THEATER : ‘Holy Days’ Author Listens, Discovers ‘Whole Worlds’ : Stage: Sally Nemeth gets her ideas for characters by jotting down monologues that come to her out of the blue. She’ll ‘hear a voice,’ record the words and then decide whether they’re ‘a speech or a whole world.’

Sally Nemeth got a taste of the commuting life in Southern California last week, on the evening her play “Holy Days” had its U.S. premiere here on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage.

“Friday on the 405,” she said. “Nobody told me. I just didn’t have a clue. It was a 45-mile-long parking lot all the way down. No lie. I come out to Los Angeles. I get a rent-a-car. Wow. They gave me a Mustang. They were out of Econoboxes. This Mustang has power everything. Then I pull onto the freeway. And stop.”

The 30-year-old playwright made it to the theater in time for the premiere but missed the appointment for this interview by an hour.

“I hate being late,” she continued by way of apology. “But I’m used to it. I mean, I live in New York. If you’re on the subway, you get stuck between stations. The train doesn’t move again for I don’t know how long. You’re late. Period. Now I know why people have car phones. I kept looking for one. I swear to God I was going to ask someone to dial for me. Bumper to bumper. No accident. No nothing. God knows why.”

Nemeth sounded as though she could have been inventing a monologue for one of her plays. Not that her characters speak even remotely as she does--especially not Rosie, Gant, Will or Molly, the Depression-era farmers in “Holy Days” whose spare Kansas rhythms echo the dry wind of the Dust Bowl.

But Nemeth does get her ideas for characters by jotting down monologues that come to her out of the blue. She will “hear a voice,” she said, and she’ll record the words “just for myself,” then decide whether they are “a speech or a whole world.”

The entire opening of “Holy Days”--Rosie’s soliloquy about daffodils--came to her precisely that way, Nemeth recalled. “I thought, ‘This is a world. This is the Dust Bowl.’ I don’t know why. It just was.”

The pale, gray-eyed, auburn-haired writer had no direct experience of the era. She doesn’t come from a farm family. In fact, Nemeth said with a combination of embarrassment and amazement, she had even managed to get through high school and college without reading “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck’s classic saga of a Dust Bowl family.

Still, if you come from the country’s heartland--Nemeth is a Chicago native whose father started out in the Indiana steel mills--you can’t help knowing of the period, she noted. Indeed, no matter where you live, you would have heard of it if only through a Woody Guthrie folk song or glimpsed it through a Walker Evans photograph.

“The Dust Bowl is American myth,” Nemeth said. “There is something very enduring about that time, very large in spirit. Perhaps it has become ingrained in the American psyche because it was not a time of me and mine.”

After her monologues plant the seeds for her plays, the research begins. Nemeth is the sort of writer who likes to investigate her material and afterward lets it steep for months. With “Holy Days,” the method resulted in characters whose language sounds naturalistic but on the page looks like poetry.

“People have told me my plays have the most minimalist writing they’ve heard,” Nemeth acknowledged. “It is so stripped down in this one that Jeanne Paulsen, who plays Rosie, said the first time she read it she went: ‘Oh, haiku!’ ”

“Holy Days,” written in 1984, was first produced in 1988 at a fringe theater in London, where the notices were so good “they were just absurd,” Nemeth recalled. “It was kind of frightening. I thought, ‘Will I ever get reviewed like this again?’ ”

Her next effort, “Mill Fire,” was finished in 1988 and reached the stage for the first time last year at Chicago’s Goodman Studio Theatre, then was transferred to New York by the Women’s Project. Another production will be mounted next month in London. The play unfolds during the late ‘70s in Birmingham, Ala., and revolves around a furnace explosion in a steel mill.

“That one is the closest to my own experience,” Nemeth said. “I don’t mean the explosion. But I am very familiar with steel mills. My father used to put a hard hat on me and take me into the mills as far back as I can remember. When he moved up into management, we moved to steel mills all over the country. I spent most of my childhood in Delaware and my teens in Alabama.”

Nemeth, who was commissioned in 1989 to write a play for SCR, has already delivered a draft of her latest work, “Spinning Into Blue,” which also takes place in Alabama, this time in the backwoods along the Tennessee Tom Bigbee Waterway. The title comes from the central motif of a falconer who trains her falcons by spinning a lure in the air, Nemeth explained.

To familiarize herself with the material, she sought out a falconer about whom she had read in a newspaper article. “It was the neatest thing I’ve ever done,” Nemeth said. “I called him up and said, ‘I want to come see you.’ He lives with his wife on 40 acres way out in the woods. They bathe in a stream. They garden organically. They eat what their falcon hunts. Definitely back to the land.”

The theme of “Spinning Into Blue,” however, is actually about abortion. And, she added, “it’s pro-choice.”

In the meantime, Nemeth has begun working on another play, about pornography, which she plans to complete in the spring. The research worries her, though. “It will be told from the woman’s point of view,” she said. “I’m a little leery of what I’m going to have to do for this one.”

The playwright said she lives alone on royalties in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y. Productions earn her on average about $3,000 each, she said, “and there are not too many productions.” A recent $17,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts has tided her over “just barely.”

So how does Nemeth manage to keep up with the high cost of living in New York, where she arrived from Chicago slightly more than three years ago? Her apartment is “really cheap,” she said. “Only $500 a month. And they didn’t raise the rent this year.”

But the issue of “cohabitation (with her boyfriend) has begun to rear its ugly head.” That could upset the delicate economic balance. “We’re both going: ‘I’ve got this really neat apartment,’ ” Nemeth said with a laugh. “And you know New York. You don’t give up your lease until you have the ring on your finger.”

Sally Nemeth’s “Holy Days” continues through Feb. 25 on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Curtain times are 8:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, and 8 p.m. Sundays with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 3. Tickets: $20 to $27 (discounts available for students and seniors except on Friday and Saturday nights). Information: (714) 957-4033.