Kenneth Lonergan's 'Lobby Hero' brings its dark comedy to Theatre Horizon

Norristown's Theatre Horizon on Thursday opens Lobby Hero, Kenneth Lonergan's 2001 drama. Director Matthew Decker and cast will be unspooling a provocative comedy of errors embracing hot-button topics (racial profiling, police brutality, gender politics).

Lonergan, 53, is the bluntly lyrical author of the Oscar-nominated scripts for 2002's Gangs of New York and 2000's You Can Count on Me (the latter of which he directed), as well the critically acclaimed 1996 Off-Broadway hit This Is Our Youth.

In January, Lonergan's newest cinematic effort, Manchester by the Sea, which he wrote and directed, screened at the Sundance Film Festival. He came out of Sundance with a reported $10 million domestic-rights deal from Amazon. "I didn't ask them for free shipping on anything I buy," he said, joking - but he says he is trying to get an Amazon Echo.

Speaking by phone from his home in New York, Lonergan was preparing to preview his new Off-Broadway play, Hold on to Me Darling. He has been commissioned for a BBC adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel Howard's End. So it has been a great recent run, especially with the critical and financial success of Manchester by the Sea.

In Lobby Hero - a black comedy more dark than comic - two white police officers (a female rookie and her charming male partner) and a young white security guard and his overly officious black supervisor are thrown into a series of personal and moral dilemmas, all of which intersect on one lousy night in the lobby of a shabby-chic apartment building in Manhattan.

The play was part of a 1999-2002 cluster of works that included Lonergan's screenplay for the 1999 Robert De Niro comedy Analyze This (and its 2002 sequel, Analyze That) and another Off-Broadway play, The Waverley Gallery, in 2000. Also in that year, Lonergan made his directorial debut with You Can Count on Me and wrote the script for The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. The surge included Gangs of New York, directed by Martin Scorsese.

Rocky and Bullwinkle and Gangs of New York? Both of them? Humbly, Lonergan says: "One was a comedy assignment, one was a drama assignment, and I did my best at both."

It hasn't all gone smoothly. Think of what happened to Lonergan's film Margaret, a psychological drama of accidents and aftermaths starring Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, and Mark Ruffalo. "I never wish to go through that again," Lonergan says. Written after Sept. 11, 2001, filmed in 2005, and slated for 2007 release, Margaret got tied up in litigation over final cut for years, until it dribbled out in a quiet release by Fox Searchlight in 2011. It would not be until 2015 that Lonergan would try filming another movie, Manchester. "I was just really tired, literally weary, after that experience. That's behind me now."

In 1986, along with stage director Joe Mantello and actor/producer Fisher Stevens, Lonergan cofounded New York's Naked Angels, a nonprofit theater company notable for plays on controversial social topics. Lonergan says Lobby Hero started out as a 15-minute one-act play for Naked Angels that blossomed into something similar to works such as This Is Our Youth, in that it finds "characters in both plays dealing with situations that are too big for them to handle and balancing one's professional life and personal, emotional life." Lobby Hero was one of his first works to portray a professional woman who doesn't want to be viewed through the prism of her sex. The character Dawn "presents this idea of being asexual, or a sexless person doing their job," Lonergan says. "She doesn't want to be seen as a woman, but as a cop."

A key question in Lobby Hero, Lonergan says, is this: "How do you do your job - be a person - when your emotions are pulling you in other directions?"

Lobby Hero
Through March 13 at Theatre Horizon, 401 Dekalb St., Norristown.
Tickets: $20-$44.
Information: 610-283-2230 or www.theatrehorizon.org