Douglas Carter Beane spills the Broadway beans

NEW YORK — Douglas Carter Beane may have two musicals simultaneously playing on Broadway but that isn't enough.

"Neil Simon had four. Where are my other two? C'mon. I'm here to break records. I'm not here to do art," says the playwright, matter-of-factly. "I used to care about the process of creating art. Now it's all about the tally sheet at the end of the day."

Then he smiles slyly, unable to keep up the ruse.

To meet Beane is to laugh a lot — his dialogue is littered with a wonderful mix of witty, arch and sarcastic humor that recalls the lost era of Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table. He drops bon mots the way regular people drop crumbs.

"He has something witty to say about everything," says director and choreographer Dan Knechtges, who has worked with Beane twice. "He is always on. If you give him an inch he takes a mile with the joke."

These days are good ones for Beane. "Sister Act," one of the musicals he helped write, has been playing for more than 250 performances on Broadway, and he's about to watch his new offering "Lysistrata Jones" open a few blocks away. In the pipeline for the next Broadway season is a play — "The Nance" with Nathan Lane — and another, still hush-hush musical.

He both recognizes his good fortune and laughs at it. "I have very important phone messages that will be playing Broadway," he says, cracking up. "An evening of my tweets I think is going to be booked into the Golden Theatre."

At a Times Square restaurant for an interview, he orders green tea but isn't interested in food. The waiter wonders if he should take away the menu. "Leave it," Beane says. "You never know. I have violent mood swings."

Beane, whose play "The Little Dog Laughed" earned a Tony nomination and who also wrote the cult movie "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar," has just come from the Walter Kerr Theatre, where he is still tinkering with his crafty updating of Aristophanes' play "Lysistrata." Beane has taken the 2,400-year-old comedy about Athenian women withholding sex until their men stop fighting and plopped it to present day Athens College, where the basketball team hasn't won in decades.

He wrote it with his real-life partner, composer and lyricist Lewis Flinn, who gave the 411 B.C. story a pulsing, extremely hummable and contemporary soundtrack. Beane's book is classically structured — in honor of the Greeks — but he updates a line every week.