That’s a lot of calling cards

UNTIL a few months ago, Julie Marie Myatt was struggling with the loneliness of the long-distance playwriting career -- as in a long distance from financial security and an even longer distance from being noted, let alone famous.

Now the former long-distance runner -- she finished the 1995 L.A. Marathon in 3:39:10, good for 126th place -- has all the company an emerging playwright could want. This year, her 40th, is shaping up like a mad dash -- perhaps into the record book, if anybody keeps records for the most world premieres on prominent American stages by one playwright in 12 months.

By February, Myatt will have had four. Her surge begins Friday at South Coast Repertory with “My Wandering Boy.” The drama concerns a private detective’s search for a missing young man who has the charismatic allure and restless refusal to be tied down of a Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

May 23 is opening night for “Boats on a River” at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, which commissioned Myatt’s account of aid workers in Phnom Penh trying to rescue and rehabilitate Cambodian children enslaved in the sex trade.

Myatt, who nowadays gets her exercise walking her large mixed-breed hound, Longfellow Deeds, around her Los Feliz neighborhood, thinks the discipline she learned as a military brat and a high school and collegiate cross-country runner should stand her in good stead as she goes through back-to-back spring premieres, while also facing a late-April deadline for the first draft of another play. It’s an as-yet untitled piece scheduled for a November run by L.A.’s Cornerstone Theater Company. The semi-documentary script will be based on interviews with people whose lives have been shaped by laws governing reproductive rights issues such as abortion, gay adoption, in vitro fertilization and surrogate birth.

In February, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival will launch “Welcome Home Jenny Sutter,” about a Marine sergeant who’s hiding out at Slab City in the Southern California desert while trying to come to terms with having had one of her legs blown off by an IED in Iraq. The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., has booked a July 2008 run of “Jenny Sutter” as part of its effort to showcase new American plays.

A tough year

IT’S a long-deferred swing toward the spotlight for Myatt, a slender, cheerful woman with long auburn hair and large, warm eyes who loves Frank Capra movies but bailed on Hollywood in the late ‘90s after an episode she’d written for Showtime’s sultry sex series “The Red Shoe Diaries” was changed beyond her recognition. Myatt went back to her first love, the theater, knowing she’d be trading earning potential for creative control.

As her 40s approached, she’d had just one play, “The Sex Habits of American Women,” make its way across the country in well-established regional theaters. From 2003 to 2006, the comedy about a Kinsey-like 1950s sexologist earned mixed reviews, going from San Francisco’s Magic Theatre to the Guthrie to the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va.

“Last year I really struggled,” recalls Myatt, whose father, retired Gen. James “Mike” Myatt, commanded the 1st Marine Division during the Persian Gulf War. “I felt like nothing was happening.” Questions simmered inside: “Do I need to go back to school? Is this my path? Do I want a family?” And if the answer to the last two was yes, could she remain a playwright while raising a child? “It was just one of those years when things broke for a while.”

But the Guthrie was committed to producing her Cambodian play, having sent her to do first-hand research for it, and that kept her going. Last fall, Cornerstone asked her to tackle reproductive rights for its five-play Justice Cycle of new works about how the law can solidify or divide society. In keeping with Cornerstone’s method of burrowing into communities, collecting everyday people’s stories, then dramatizing their lives, Myatt hit the pavement in November. One outing took her less than a mile from her home near Griffith Park to interview Bill Rauch and his husband on their outdoor deck about their experiences as the gay adoptive parents of two small boys. Rauch, the co-founder and former artistic director of Cornerstone, was on the hunt for new plays to fill two slots: at South Coast, where he frequently directs, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he was putting together the 2007-08 season, his first as that company’s artistic director. He didn’t know Myatt, but he’d seen and liked her “Sex Habits” comedy and had been “totally shaken up” reading her Cambodian script. Did she have anything else not yet spoken for?

Rauch jumped at the two plays she gave him, admiring their grittiness and what they had to say about the state of the American spirit. This was one-stop play shopping, with home delivery thrown in. “It was unbelievably fortuitous,” says the director.

Now the playwright is unbelievably busy. “I’m very stressed out at the moment, but it’s a good kind of stress to have,” Myatt says, sipping espresso during the first week of rehearsals.

She traces the beginning of her theatrical path to another lucky convergence. As a junior English major at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., Myatt took a course about female playwrights and a writing seminar given by science fiction author Orson Scott Card. Reading the playwrights got her interested in entering a campus short-play contest, and she figured she could turn her script in for credit in Card’s course as well. It was called “Camouflaged Love” -- “or something stupid like that” -- about a military family, of course, and it came back with one of those scrawled professorial comments that changes lives: “He said, ‘You can do this. It’ll be a hard road, but you can do this.’ ” Then the play festival chose her script and staged it. “I was hooked.”

The transient life

THE seed for “My Wandering Boy” was John Krakauer’s nonfiction book “Into the Wild,” about an idealistic but ill-prepared young man -- a former cross-country runner -- who tried to rough it alone in the Alaskan wilderness and died of starvation. More than his doomed adventure, documented with diary entries and self-snapped photos as his life ebbed away, what grabbed Myatt was the emptiness his disappearance left in his family and friends. She set rules for herself: The play would weave video intrinsically into its storytelling, using footage shot by Emmett, the missing title character. But the audience would never see or hear Emmett; viewers would be in the same shoes as the detective trying to piece him together from belongings left behind and the fragmentary, even misleading accounts of his parents and friends.

“I thought, ‘God, what would it be like to have someone in your family just walk off and vanish? That kind of hole in your life.’ I wonder what’s worse -- death, or someone being gone, and not having any idea where.” She says she connects with the story, explaining, “I feel like I have a transient heart.” As the daughter of a career soldier, she had to adapt every two years or so to a new base, a new school. “Creating roots is very hard for me. There’s both a huge desire to have a home and yet this kind of weird ... well, home is a big issue. And I’ve dated a lot of Emmetts. Oh, yeah. Those charming men who cannot be held.”

Michael Dixon, a member of the Guthrie artistic team who has championed Myatt over the last six years and will direct “Boats on a River,” doesn’t think the next 12 months are necessarily make or break for her theater career. Even if none of the four plays is a hit, “she can’t help but increase her circle of fans exponentially.” Rauch admits that as the director of the first leg of this one-woman relay race and the artistic director overseeing the last, he feels a lot of responsibility. “I really believe in Julie’s voice, and I don’t want to cloud it in any way,” he says.

While her imaginative voice is about to cross the country, Myatt is not recalibrating her assumption that a life in the theater means living close to the margins. “This year I’m lucky because I’m busy,” she says matter-of-factly. “Next year? You know, it’s the nature of the life. I think that’s why I associate with the homeless in a lot of ways. I think that there but for the grace of a fellowship, or a little help from friends and family ...” Her voice trails off, and one imagines the footage of L.A.’s skid row that she shot for “My Wandering Boy” running in her mind.

“A lot of playwrights live really on the edge.”

mike.boehm@latimes.com

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‘My Wandering Boy’

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

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: May 6

Price: $28 to $60

Contact: (714) 708-5555 or www.scr.org