THEATER : Designer Sets the Mood With Depth and Detail : Stage: Another Depression-era play--Clifford Odets’ “Golden Boy”--is in the works for designer of ‘Holy Days’ set.’

Backstage at South Coast Repertory, the cast and crew call it “the battle of the sets.” In one corner: “Search and Destroy,” Howard Korder’s chronicle of a man who will do anything for success in the get-ahead ‘80s. The spare Mainstage set is sleek, cold and immaculate.

In the other corner: “Holy Days,” Sally Nemeth’s tale of two farm couples surviving the Kansas Dust Bowl during the Depression a half-century earlier. The Second Stage set, also spare, is homey, warm, and coated with a mixture of makeup powder and fine-grained sand.

“One play is all about dust, and the other is all about the lack of dust,” says “Holy Days” set designer John Iacovelli. “There’s a common hallway to the dressing rooms; the Mainstage cast has to step on a little wet towel to wipe off their feet before going on.”

The 30-year-old designer--a stocky, square-jawed, former New Yorker with a thick black mustache--finds the contrast between the high-tech, polished surfaces of Korder’s play and the cracked earth and sandblasted wood of Nemeth’s revealing not only of their respective periods but also of their characters’ inner lives.

“With ‘Holy Days,’ we wanted to create a deep sense of place,” he said. “I remember Martin (Benson, the director) kept saying ‘texture, texture, texture.’ That went for everything, from the acting to the costumes to the set.

“He also kept using words like ‘four-square architecture.’ The environment had to be destitute, but he didn’t want anything ramshackle or rickety--which is the way you think of the Joads” in John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl saga, “The Grapes of Wrath.”

While “Search and Destroy” distances the audience from the characters, as though they are playing episodes of a supersonic cartoon sketched in panels across a vast, impersonal canvas, “Holy Days” draws the audience in by imparting the uncanny feeling of an intimate diorama brought slowly to life through a heightened and poetic realism.

Coincidentally, Iacovelli is already at work designing another Depression-era play--Clifford Odets’ “Golden Boy”--in the scene shop of the Village Fine Arts Theatre on the UC Irvine campus. Judging from his miniature stage model for that set, it too will suggest moody, period details of the ‘30s, although of a completely different order.

“We’re setting the play in a run-down gym,” he said of Odets’ classic drama about a young man torn between the fast money of boxing and the less remunerative but more soul-satisfying rewards of the violin. “One of the ideas is to transport you back in time. Another is to create the psychological environment of a brutalized world.”

With 13 scenes and a huge cast, “Golden Boy” (opening next month) presents the problem of making quick changes. “We’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve,” Iacovelli said, sliding the model’s slip stage back and forth with his index finger to show how furniture would be moved on and off the set during blackouts.

Despite his enthusiasm for finding ingenious solutions to knotty theatrical problems, it seemed unusual that Iacovelli would be working on a college production at all, if only because he is among the busiest professional set designers in Southern California. He has done four shows for the Mark Taper Forum since 1986, seven for the Los Angeles Theatre Center since 1988 and, in the past year alone, three for South Coast Repertory.

“You try to work with directors you trust,” Iacovelli explained. “When I was asked to do ‘Golden Boy,’ I found out Eli Simon was directing it. He and I had a working relationship years ago--we did Tom Stoppard’s ‘Night and Day’ in Buffalo together--and it was great. So I was happy to do this show.”

Ironically, Iacovelli will have more than three times the budget to spend on “Golden Boy”--the set will cost $8,000--than he had last season on the SCR Second Stage for his lovingly detailed design for “Talley’s Folly,” which cost $2,500--the same for “Holy Days.” He spent even less ($2,100) on Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny and the Clair de Lune,” which opened the SCR Second Stage season in the fall.

“What it really comes down to is serving the play the best way you can,” Iacovelli said. “If anything distinguishes me as a designer, it’s that my work is different each time. A lot of designers make all their work look like it comes from one world. Some are even famous for this. They want to imprint their style on every play they do. I’d rather have a play imprint its style on me.”

Indeed, it would be hard to tell that he designed both the look of cold grandeur in August Strindberg’s “The Dance of Death,” which closed Sunday at LATC, and the cluttered semblance of airless claustrophobia in Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker,” which ran at LATC in 1988.

Iacovelli has gone just as easily from the seedy motel in John Steppling’s “The Dream Coast” (at the Taper Too in 1986) to the hard-edged, bureaucratic laboratory of Vaclav Havel’s “Temptation” and its surreal playground of giant-size objects (at the Taper Forum last season).

Trained in scenic design at New York University, he also had such mentors as Oliver Smith and John Lee Beatty on and off Broadway. Television work brought him to Los Angeles, where he landed jobs as a staff art director on “Santa Barbara,” “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World.” He has worked in the movies as well, designing “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” among other productions.

But even from childhood in Reno, Nev., where he was born and raised, Iacovelli knew he wanted a career in the theater. “I started with a puppet troupe before I was in grammar school,” he recounted, “and I remember that I loved the backgrounds more than the stories.”

If anything has changed, he added, it’s only that the stories come first now.

“When I talk with a great director, we always start with the play as literature or as an event,” Iacovelli said. “We discuss what the play means, or who the characters are. We don’t really talk about where the doors go. Who cares if they’re stage left or stage right? We’ll get around to that eventually. The main thing is to hear the writer’s voice.”

“Search and Destroy” by Howard Korder continues through Saturday (curtain today: 8 p.m.) and “Holy Days” by Sally Nemeth continues through Feb. 25 (curtain today: 8:30 p.m.) at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $21 to $28 (“Search and Destroy”); $20 to $27 (“Holy Days”). Information: (714) 957-4033.