about our own times onto this other, very apt moment in history, because I’m not sure where the country is right now.

“But I do know that the passions that motivated me to write this came from a blood hatred of people in the 1980s who were ruinous financially and morally,” he said, “and how they looked down on those not like them.”

SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch, who has been working with Babe on the play’s development through three workshops and 14 months, warns that “lest anyone think that this is a historical play, it’s not at all.”

“Yes, there are period clothes, period songs and period settings, but the period isn’t the point,” Patch said. “The forces which occurred in that period, and re-occurred in our own, is the point. I think Tom has done an especially good job of paralleling the excesses of their day with our own.”

Babe, a modest looking 51-year-old man whose slight frame contrasts with a deep-as-a-well voice, is a casual conversationalist who can suddenly deliver a remark that knocks the listener sideways, as when he says that “putting together a good production amounts to 5% talent and 95% politics.”

With the current production, directed by SCR producing artistic director David Emmes, Babe’s standing at the theater has certainly improved since 1988, when his play, “Down in the Dumps,” garnered an SCR commission but failed to receive a full staging.

The theater was enthusiastic enough about “Great Day” that SCR submitted it for--and won--a coveted grant from the Fund for New American Plays ($37,000 for the theater, $10,000 for Babe).

It was a handsome reward for a playwright with a body of work which stretches back to the mid-1970s, beginning with the mythic rock ‘n’ roll play, “Kid Champion,” to the disturbing police station drama, “A Prayer for My Daughter,” to the angular urban darkness of “Demon Wine.”

“Someone once wrote that it was too bad that I’ve never found my voice,” Babe said, with a quiet chuckle.

“That is the stupidest thing I ever read, because every situation I write about requires a different configuration of language, with different people talking in different ways.”

Before he was a writer, or a director, Babe studied law at Yale--ideal training, he later realized, for playwriting: “You learn to argue every side of a case, and you do that best in the theater if you never bring on a character you don’t care for.

“I always begin with voices when I write. Even when I’ve directed, I haven’t made a point of fully visualizing the play. I don’t see how it is, I hear how it is.”

But while the voices he heard for “Great Day” are as gilded as can be, Babe says he happily played fast and loose with the historical record.

He has, for instance, compressed some 15 years of time into three. Ulysses S. Grant (played by former Laguna Playhouse managing director Douglas Rowe) has a frequent presence on the stage:

“He was a part of this society, but maybe not the Jiminy Cricket I’ve made him out to be.” He turned the author of his key source text--Elizabeth Wharton Drexel’s “King Lehr and the Gilded Age”--into his central character.

“I found in Elizabeth a woman poised between two periods,” he said. The young, wealthy Philadelphia widow, in history and in “Great Day” (played by Gloria Biegler), arrives on the the New York social scene of the mid-1880s like an explorer landing on uncharted territory. She marries the so-called “court jester” of the Gilded Set, Harry Lehr (played by Michael Brian), and life begins to resemble one big party.

“She enters society with the highest expectations,” Babe noted, “and only finds bitter disappointment. But she can’t bolt. It’s just not allowed. She has to find something to fill her emptiness, which is what Act II is about.

“We’ve had to make Elizabeth harder, darker in the second half than she was in the first. She attains this very modern sensibility, very different from the 19th-Century style, of not taking people at their word.”

The actual Elizabeth and Harry never divorced, but lived separate lives; never true lovers, but curiously genuine friends. A match, to be sure, as defiant of description as the play, which Babe willingly admits is “a little of this, a little of that, part musical, part satire, part tragedy, part melodrama.”

“This work is incredibly difficult to make work on stage,” said Patch. “For one, the role of Harry is probably the most demanding character this theater has ever tackled--and yes, that is saying a lot. You could say that his character runs the gamut from Tiny Tim to Clark Gable to Jimmy Cagney, plus he has four songs and he goes insane.”

“I have no idea how audiences will receive this,” Babe said. “But I do feel already this distance from the play, in that I feel fairly tapped out on the subject of the Gilded Age.”

Don’t think that “Great Day in the Morning” marks the end of the Thomas Babe theater time machine.

The subject of Babe’s upcoming opus? Henry Ford.

“Great Day in the Morning” continues through March 28 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $25-$34. (714) 957-4033.