A Whitty native son.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

Jeff Whitty already knew that it's a long, long way from Coos Bay, Ore., to the bright lights of Broadway.

He's only just discovered that it's even farther, theatrically speaking, to Las Vegas.

Whitty, a Coos Bay native now living in New York, wrote the Tony Award-winning book for the hit 2004 Broadway musical ``Avenue Q.'' Based on its New York success, ``Avenue Q'' opened to great fanfare at Steve Wynn's hotel in Las Vegas in a theater built especially for the show.

`Avenue Q' uses large puppets for its adult-themed plot. It's been called an X-rated Muppets show and drew rave reviews, along with three Tony Awards: Best Book, Best Score and Best Musical.

``The most fun onstage this year,'' said the New Yorker magazine. ``Disgustingly irresistible,'' The New York Times said.

The 34-year-old playwright was vacationing in the Virgin Islands this winter when he got the news that Wynn would close the show down this spring and substitute a new musical, ``Spamalot.''

The irony, Whitty said in a recent interview, is that "Avenue Q" was selling enough tickets in Vegas to make it very successful, in Broadway terms.

Trouble is, they weren't playing by Broadway rules anymore. Vegas producers expect to get more money from a play.

"We were selling an equal amount in Vegas as we do on Broadway," he said. "And we're doing great on Broadway. But Steve Wynn also bought `Spamalot,' and - how do I put this? - there weren't resources to build another theater for `Spamalot.' We got squeezed out.''

The Vegas closing was a good-news, bad-news situation for him, Whitty said.

"I feel bad for the cast, obviously, and the crew, and everyone who worked on the show," he said. "But there is a little bit of artistic relief about it. We had to cut the play down to 90 minutes, which was very difficult.

``The Vegas audience is very different. In New York, you make an evening of theater. In Vegas, you don't go to see a show as the only thing you do. So it had to be shorter."

Another difference is that in New York there's a theater-going audience that can be relied on to see shows in their early weeks. Tourists only start going to New York shows later in the game.

"In Vegas, it's a tourist audience right off the bat," Whitty said.

"I think my next play is going to be about Las Vegas," he said. "It would have to be a comedy. I have a little kernel of an idea of a play about what happens when art and commerce collide, and the hijinks that ensue."

Whitty insists he isn't bitter about the closing.

"I have no regrets," he said. "I invited everyone I knew to come to the opening, and everybody came. Even if the show ends up closing, I want the opening to be fabulous. I have this blue rabbit coat I wore and a white linen suit with a rhinestone belt. It was my one chance to be Liberace!"

In any case, ``Avenue Q'' is set to open this June in a Cameron Mackintosh production in London. And the Broadway production, running now for more than 2 1/2 years, recently topped 1,000 performances.

Meanwhile, Whitty's newest play had a brief world premiere in January at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, Calif.

"The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler," which was commissioned by the influential regional theater, begins with the gunshot that ends Henrik Ibsen's famous drama about a woman who chooses suicide over her stifling life.

As Whitty's smart, dark comedy opens, Hedda wakes up on the bloody couch, still very much alive, and discovers she's now in "the Cul de Sac of Tragic Women," a limbo she shares with such other fictional figures as Medea (don't bring up the touchy matter of her dead children) and Mammy from ``Gone With the Wind.''

Most critics found the play to be very funny and ultimately flawed. "Variety" compared it to "Avenue Q" without musical numbers but said it needed work. It was directed by Bill Rauch, who has worked at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Whitty loved the experience of working in Southern California.

"The run went wonderfully in Costa Mesa," he said. "It built a really nice audience and made them some money. I had such a wonderful time doing it. It totally recharged my batteries. The cast was wonderful, and Bill Rauch was a dream to work with."

Winning the Tony hasn't exactly changed Whitty's life. What's been best, he says, is the fact that people are still watching his work.

"What's important is just being able to have `Avenue Q' up and running where people can come see it, as I intended people to see it, live in front of an audience," he said, and launched into a sermonette on the virtues of live theater in an electronic age.

``Everyone is always so doom and gloom about theater,'' he said. ``I have this incredibly optimistic view. There is nothing more brutally exciting and present than theater. As people retreat more and more into their wired worlds, their need for the sort of confrontational, ingenious, collaborative experience of theater is going to grow, if anything. Movies have become such bores!''

After growing up in Coos Bay, Whitty studied theater at the University of Oregon. He last visited his family in Oregon before Christmas.

"I got back and was so happy to see what a little economic boomlet is going on there," he said. "I grew up during the economically strained days in Coos Bay. It looks so much better. The ineffable spirit of the town is so optimistic that it's really nice to see."

Whitty's Tony Award sits on a shelf in his Manhattan apartment among other awards that are as often collected as won.

"I have a collection of vintage trophies," Whitty said. "The more dilapidated, the better. Arthur Miller bronze awards for dance. A Mister Senior Boston second-place body-building trophy. I have a coon hunting trophy. That has a tree with a raccoon on top of it."

And now he has a real live Tony. ``The Tony is next to my spelling bee trophy from 1983 for winning the district spelling bee in Coos Bay,'' he says. ``The other proudest moment of my life.''

CAPTION(S):

Jeff Whitty accepts his Tony Award in 2004 for ``Avenue Q.'' The show is still running on Broadway after 2 1/2 years. Eric Jamison / The Associated Press Brynn O'Malley prepares her puppet Lucy for the Las Vegas production of ``Avenue Q.''