An Acute Interest in Bad Behavior (Published 2007)

BETRAYAL and treason and poor behavior. A lot of poor behavior.”

The playwright Theresa Rebeck is ticking off the common themes that unite her plays, which on the surface can seem quite unlike one another. Whatever the script — be it a comic solo show about one woman’s romantic tribulations (“Bad Dates”), an expressionistic dinner party held at the edge of Hades (“Omnium Gatherum,” which she wrote with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros) or a cutting satire about status in the empty world of show business society (“The Scene”) — a lot of bad manners are on display in Ms. Rebeck’s dramatic universe.

There is at least one betrayal per scene in “Mauritius,” with which she will make her Broadway debut next month, and which, in keeping with the eclectic range of her work, has all the earmarks of a traditional thriller.

“I’m actually interested in poor behavior,” she said, calm as a monk. “I’m interested in what drives people to poor behavior. I do believe that there are monsters out there, and that they are monsters.”

Ms. Rebeck said she generally finds things “interesting.” She uses the word as a kind of defusing descriptor for many events and phenomena found in her plays and in her life. She found it interesting that it took her 35 tries to get one scene in “Mauritius” right. (“I never had to go through that before.”) She’s interested why an article is being written about her, specifically “in the anecdotal evidence of a lifetime, what sticks in people’s heads.” And it’s interesting that Kevin Bacon once told her, “If you just stick around long enough, they start respecting you.”

Theresa Rebeck has stuck around.

Born in Cincinnati and the recipient of three degrees from Brandeis University, Ms. Rebeck, who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has brought forth roughly a play every season since “Spike Heels” in 1992 first established her reputation. But only now is she starting to command something approaching widespread respect. “Omnium” was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2004; “Bad Dates” was widely produced regionally following its 2003 debut; “The Scene” won mostly admiring reviews last season; and there’s this belated Broadway bow, the only original play by a woman to have its debut on Broadway this fall. Two volumes of her collected plays were published this summer, and Random House will bring out her first novel in March.

When pressed, Ms. Rebeck uneasily acknowledged that at some point recently she somehow “slid over the line” as a sort of theatrical eminence after so many years as one playwright among many. (She declined to give her age.)

“Show business is a struggle,” she said. “I certainly wish that I had just blasted on the scene and not had quite such a hard time. But there’s a great sense of the relief in that you don’t have to prove yourself anymore. You can just do your work.”

When colleagues are asked why they think Ms. Rebeck is enjoying her present wealth of professional activity, they cite her work ethic as often as her talent.

“She’s been around the block,” said Doug Hughes, who is directing “Mauritius.” “You go browsing in the Drama Book Shop, and there’s a lot of Rebeck on the selves. Her talent and her will have combined to insist that we pay attention.”

Julie White, who has appeared in four Rebeck plays and for whom Ms. Rebeck wrote “Bad Dates,” said: “You get the feeling that she just wakes up at night and writes a play.”

Ms. Rebeck, who has the warm but weary air of a working Brooklyn mother (which she is, of a 12-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter) and the slightly distracted demeanor of a tenured professor (which she is not), admits to being a workaholic. But she also claims to relish her compulsion.

“I think with most writers their neurosis is finishing things,” she said. “I have a different neurosis. I’m terribly anxious when it’s not finished. Then I become really difficult to live with.” So ingrained is her completion complex that, after switching majors from literature to dramatic writing, she went back and finished a half-completed degree in Victorian melodrama. Her husband, Jess Lynn, a former stage manager whom she met in college and married in 1990, once told her, “You’re like the opposite of Dorothy Parker, where you love writing and hate having written.”

But Ms. Rebeck stumbled upon the subject matter of “Mauritius” while she was avoiding work. One day, weary of writing, she began to surf the Internet and landed on a page itemizing the soon-to-be-auctioned stamp collection of a Spanish lord. “I became really fascinated by how beautiful the stamps were, and how strange and historic and utterly valuable,” she said. She began to delve into the world of philately and to puzzle over the monomania that fed its enthusiasts. “It became clear that there was some kind of hunger in these people that the collection of objects answered. I found that mysterious and moving — why that thing would satisfy your spirit in a deep and meaningful way.”

The play is about two half sisters who inherit a possibly valuable stamp collection and the three male philatelists who want to get their hands on it. “The stamps mean something desperate to all of them,” Ms. Rebeck said. “In some ways the stamps mean life to them. I’m a believer that all of us are broken in some way, and there’s a hole in our heart that we pour our own destruction or our children or our stamp collection into.“

Ms. Rebeck seems to share with her protagonists a strong sense of right and wrong. Her characters frequently pay for their principles. “The Family of Mann,” a comedy she has sometimes called a “documentary,” is largely an exposé of the wounds she suffered in the trenches of television writing, with which she has extensive experience. In addition to the occasional screenplay, from 1994 to 1997 she wrote for “NYPD Blue,” which brought her financial stability, a couple of Emmy nominations and regular accusations of having sold out. While she still writes the occasional pilot, she said she’s substantially absented herself from that world, calling it “a bit crackers for someone like me”

There are plenty of tales of Hollywood in “Free Fire Zone,” her recently published “writer’s guide” to working in film, television and theater. In it she relates, with comic aplomb and barely concealed fury, a few dozen terrifying war stories from her nearly 20 years in the business. She censors herself only to the extent of renaming figures with names like Caligula, Napoleon, Richard III and Satan.

Mr. Hughes, who recently started reading the book (“I hope I don’t end up in Volume 2,” he said), observed: “Theresa does not — and I commend her for this — she does not make nice for the sake of making nice. She’s a believer that pathologies and tainted motives and overreaction are important to expose. She sees that as her job, and it damn well is her job. Playwrights are here to make some trouble.”

Ms. Rebeck said she wrote the book as a “don’t kid yourself” answer to the many young writers who ask her for advice. But the tone of the book matches her plays, the simultaneous search and demand for values and decency.

“I think Theresa’s plays are about how to behave morally in today’s world,” said Will Frears, who directed the New York productions of “Omnium” and “The Water’s Edge.” “How is that possible?”

Ms. Rebeck herself put it more simply: “I don’t ever write about an amoral universe.” That, apparently, would not be interesting.