"There's too much meat and milk in the American diet," joked Mark Rylance. "We Europeans have trouble keeping up."

He was answering my question over lunch at Joe Allen's, a favorite actors' restaurant, about the physical humor of "Boeing-Boeing," and he admitted he has some bruises -- but he doesn't really seem to mind. Indeed, this whole Chaplin-Keaton-Tati side to his comic skills is one of the chief charms of a very funny play. (See today's very appreciate review, paired with a review of the contrasting "Macbeth" starring Patrick Stewart.)

Like Pittsburgh, which knows Rylance from three performances in Shakespeare, New York also knows him from Shakespeare -- four shows, all off-Broadway. He had one Broadway bid for his touring London Globe "original practices" version of "Twelfth Night" (which we saw in Pittsburgh), but the company was eager to get home. "I should have pressed ahead," he now says.

When he, Roger Allam and Frances de la Tour led the London cast of "Boeing-Boeing" for director Matthew Warchus last year (see my enthusiastic review of it then), Rylance told me a New York version was being planned. (Click here for a full interview in March, 2007 about all things Rylance, along with links to Post-Gazette coverage of his previous appearances in Pittsburgh.)

But it took a long time to put the "Boeing" deal together. So he went off to play the central role in Ibsen's comi-satiri-tragic "Peer Gynt" at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and he had planned to come to Carnegie Mellon this spring for a workshop of the play he is creating about Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick.

Then this Broadway "Boeing" came through, so those workshop plans were put on hold. But Rylance says since the Public's Ted Pappas and philanthropist Richard Rauh are both interested in the future of the new play, it might still come "home" to Pittsburgh.

It has to be written, first -- now, he has only about 40 percent of it. "I know what needs to be written," he says. The two men's deaths are already long scenes, but "it comes out with bones sticking out through the muscle and skin -- you need to cut and build muscle around it."

The theme clearly involves the domination of nature, both internal and external. Steel is man's tool to subdue nature, pierce the skies, span valleys and fly battleships aloft. The grandeur of his concept now extends to an epic in parts that you could see separately or together -- perhaps four parts over seven hours altogether. Two long death scenes are written, and he's working on Emma Goldman and Frick's would-be assassin, Alexander Berkman.

Thematically, the play will be about industrial invention and the desire to dominate nature. Rylance offers the Shakespeare history plays and the extended works of Robert LePage as analogies and inspirations. He knows he still has to get to the point, past the need to explain, where you "give yourself license to be playful, not to be bound by research."

Ideally, the actors will help flesh it out in a workshop, as they did with Rylance's last play, "I Am Shakespeare," in which an amateur enthusiast has for three years hosted an Internet chat show about the Shakespeare authorship controversy, until the day Shakespeare, Bacon, Oxford and Mary Sidney suddenly materialize out of the ether.

Last year's premiere went well, and he expects to stage it again in 2009. In it, the audience gets to vote on the authorship question, and Shakespeare always wins, but not without a tussle and a lot of doubts being weighed. Rylance himself is famously a Shakespeare-doubter, but he's enough of an agnostic to enjoy and dramatize many points of view. The play's ending is like the famous one in "Spartacus," where everyone claims to be the man they seek. He expects to produce "I Am Shakespeare" elsewhere in the year ahead -- discussions are under way, no specifics offered.

His "Peer Gynt" was in a version Rylance had the Guthrie's Joe Dowling commission by Robert Bly. "We worked with him a lot and he was absolute bliss," he says. The acting company improvised some scenes and Bly worked from that. "Robert brought his dry, Norwegian-Minnesotan humor to it. He had the guts to rhyme it and we asked him to go back and rhyme more," and he did.

Rylance says he's enthusiastic about TV's "The Wire," and as he talks, you can see the engaged mind of the playwright even more than the performer. He admires how the show balances audience attention between adversaries and "how deep down they'll send one part of the story, only to come up again a couple of episodes later."

As to settling in for his New York run, which the enthusiastic reviews of "Boeing" seem to guarantee, he says, "I hope I won't be too distracted by the delights of Broadway" -- he's hoping to get back writing on Carnegie and Frick.

His wife, musician Claire van Kampen, is spending some time with him, but she's working on a musical and also has some commitments to the Globe under his successor. One daughter, Juliet, is producing "Romeo and Juliet" at London's ancient Middle Temple Hall, where Rylance famously once staged the Globe's "Twelfth Night."

Rylance is contracted to Broadway's "Boeing" just through Sept. 9 (those making their summer plans, take note). In the fall, he hopes to be back in his own back garden in London, writing and also pruning, both plants and text. With luck, we might see some of the results in Pittsburgh during the next few years.