THEATER : AT HOME IN THIS ‘BERG : Playwright Cecilia Fannon Prepares for a World Premiere in Her Own Back Yard

Mariners have long reported green icebergs in northern waters, but scientists for years re garded the sightings as illusory, perhaps a trick of reflection.

They were wrong.

“Green icebergs exist,” Cecilia Fannon said. “In fact, they are . . . a very brilliant, emerald green. And, they’re very rare.”

The Newport Beach resident, interviewed last week, was explaining the metaphor behind the title of her new play, “Green Icebergs,” which starts a week of previews Friday on SCR’s Mainstage before its world premiere Oct. 21.

Some icebergs absorb plankton and other marine life. The accumulating weight can actually change an iceberg’s balance and tilt it, exposing the green that was below the water.

“It doesn’t happen to all icebergs--they say one in 100, maybe one in 200,” Fannon said, adding that the process mirrors what happens to the two couples in her play. “They undergo this--well, I guess we could call it a sea change--and in a way are capsized and their lives are turned upside-down.”

Fannon’s own life, if it hasn’t been turned quite upside-down, has undergone a sea change of its own in recent months. After writing five full-length plays in five years without a production, the sixth has gone from birth to boards in less than a year.

That process has involved seven drafts, two full readings and, now, all the last-minute trims and changes that come during the rehearsal process for a new play.

“It’s wonderful. It’s overwhelming sometimes,” Fannon said in an interview in the theater’s lobby. “It even impresses me that this whole lavish production stems from something on a written page.”

Fannon was a free-lance technical writer 10 years ago when she moved to Newport Beach, and soon thereafter found some success in writing for television. Other aspects of her writing career, however, have required more patience. Two novels generated interest among publishers but remain unpublished; a major production company has contacted her about a screenplay she wrote, but she has seen no option money yet. Now, after previous plays performed well in competition, one is actually being produced.

“I think 10 years ago, I expected to be a produced screenwriter (immediately). . . . Absolutely, I would have thought, I deserve this,” Fannon said. “Ten years later, I feel, ‘Wow, this is really cool,’ because now I can actually enjoy it, and it’s less a matter of deserving.”

*

At an afternoon rehearsal for “Green Icebergs,” 10 days before the previews, Fannon watched intently, with one hand supporting her chin, and a script open before her.

“We’re in the third week of rehearsals,” said the director, David Emmes, during a brief break, adding that the actors are “just coming off the book”--meaning they can go through the scenes without their scripts.

Fannon is on hand to clarify any aspect of the script that may seem murky to the actors, and to smooth the play’s edges with a line change here and there when necessary. Scenes may be revised all the way through previews.

“Just last weekend I took off, because I think there comes a time when you have to back off,” Fannon said after the rehearsal. “I absented myself, and the end result was when I got home Sunday . . . there were 12 calls on the machine. So, I guess they were not weaned.”

For world premieres, SCR usually brings in a playwright for the first and the final weeks of rehearsal. But because Fannon lives nearby, she has not only been available all through rehearsal, but has also through the long development process.

“I think it was an added benefit to have Cecilia in the neighborhood, if you will,” Emmes said in a separate interview. “That was certainly helpful, to be able to meet from time to time and talk. It’s been a very positive process, just to see the play continue to grow.”

For the actors, as well, having the playwright on hand is an added resource.

“I really enjoy it. Because they’re there, they can help clear things up,” said Nike Doukas, who plays Veronica, a writer and one of five main characters in in the play. “When you’re working on a play that’s been done 15 times or 115 times or 1,015 times, you tend to just accept that this is the way it’s done and you work through it. . . . When you know it’s the first time, there are things that might not quite work or need some smoothing out.”

Robb Curtis-Brown, who plays Claude (another of the leads), agrees.

“It’s what I like about new plays, actually, is that they’re still flexible. It’s still in motion,” said Curtis-Brown, who also performed in Richard Greenberg’s “Night and Her Stars,” another SCR premiere last year. “It’s actually working really wonderfully. Cecilia has a real strong sense of what she wants.”

Added Doukas: “She’s really easygoing and very receptive. I get the sense from her that’s she’s enjoying hearing her play spoken by actors. I’ve always felt that playwrights get a charge seeing their words come off the page.”

The admiration is a two-way street.

“They feel comfortable with me and I with them,” Fannon said, “so we have a camaraderie, which doesn’t always exist. It can’t always be that way for reasons of distance. For reasons, also I think, of distance between writer and actors.”

The play was written quickly, even if the subsequent development has been a more measured process.

“I was in the middle of writing another play, and I was sitting in the bathtub one night and I thought, wow, this would make a really good play. I wrote it last November and December, in short order.”

She submitted it to SCR’s California Playwrights Contest, in which she had placed second the year before for “To Distraction.” “I thought I would sneak it into the contest, thinking this is ridiculous, because I had won (second place) the year before. I thought there’s no chance they’re going to listen to me, the Newport housewife.”

Fannon was in Hawaii for an annual family gathering when told she had won first prize. It was at this same number that SCR had called her the year before.

“This is what happens when you let something go, thinking ‘no chance,’ ” Fannon said.

It went on to a staged reading in April, and at the end of a debriefing a week later, “David (Emmes) said that they’d like to produce the play. And I said absolutely not, I want this straight to Broadway,” Fannon said, laughing. “From there, I just sort of sailed home and made the announcement to my husband.”

In the play, two Orange County couples meet by chance in a small Italian hill town, and their lives become intertwined in ways that turn the old relationships upside-down. In the second act, which takes place 18 months later, they reconvene in the same town in an attempt at “closure” that only leads to more fireworks. An Italian waiter oversees the action, spouting quotations that comment on the conflicts and contretemps.

Emmes said the play was “essentially there” at the reading.

“Certainly I was very attracted to the intelligence and the wit that was manifest. . . . Also, as a director, it was something that I just had a response to. It spoke to me on a creative sort of level, if you will. I could see a production, I could see it working on stage.”

Subsequent changes mostly helped to clarify the action, Fannon said, and did not change the substance of the play.

“You know what I think? After all of this tremendous amount of work . . . I think that most people who came to see the reading will not notice that the play has changed. Unless I’m terribly mistaken.”

*

The earlier crack about “Newport housewife” is a little self-deprecating humor, one of many joking asides Fannon might offer during the course of a conversation. The New York native, who is married but has no children, is a woman whose far-flung interests turn up in her written works in sometimes surprising ways.

She has written a screenplay on the remarkable lives of Russian modernist poet Osip Emil’evich Mandel’stahm and his wife Nadezdha Yakovlevna Mandel’stahm--esoteric and non-commercial subject matter for a Hollywood film, it would seem, yet she reports that Castlerock Entertainment has shown some interest.

In the plot twists of “Green Icebergs,” which is set in a fictional hill town in Italy’s Tuscany region, the Renaissance monk and painter Fra Fillipo Lippi plays a pivotal role, although not as a flesh-and-blood character. Fannon is now contemplating a play based on the life of another figure from Italian history, St. Ursula, who--as legend has it--was slain along with 11,000 of her female followers for turning down the advances of the Huns.

At the University of Utah, Fannon studied a variety of subjects, including dance and languages--Russian, Greek, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, to be precise. Then there was her stint as the only student of an imposing professor emeritus of Yiddish, Louis Zucker.

“There were people who entered (the program), and they were so browbeaten by this very intimidating gent they all left,” Fannon said. “I studied with him for two years, and I was his only student, an Irish Catholic from Queens studying with Louis Zucker, and it was one of the great experiences of my life.”

“He was sometimes so hard, that I would go home in tears. . . . I learned out of fear, which is still a very effective teaching method. Don’t underestimate it.”

Zucker died in 1981 at age 83.

“At his memorial service, one person came up and (told) a story to the effect that he never gave any student an A except for me,” Fannon recalled. “It was the crowning achievement of my life, and it came at someone’s memorial service.”

If there was a lesson from those days that she still carries with her, it has to do with the precision with which he chose his words: “He always chose the right word-- always --and he cautioned me to choose the right word.”

Fannon came out West making her living as a technical writer, but instead she found success writing for TV soap operas. Then, just as she was about to change networks, the writers’ strike hit in 1989. She decided to take a playwriting class at UC Irvine, taught by SCR literary manager John Glore.

“I have to say that I can take absolutely no credit for her success as a playwright,” Glore joked in a telephone interview. He said he has had many students, but he recalls that Fannon showed a talent for playwriting early.

“Once she started, she didn’t stop,” Glore said. “That gives you some sense of how serious she became. . . . She does have kind of quirky view and a great comic sense, a lightness of touch and a seriousness of bearing that combine wonderfully in her work. Mostly it’s the kind of thing we look for in a writer, and that is a distinctive point of view.”

Glore and Fannon became friends while she was still a student.

“As her teacher and friend, I couldn’t really advocate for her work at SCR as I would have otherwise.”

Through the contests, however, Fannon eventually made her mark, culminating in the coming premiere of “Green Icebergs.”

For the premiere, she will be receiving visitors, family and friends, from as far away as Spain and Hawaii.

“They’ll be here when the reviews come out, so they can get the gurney and the Valium drip,” Fannon said, her lighter side coming through again.

* What: “Green Icebergs.”

* When: Previews Friday, Oct. 14, through Oct. 20. The regular run is Oct. 21 to Nov. 20. Performance times are Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m.

* Where: South Coast Repertory Mainstage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Avenue and head north to Town Center Drive. Take a right.

* Wherewithal: Previews, $16 to $26; regular run, $26 to $36.

* Where to call: (714) 957-4033.

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