The Arts

Bill Cain set two award-winning plays in far-flung circumstances: "Equivocation" unfolded among Shakespeare and his colleagues in a theater in Elizabethan London. "9 Circles" focused on an Iraq war veteran, facing a murder trial.

Yet for his latest script, "How to Write a New Book for the Bible," playwright Cain ventured closer to home: his own childhood home in the working-class Woodside section of Queens, New York, where he grew up surrounded by a loving, colorful, ordinary-yet-remarkable family.

"How to Write a New Book for the Bible" is coproduced by Berkeley Repertory Theatre (which recently hosted its successful world premiere) and Seattle Repertory Theatre (where it begins previews this weekend with the same cast, under Kent Nicholson's repeat direction).

It depicts the family relations and background of Cain, a Jesuit priest whose calling is writing thoughtful, theatrically challenging works for stage ("Stand-Up Tragedy") and screen ("Nightjohn") that tend to ruminate on a nexus of moral and philosophical concerns. (His next play, commissioned by Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is about the symbolic and real relationship between President Lincoln and early civil-rights activist Frederick Douglass.)

Over coffee at an Eastlake cafe, Cain, a slender, intent Californian in his mid-60s, who is in Seattle to keep refining "Bible," stressed repeatedly that this new play is a memoir — and a departure from many American domestic dramas. It is not a portrait of family dysfunction: though it ponders the long marriage of Cain's parents, he says, "they are no George and Martha" (as in Edward Albee's battling-spouses classic, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?").

"There are so few plays about functional families," Cain says — alluding to a dramatic trend that extends back to ancient Greek tragedy.

"Most people are writing about the horrors of their family circle and want to distance and disguise it. I'm from an extraordinary family of wonderful people whom I adore, and my urge was to celebrate and get closer to them."

Cain began writing about his parents, Pete and Mary Cain, himself and his brother Paul in a novel culled from his personal diary. The (unpublished) work later became the source of "a memory play, about how the past is encapsulated in the present."

Characteristically for Cain, the scenario switches back and forth in time — to explore the effects of his brother's military service in the Vietnam War (drawing from actual letters home), the "unsinkable" bond between his parents, and the final months of his mother's life (she died of cancer in the 1990s) as she "came to a deeper understanding of her relationship with my dad."

Cain's father (who predeceased his wife by more than a decade) worked at a modest-paying job at the Army Corps of Engineers, and the family "lived poor," noted his writer son. "But people in our neighborhood loved to come to our house.

"We were a fun family. My parents adored one another, it was a love match. They were opposites in many ways, including politically. But they were always working things through. They'd fight, but they always fought fair."

As the play revisits the Cain clan, in good times and bad, "the essence of it is trying to reclaim who we are. I believe if you want to find something of true, infinite value, look at your family."

And the Bible reference in the title? "Many people look at the Bible today as a set of rules and dogmas, instead of a book about how we live together," he explained. "Each book of the Bible tells a family story — about Daniel, about Abraham and Sarah. I truly believe the cradle of the infinite is the family, and the revelations about it continue."

When asked how much of "Book" is autobiographical, Cain answered firmly, "All of it." And how has brother Paul, a respected schoolteacher in Texas whom Cain is close to, reacted to a revealing work that, like previous Cain plays, will probably be staged around the country?

"He loved the novel, and called me in tears after reading it. I think he's a little scared of the play. He'll see it, but it isn't quite the right time for that yet."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com