This local playwright loves OC theater; does it love him back?
Without Eric Eberwein, Orange County playwrights would still have a voice, but it would be little more than a whisper.
Eberwein is one of Orange County’s most prolific playwrights and definitely its biggest facilitator of new plays by local playwrights. Over the past 30 years, he has written some 40 full-length and one-act plays, and through his work with the county’s oldest playwrights' group, the Orange County Playwrights Alliance (OCPA), and the only new play festival for local writers, OC-Centric, he has helped develop over 150 more.
Eberwein has done as much as anyone to keep the conversation about Orange County plays alive. He’s helped introduce and celebrate the work of playwrights and cultivated relationships with nearly every theater in the county, particularly the storefronts. He is also one of the most studious observers of local theater over the past 30 years, and one of its most direct and honest critics.
By every indication, Eric Eberwein has been good for OC theater.
But has OC theater been good for Eric Eberwein?
Consider this: When the lights go up Friday at the Wayward Artist in Santa Ana on the world premiere production of Eberwein’s play “Peace Be with You” – a four-person drama written in 2019 focusing on a young man joining the Marines and the toll it exacts on him and those closest to him – it will mark only the second time in 30 years that a local theater has produced a full-length Eberwein play.
Point of Clarification
The word “only” in the previous sentence may have worked better in quotation marks. Rare are those O.C. theaters that stage full productions of original plays; rarer still are those that stage original plays by local playwrights; and rarest of all are local theaters that stage new plays by writers who are not either products of a prestigious MFA program or affiliated with the theater itself. With Friday’s opening, Eberwein joins Johnna Adams as the only local playwrights to receive world premieres of full-length plays at multiple venues in Orange County.
So Eberwein is in elite company. But while he admits that a full play production is the most fulfilling stage of the playwriting process, he’s not too hung up on receiving one and has never written a play expecting to get one.
“There’s no law that says you’ll be produced by your hometown theater,” said Eberwein, who was born in Santa Monica but has called Orange County home since he was 2. “The theater down the street has no obligation to produce your work. You’ve got to earn it.”
And it’s not like Eberwein is limited to O.C. theaters. His plays have won prizes, been staged from Albuquerque to New York City and received readings or been otherwise developed by theaters across the country.
No Expectations
Eberwein said he has never expected anything from writing plays: money, acclaim or validation of his talent. Nor did he start writing them out of some burning need to express himself or a fervor to change the world through his art. (Case in point: When asked what he would like audiences to walk away with after seeing the play that opens Friday, he responds: "Nothing in particular, just that it’s very compelling and engrossing. That they really like it.”)
But don’t interpret Eberwein’s lack of expectations in terms of the number of his plays produced, what he might gain personally, or how they are received as a lack of commitment to his playwriting. He sees them as quite the opposite.
“When I started writing plays, I found them to be fun and challenging, completely engrossing,” Eberwein said. “It was the type of writing that once I started doing it, I knew I wanted to just do it for life. It was my calling.”
Hearing the Call
That call first came when he was a junior journalism major at Cal State Long Beach. He knew he wanted to tell stories and had a facility for words, but writing plays never entered his mind. Up to that point, his admittedly scant experience with theater (high school musicals from the 1960s) led him to think that theater “had no relevance to contemporary life."
That opinion was upended when he took a class on modern world drama to help satisfy his general education requirements. Though the list of playwrights covered probably wouldn’t pass the diversity and inclusion test on a public university campus in California today (nine white men), his exposure to them blew his mind.
“The plays were like nothing I’d ever heard of. Reading them completely undid my perception of theater.”
Eberwein began devouring plays and was particularly drawn to the off-off-Broadway movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, the period that revolutionized American theater and brought writers like Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson and Maria Irene Fornes to the forefront.
“And then I kind of looked around and saw what theater was, or could be, and thought maybe I’ll try to write some plays.”
But though he was an avid reader of plays on the stage, he didn’t know much about writing plays for the stage; he had no theater background, and didn’t know anybody who did.
But he knew one thing: “I was looking to become a playwright as opposed to a hobbyist,” he said. “I wanted to do this seriously.”
The Road to Serious
Little did he know the road to being a serious playwright would begin in a room surrounded by people who knew as little about playwriting as he did, or that his becoming that serious playwright would be shaped as much by developing other writers’ work as by creating his own.
That room was a conference room in South Coast Repertory, where advanced playwriting workshop taught by SCR literary manager John Glore was held. It was the early 1990s, and SCR had already established itself as one of the leading forces in new American play development. If he wanted to become a serious playwright, Eberwein thought, he couldn’t get more serious than that.
But instead of finding a group of seasoned playwrights whose knowledge and expertise dwarfed his, Eberwein found people just like him: They all had writing backgrounds but none had ever worked on a play.
He also found that instead of learning how to write a play that could be submitted to a theater in hopes of landing a production, Glore had structured the class around a reduced version of SCR’s new play development program, a collaborative process of mutual feedback among students supervised by Glore. Students learned as much about playwriting from critiquing the nuts and bolts of each other’s works as they did from Glore.
Forming an Alliance
Eberwein loved the class, and when fellow classmates Eleanor Brook and Curt Webster invited him to join a new playwrights’ group they had just formed, the Orange County Playwrights Alliance, Eberwein was all in.
He was part of OCPA’s first bill, a full production of one-acts written by him and Webster and produced in November 1995 at a Newport Beach church. It would take 15 years for him to receive his second full production.
“The fact was that OCPA (in its early years) was mostly writers who decided we wanted to write plays. We were not dyed-in-the-wool theater people,” Eberwein said via email. “So since we weren’t theater artists, we didn’t have the skill set to run a theater or produce theater.”
And despite forming solid relationships with many of the county’s storefront theaters, and being invited to hold staged readings at their facilities, there was little interest among them in producing OCPA playwrights.
But that didn’t stop Eberwein from being one of the group’s most prolific playwrights. When he became OCPA’s director in 1998, he channeled the same tone of seriousness in his approach to playwriting into making sure members had the best possible readings.
Nurturing playwrights
“The writing of the play and the nurturing of the playwright are both a passion of Eric’s,” said Craig Holland, Wayward’s managing director and an OCPA member for six years. “You can see that in the number of plays he has written, but also everything from the way he summarizes feedback so it never sounds totally negative, to how he is constantly thinking about what actor would be good for a role and making it happen. That takes a lot of work, but as a playwright, I can tell you having the right actor can make all the difference in the world.”
In 2011, Eberwein added theater producer to his resume after being asked by Chapman University professor Tamiko Washington to help her coordinate OC-Centric, a festival intended to celebrate work by playwrights with O.C. connections. Its first year was limited to OCPA playwrights, and an early Eberwein one-act, “Do Hoosiers Go To Heaven,” which was the first play he thought he “knocked out of the park,” was among them.
The fourth full production of an Eberwein play, and the first full-length, came in 2012, when the Hunger Artists Theatre Company mounted “Great Western Wanderlust.” But the production proved bittersweet, as that theater closed later in 2012, adding to one of the darkest chapters in O.C. theater history, as Eberwein wrote in 2015.
Bittersweet may also characterize Eberwein’s feelings about his upcoming production at Wayward. The 2019 play was his sixth full-length play and was one of two inaugural winners of the Erika Bennett Prize, an award given to the OCPA members who write the best comedy and drama for a given year. The winners are decided by a panel of judges not affiliated with OCPA, and OCPA then promotes them to local theaters. That’s how Eberwein’s play found its way to Wayward. Eberwein is as appreciative of the production as he was of the award, but neither may have happened had Bennett, who was one of Eberwein’s closest friends and playwright confidantes, not passed away in 2019.
“She was an amazing person who always looked forward to tomorrow even when tomorrow seemed bleak,” Eberwein said. “She created right up until the end and she was a creative explorer who wrote plays that were provocative and experimental and asked serious questions. She wrote works of significance; she didn’t write trivia. And I think that’s one of the best things you can do as a playwright.”
‘Peace Be With You’
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Sept. 13-22
WHERE: Wayward Artist, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana
COST: $25-$35
CONTACT: (657) 205-6723; thewaywardartist.org
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