By Melonie Magruder
Lookout Staff

January 5, 2012 -- When Santa Monica College students see G. Bruce Smith walking around campus, they might know him as the school’s genial, smooth-pated public information officer, or maybe as the administration’s champion for SMC’s Global Citizenship Initiative.

What they might not know is that Smith is a founding member of Playwrights 6, one of an elite group of playwright-managed theatre companies in Los Angeles, and an award-winning playwright with more than 20 scripts, two screenplays and production credits in theatres across the country.

Bruce Smith. Photo courtesy of SMC Corsair

Whether writing comedy, drama, one-acts, short stories or searing family portraits anchored in environmental tragedy, the prolific Smith says he found his voice later in life.

“I liked to write since I was a boy,” Smith told The Lookout. “But then I had kids and time management became an issue. After my youngest was in school -- I was in my mid-30s -- I figured I could start again, so I checked out a library book on playwriting.”

That modest ambition yielded his first feature-length comedy, “Close to Glenn;” two fully staged productions, and regional playwriting awards.

Smith’s talents fell close to the tree. His mother was an actress. His father was a journalist, reporting on crime scenes for Los Angeles-area dailies, who published his own short stories before he entered the diplomatic corps and ferried his family around the world, from India to Ethiopia.

Smith adapted one of his father’s short stories, a baseball treatise titled “The Last Pitch,” in 2000. It was produced locally, won a National Playwriting Award from the American Renegade Theatre in North Hollywood and claimed a “Pick of the Week” in LA Weekly.

Inspiration kept knocking, apparently, and Smith has won playwriting awards from the Ashland (Oregon) New Plays Festival, the Long Beach Playhouse and the New Play Festival at the Chameleon Theatre Circle in Minnesota, to name a few. Other works have received critical recognition from Backstage West, LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times.

He wrote “Butterfly Wings,” a drama about college students during wartime, as a commissioned piece from SMC’s Theatre Arts Department in 2008, and worked with the department’s chair, Perviz Sawoski (“a wonderful collaboration”) to stage it.

His current project, (working title) “Happiest Person in America,” was inspired directly by his job.

“My last play, ‘After Us the Savage God,’ and this one dovetailed right out of SMC’s Global Citizenship Initiative,” Smith said. “The last one is quite dramatic and I was inspired after reading about the drought condition in Australia that was causing farmers literally to commit suicide.

"It grabbed me and I finished a first draft in about five weeks. This one is a comedy in line with the initiative’s goal of health, wellness and the pursuit of happiness. But I never know when an idea will hit me.”

Smith doesn’t normally take on agenda-driven writing. He’ll read news articles that have inherently dramatic stories for ideas, but normally finds people or families compelling launching points.

“I’ve always been a story-teller and there are lots of different sources of inspiration,” Smith said. “Sometimes when I’m driving or at the gym, an idea will come. But I need to have a character involved in a story first, and then the theme of a play will emerge.”

Working in Santa Monica for 23 years has provided Smith with plenty of opportunity to observe a dynamic city in action and cull dramatic situations. Such with the case with his comedy titled “Canvas” that was staged at the Electric Lodge in Venice in 2007.

“I pulled a major plot point for that one from watching Santa Monica city activity,” Smith said. “In this play, the city commissions a sort of bad-girl artist to create a work for the cultural scene, then gets nervous about what she might come up with. It’s a thinly disguised political structure but I think it was pretty funny.”

Smith believes Los Angeles to be an opportunity-rich environment for artists, with plenty of talent and creative energy available to playwrights. Despite rumors of impending demise of local theatre venues, he’s not too worried.

“Every arts group has been affected by the economy, even cities of means like Santa Monica,” Smith said. “There is always a lot of hand wringing in the theatre community about its continued viability, but I’ve also noticed a lot of new companies popping up.

"There are too many stories out there," Smith said. "I think theatre will be around forever.”