STAGE REVIEW : ‘SNOW’ FALLS ON VIETNAM AFTERMATH

Steve Metcalfe knows how to write heart. Put him together with actors who know how to play heart and--bingo. You’re on a powerful--and winning--course.

It’s not that Metcalfe’s “Strange Snow,” which opened over the weekend at the Coast Playhouse, breaks any new theatrical ground. Quite the reverse. It’s your traditional kitchen-sink realistic drama, but expertly driven to the wall.

The basic issue is Vietnam, but while other dramatic explorations of that subject have focused mainly on the combat experience (“Back to Back,” “G.R. Point,” “Medal of Honor Rag”), “Snow” deals with the aftermath: what it’s like surviving with intolerable memories.

Quite simply, it’s the tale of Megs (Brian Kerwin) who comes to visit his old Army buddy Dave (Dirk Blocker) on the first day of trout season. Dave lives with his reclusive schoolteacher sister Martha (Jean Smart), and before we know it we have an old-fashioned love story on our hands.

Though not entirely. Plot here is an excuse for exploring the post-Vietnam syndrome in the context of real lives. Dave resents--and tries to reject--the re-entry of Megs into his orbit. They share extremely painful secrets about Vietnam that Dave has almost managed to embalm in alcohol. The last thing he wants coming around now is an irrefutable reminder.

Life, of course, rarely cooperates. Dave doesn’t like the attention Megs pays Martha or the attention she offers in return. They’re certainly an odd couple: She, a lonely and bookish teacher of English; he, an ebullient grease monkey who flunked everything but auto shop in high school.

Dave tries to warn Martha that Megs is trouble, that she’ll be sorry, but what she sees is a sweet and kind and funny guy who actually notices she exists. It’s a lot.

In time, oddly enough, they all, to Metcalfe’s credit, turn out to be a little right and a little wrong. There are no villains here, which gives the play its uncommon strength. There is even a semi-happy ending, but not until Megs almost gives up Martha, not until Dave is forced to confront himself and not until he and Megs go through a howling, knock-down rite of exorcism and self-reexamination.

“Snow” is not a new play. It was commissioned by New York’s Manhattan Theatre club in 1982 and has had several productions since, including a recent one in town at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble. What keeps it going is the toughness of the fiber at its core.

Metcalfe has created intensely committed characters, thrown them into a less than plausible situation and made sure that they are genuine enough to make us believe in it.

While Smart will never be plain enough to be the real Martha (those fundamental good looks keep bleeding through; designer Bonnie Stauch’s attempts to drown them in drab or shapeless costumes are not winning the battle), she is bright, self-possessed and, as Martha, practical enough to seize her opportunity, however unlikely its shape or tardy its arrival.

Kerwin, of course, is the quintessential Megs. He is the production’s purest raison d’etre, re-creating his award-winning role here with as much fervor as he did two years ago at San Diego’s Old Globe. We can’t improve on the report we gave him then: His Megs is the perennial Peter Pan--a noisy, scruffy, shy, socially unpolished stray pup, desperate to love and be loved, falling over his syntax and bumping into his feelings.

The production’s surprise is Dirk Blocker. His mule-headed, beer-drinking Dave gives little early indication of the power of his eventual discomfiture. It comes just as we are ready to dismiss him as Mr. Insensitivity. The moment is cathartic and heartbreaking, and the relief of tension that follows as palpable as it is memorable.

Director Dan Polier’s otherwise unobtrusive hand is visible only at these moments where proper orchestration becomes paramount. The set by Dorian Vernacchio and Deborah Raymond is awkwardly placed on the Coast Playhouse’s stage and, for all its attention to realistic detail, has an electric range that doesn’t light up. Sound design by Steven Barker and, especially, lighting by Ann M. Archbold, serve the production well.

Performances at 8325 Santa Monica Blvd. run Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 7 and 10 p.m., until Dec. 28 (213) 650-8507.