If there's one thing Zach Braff wants people to know, it's that it wasn't vanity or ego or even professional pride that made him turn to playwriting. It was a long-suppressed impulse.

"I'd always fantasised about writing a new play," Braff said. "Even when I had all this success in television, what I was daydreaming about in my dressing room is that one day I would do it."

When the offbeat comedy Scrubs completed its nine-season run last year, Braff left behind his man-child character of Dr John "J.D." Dorian to get in touch with his inner Eugene O'Neill.

Braff said he has been preoccupied with doing so ever since his father let him hang around and "be the mascot" at the community theatre that Hal Braff ran near his family's New Jersey home.

So the actor, 36, has written All New People, a dramatic comedy that opened recently at the Second Stage Theatre, a prominent off-Broadway venue. So far the reviews have been solid, if not overly effusive.

In this crossover age, television and film actors make the jump to the stage all the time. But they're usually standing on it, not looking at it from the back row as their words are hashed out in endless rehearsals.

A few hours before the show was set to open, Braff tucked one leg under the other on a single-seat sofa, in the loft-like apartment he shares with his girlfriend, the model Taylor Bagley, and their two lap dogs, Roscoe and Scooter.

Braff woke up at 5am in Detroit, where he is shooting Sam Raimi's Wizard of Oz prequel Oz, spent seven hours on the set, flew into New York for the opening, and will return to Detroit sometime around midnight so he can resume shooting the next day.

Interruption

The actor has put in more than a year writing and workshopping All New People, calling on various theatre luminaries, including the Tony-winning director George C. Wolfe. "This is me," Braff said. "I'm putting myself out there in a way I don't know if I ever have before. This is what I think; this is what I find funny. This is what I and my peers are obsessing about and brooding about and laughing about."

When we first see main character Charlie he is one unfinished cigarette away from hanging himself in a sleek Long Beach Island summer house in the dead of winter. Charlie's march to the smoker's lounge in the sky is interrupted by daffy young real-estate agent Emma, who walks in on Charlie mid-hang.

She tries to talk him out of it, he grumpily resists, and before long Emma's friend Myron, a literate firefighter with a slight substance-abuse problem, and a wide-eyed prostitute named Kim have shown up to hurl R-rated one-liners and get to the bottom of everyone's spiritual pain.

All New People is the first piece of entertainment Braff has written from scratc since Garden State, his 2004 screenwriting and directorial film debut, and it's tempting to see this as a companion piece to that hipster staple. In both, a young single man finds himself adrift, and in New Jersey, which in the Braff lexicon may be one and the same.

And in both Garden State and All New People, the main characters seek penance for a consequence-laden act that is not entirely their fault but for which they are not entirely blameless, either.

But where Garden State often veers into dour melodrama, Braff and the director, Peter DuBois, keep All New People light. Despite some serious themes and moments, zingers fly back and forth, from Kim's ditzy pronouncements to Myron's cutting insults. "It's kind of The Breakfast Club for 35-year-olds," Braff said.

All New People provides a kind of interesting experiment: What happens when the star of a long-running, single-camera sitcom plunges himself into a world normally reserved for starving artists and grant-seekers?

Resentment

"The success of Scrubs allowed me to pursue anything I felt passionately about without having to worry about money," he said.

"It allowed me to spend my summer workshopping my show at a nonprofit theatre. There are so many writers out there who can't invest in something like this."

The actor said he's aware that his entry to the theatre world might create a certain resentment. He came to know Second Stage, after all, via his Hollywood connections, when Braff starred in Trust, a play written last year by studio filmmaker Paul Weitz. He knows he could be viewed as a carpetbagger.

"I'd be naive if I didn't think there weren't people out in the theatre community who saw me as an outsider," Braff said. "But I hope they would simultaneously see this desire as coming from a love of the arts."