Still resonant

Playwriting doesn’t pay nearly as well as pop stardom, but it’s a line of work in which a young practitioner can be pegged as the “voice of a generation” and not have his life unduly distorted.

Bob Dylan took cover from the scrutiny that came with anointment as his generation’s poet by turning himself into a public enigma; Kurt Cobain escaped with a needle, then a gun.

More than 30 years after he first wore a similar label, Michael Weller gets to ride his bike to work each morning, grab what he considers the best cup of coffee in Manhattan from a curbside vendor and spend the ensuing five or six hours working on scripts he has every assurance will find welcoming producers who respect him as one of the theater’s steady, prolific craftsmen.

Among the several plays he has written in the new millennium is “What the Night Is For,” a two-character drama about marital infidelity that’s having its U.S. premiere April 3 at the Laguna Playhouse. At 61, Weller also takes satisfaction in mentoring, year after year, fresh cohorts of young playwrights honing their own voices to capture their own times.

In 1971, he was hailed as the playwright most directly in touch with the manners and mores of his g-g-g-generation. His career-making “Moonchildren,” an off-Broadway hit, depicted a circle of 1960s college seniors whose flippant humor and incessant put-ons couldn’t disguise their anxiety about a future fraught with dangers. “Loose Ends” (1979) checked in with the ‘60s generation a decade into its adulthood, as ideals succumbed to the exigencies of “making it” and relationships imploded over whether family or a fulfilling career should come first.

Being tagged as a dramatist for his generation brought more pluses than minuses, Weller says. Swift recognition set him up for a sustained career. “There are a ton of playwrights who have never been defined in a clear way, and they have a terrible time.” The drawback, he says, is that the many plays he has written on other subjects tend to get overlooked or misunderstood because they don’t hang on that handy, identifying peg. Weller, trim and wavy-haired, looks more like a tourist than an artist as he sits chatting on a soft, white couch in the foyer of Laguna Playhouse’s rehearsal hall. “You spend 99% of your time in the shadows writing, and the truth is you almost never meet anybody who knows who you are or what you do, or much cares about it, really. So the pressure is nonexistent,” Weller says.

His most widely seen works are the screenplays to two films directed by Milos Forman: the pop musical “Hair” and “Ragtime,” based on E.L. Doctorow’s novel.

Weller still wants his plays to reflect the social and political currents of his times. On Sept. 15, the New Repertory Theatre, a 155-seat house in the Boston suburbs, will premiere “A Voyage to the Sovereign and Most Holy Kingdom of Moomtaj,” a satirical fantasy inspired by the fallout from Sept. 11.

“A lot of the play has to do with how many bogus causes have been furthered by invoking 9/11. I’m positing that it means nothing at all, except what you make it mean inside ... where it’s free of all the common rhetoric.”

Always fond of plays with big casts and sweeping action, which budget-conscious nonprofit theaters seldom produce anymore, Weller these days is busy writing the book for a big-scale musical based on “Doctor Zhivago,” the Boris Pasternak novel and epic 1965 film. Lucy Simon (“The Secret Garden”) is writing the songs, and director Des McAnuff is overseeing the half-finished show’s development at the La Jolla Playhouse.

“He’s very skillful and a genuine pro,” says McAnuff, who first worked with Weller in 1985 when the La Jolla Playhouse premiered “Ghost on Fire,” about a filmmaker trying to regain his artistic grace after selling out to Hollywood. “He’s always tuned in not only to his own life but to his times.” McAnuff expects a highly personal dimension to emerge from “Only This Life,” another new play the La Jolla Playhouse recently commissioned Weller to write.

In contrast to the historic sprawl of “Zhivago,” “What the Night Is For” is drama in miniature: two unhappy, middle-aged people in one sterile Midwestern hotel room. Melinda Metz, a teacher who married money, and Adam Penzius, a successful architect, are on the verge of rekindling the affair that she cut off 11 years before. First they must decide whether a chance at happiness is worth the risk of torching the more or less stable lives they’ve fashioned for themselves. It’s the first installment in a trilogy of two-character plays; Weller says the spouses with whom Melinda and Adam have grown miserable will get their say too.

Marriage at the breaking point has been a recurring theme for him.

“I always valued greatly what it means to keep a family intact,” he says, because it’s something he never knew growing up. His parents, both Communists, split when he was a toddler, and his mother raised him, moving around a lot as she traveled in left-wing circles with her only child. Weller and his wife, Kathy, have been together for 30 years and have sons ages 16 and 14. Still, he sympathizes with his play’s adulterers. When happiness is at stake, he says, “sometimes I think you have to do the wrong thing.”

Most of the British critics thought that “What the Night Is For” went horribly wrong in its December 2002 premiere in London’s West End, with Gillian Anderson of “The X-Files” playing Melinda. Some were downright insulting -- “spine-crunching tedium,” sneered the Sunday Times of London. “A play which could and should send people screaming from the theater,” shouted the Observer. However, Michael Billington, the veteran critic for the Guardian, praised Weller’s drama as “a play both painfully honest and unexpectedly funny ... that tells the truth not just about sex but about the miasmic uncertainties of infidelity.” Weller sounds unbloodied by the experience. “I loved everybody involved, and I loved the audience response, so I came away with nothing but good feeling about it.” Keeping one’s equilibrium despite bad reviews and disappointments is a lesson he tries to impart to young playwrights. Inspired by the hands-on screenwriting education he got from Forman, Weller began inviting emerging dramatists to watch and assist each time one of his plays would premiere.

In 1998, he found a permanent home for that work, the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, where he and artistic director Angelina Fiordellisi launched the Mentor Project. Young writers get ongoing, one-on-one attention from a veteran over the course of a year as the newcomers ready their plays for production at the theater. Weller is the constant; he recruits a rotating cast of other notables to take mentoring turns, including Tony Kushner, Charles Fuller, A.R. Gurney, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein and David Henry Hwang.

“He’s really jazzed being around young writers,” Fiordellisi says. “He says it fuels him. It makes him remember his own beginnings.”

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“What the Night Is For”

Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach

When: Opens April 3. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.

Ends: May 2

Price: $45-$52

Contact: (949) 497-2787