Theater no trivial pursuit to 'The Understudy' playwright Theresa Rebeck

'If you're going to write plays," says playwright Theresa Rebeck from the Brooklyn home she shares with her husband and two children, "if you know that's your vocation, you don't want to be trivial."

Rebeck has written novels, film scripts, and TV pilots as well as a string of successful dramas, among them Mauritius (2007) and Omnium Gatherum, cowritten with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, for which she was a 2003 Pulitzer finalist. She's funny, often satirical, often wacky - but one thing she can't be accused of is triviality.

Two major Rebeck works are coming to the Philadelphia area, starting with her most recent play, The Understudy, now in previews and opening at the Wilma Theater on Wednesday. Another is under way at the University of Delaware, where Rebeck, in residence there, is writing an ambitious work titled O Beautiful. The university's Resident Ensemble Players will debut it April 22.

"It's really exciting to finally have a full production in Philadelphia," Rebeck says. In 1989 she was part of the Mentor Project, administered by the Philadelphia Theatre Company, and she workshopped her play Spiked Heels there, under the auspices of Arthur Kopit. "I had a wonderful time in Philadelphia," Rebeck says, "and I have fond memories of it. Many times I have looked around and said, 'What a livable city this is.' "

In both The Understudy and O Beautiful, she says, she has tried to strike a balance among three needs - to entertain; to tell the truth about our lives; and to let that spiritual thing called drama happen.

The Understudy concerns Harry (played by Cody Nickell), the title character, newly hired to backstop the lead in a Kafka play on Broadway. (Yes, we have no Kafka plays, but in The Understudy, a long-lost theatrical version of The Castle has been discovered.) Harry is understudy to Jake (Brad Coolidge), a Hollywood action-hero hunk, who lets Harry know at every turn who's the big dog and who's the mutt (and Harry is, no mistake, bitter about it). A third figure, just as compelling, looms behind and between them: the overburdened stage manager, Roxanne (Jenn Harris), once engaged to Harry, who fled.

Two men and a woman collide - and so do at least three kinds of writing: Broadway drama, Hollywood script, and Kafka, whom we hear in snippets as the rehearsal proceeds.

"You could say it's about theater," Rebeck says. "And it is - how a play gets put on and what's behind it. But it's also about more."