A farce is a comedy of preposterous proportions. Satire's sister, the farce features physical buffoonery and absurd situations. It depicts human foibles as "vain, irrational, venal, infantile and prone to automatism."

And – this is important – farces usually end merrily, even if the characters are guilty of terrible transgressions. Because farces are, above and beyond all else, entertainments, the reference books say.

So along comes Niv Brook, 18, of Trabuco Canyon. He pens a one-act play called "Mr. Wade is Dead" while still a student at Sage Hill School in Newport Beach. It's a zany sort of romp, true to most of the traditions of the farce – silly circumstances, mistaken identities, wacky disguises, fast-paced plotting – except that "Mr. Wade" has a – how shall we characterize it? – an off-beat ending.

It is the first, and only, play young Brook has ever written. He submits it to the 23rd annual California Young Playwrights Contest.

There are 280 submissions.

Fifteen become finalists.

Three get live readings.

And four – only four – will be professionally staged by the Playwrights Project, Jan. 31 through Feb. 10, at the Lyceum Theater in San Diego's Horton Plaza. "Mr. Wade" is one of them.

One of the other winners is about a foster teen who wants to flee his group home to find his birth mother. Another is a "lyrical drama" about a daughter trying to reconnect with her mother, who has dementia. A third probes the emotions of two high school students who are about to become siblings, as one's mother marries the other's father.

And, in rather stark contrast, there's "Mr. Wade," about a couple who fake a death to get their hands on insurance money.

"This play, what is it about?" says Maria Glanz, artistic director of the Playwrights Project. "The plot is about a struggling young artist named Wade, whose wife gets the brilliant idea that they'd be better off if the world thought he was dead. There's a crazy Greek neighbor who keeps coming over to watch 'Seinfeld,' and it has that 'Seinfeld' feel. It's a very funny play about a lot of things, and about nothing."

It's directed by Liz Shipman, who was artistic director of the Kings County Shakespeare Company in New York. Her "Midsummer Night's Dream" got great reviews from The New York Times.

"This play is a crazy farce, very physical, fun, cartoony," Shipman says. "It allows us to laugh at people going to extreme measures in order to survive. That's part of what farce is about – looking at ourselves, making fun of ourselves, laughing at ourselves. Farce is as old as man. They were probably doing it back in caveman days in front of the fire."

But that ending. She just doesn't feel it's in keeping with what comes before it. She wants Brook to change it.

Does she know she's dealing with a rugged individualist? The Ayn Rand Foundation director's son? A kid who has "Atlas Shrugged" on his dorm room bookshelf?

Architect Howard Roark, for those of you who remember "The Fountainhead," opts to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his vision.

• • •

People who don't know Brook very well think of him as that quiet, creative, introspective guy with the long hair and artsy goatee. His closest friends think of him as that obnoxiously loud, overconfident guy (his words, not ours) with the long hair and artsy goatee.

He was born in Texas to Israeli-born parents, moved to Northern California when he was 3, and then to Southern California at age 10. Not to reinforce any stereotypes, but he started making videos shortly thereafter, and is now a freshman film major at Chapman University. It weirds him out that he's still so close to home – Trabuco Canyon – but he considered Chapman the best option for a budding auteur trying to learn the technical end of the business and discover his own voice, without being preached to by professors trying to infect him with their artistic visions.

So far, so good. Brook (and his "Dead Parrot Productions") has nine videos posted on You Tube, almost all of which feature him prominently, and some of which are decidedly, er, edgy.

Brook's one and only script, by comparison, is far more innocent. It came into existence when Sage Hill School had a one-act play contest. Brook was 16, had just seen "Room Service" (Marx Brothers, 1938, penniless producers stall to avoid eviction from their hotel), and decided he would write a farce, too.

He studied "Arsenic and Old Lace" and similar films. What makes them funny? He deconstructed the genre's conventions – dark comedy, mistaken identities – and tried to fashion a story of his own. "I kept thinking about complicated stories, and finally decided I'm going to do something simple. A couple needs to pay their rent. Then what?" he says. "When I wrote first scene, I had no idea how it would end. I just kept asking, 'How can I complicate things further?'"

The main characters are the hapless but talented artist Wade, his wife Jessy, and their madcap neighbor Christos. When we meet Wade, he is breathless and hysterical, having just sneaked into his apartment past the fearsome landlady, to whom he owes months of back rent. He has just failed to convince galleries to show his paintings. "They said the color spectrum was far too verbal, and that it forced its own existence on the viewer," Wade miserably confides.

"I wrote them as flawed characters that I thought, just on principle, didn't deserve to succeed," Brook says. "But no one wants to actually watch a bad bunch of people fail."

So his main characters emerge as likable, despite their twisted attempt to solve financial crisis. So likable, in fact, that the play's ending seemed incongruous not only to director Shipman, but to Playwrights Project founder Deborah Salzer and cast members as well. We really like these characters, they told him. They deserve a more fitting ending.

Brook mulled. E-mails were exchanged. "I think you like these characters much more than I do," he told Salzer in an e-mail.

"Jessy and Wade have had a fair chance. Everyone pays rent and it is expected of you, otherwise you have no right to live in the place you are renting. They choose to use dishonest means to attain something that everyone else in the country manages to either attain honestly or suffer the consequences. Therefore their failure, because of the weakness of their characters, is necessary to provide closure….

"If I changed it to something where everything turned out happily for everyone, I would feel like I betrayed my original intent with the story, and it would no longer be mine, but an unfortunate compromise of what my values tried to embody in this story.

"After much consideration I have decided to keep the original ending."

He can do that. The authors of stage plays retain control over their creations. Unlike screenwriters.

We wish Brook great luck in Hollywood!