O.C. THEATER : Playwright Slips in a Winner After Myriad Rejections : South Coast Repertory is about to stage ‘Once in Arden,’ the first major production for an Orange County playwright who never quit working.

Given a choice between acting and writing, Richard Hellesen decided it was no contest. “Writing, at least, I could do at home,” he says. “And the rejections come by mail.”

As proof of his wisdom, the 33-year-old playwright not only has a collection of 75 rejection slips dating back 14 years “on letterheads from some of the best theaters in the country” but one of those theaters, South Coast Repertory, is about to stage his first major production.

Hellesen’s “Once in Arden”--a historical drama about a renowned 19th-Century actress facing a classic conflict between her artistic ideals and her material needs--begins previews Friday on the SCR Mainstage in Costa Mesa. It opens April 20, with Martin Benson directing, and represents a first for the 26-year-old theater as well: an original work by an Orange County writer with an Orange County subject.

Nan Martin plays Helena Modjeska, a touring star of the American stage who made her home in the county more than a century ago after an illustrious Shakespearean career in her native Poland. Kay Kuter plays her husband. Patrick Husted portrays Modjeska’s friend and former protege, the pianist-composer Ignace Jan Paderewski, who arrives at her farm in 1904 to urge her to come out of retirement. Charles Hallahan is featured as the celebrated actor James O’Neill, who played Macbeth to her Lady Macbeth in New York. And Ron Boussom portrays a vaudeville agent.

“One thing all those rejections taught me is that whether you make it or you don’t, you just have to keep working,” said Hellesen, who has written seven other full-length plays and a dozen one-acts. “You can’t take the rejections personally. I guess I got so many, they stopped hurting.”

Sitting in a cubbyhole office at Cal State Fullerton, where he teaches an introductory course in theater appreciation, Hellesen maintained in an interview last week that being an agentless playwright with a drawerful of manuscripts is like being a cottage-industry distributor seeking a market.

“There’s the creative side, which is writing,” he said. “Then there’s the business side, which is licking the envelopes and sending them out. The customers either want to buy your product or they don’t. If they don’t, it’s not because they hate you and your children.”

Such a well-adjusted attitude results, in no small measure, from the fact that Hellesen spent two years in the mid-’80s reading scripts part time for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and a third year from 1986 to 1987 as its full-time literary manager. He recounted, ironically, that he often wrote the sort of polite rejection letters that he found waiting for him at home from other literary managers.

Hellesen also is a realist with a sense of humor and no illusions about the meaning of success in the American theater. “About 2% of the population goes to plays,” he noted. “So what I do is irrelevant to the other 98%. More kids went to see ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ last weekend than will ever see anything I write for the rest of my life.”

For all that, Hellesen never sounds more serious than when talking about “Once in Arden.” He recalled, for instance, that SCR’s response to his play made him “sweat bullets.” It arrived on a pin post card--no letterhead this time--and was addressed to one Tom McKillop, the pseudonym Hellesen had used.

“Dear Mr. McKillop,” SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch wrote, “Your play is a finalist in the California Play Competition. Please contact me by telephone as soon as possible.”

Why the pseudonym? Because by then, in the fall of 1989, Hellesen was working as a part-time script reader at SCR to supplement his income from Cal State Fullerton. He wanted an impartial verdict, and he was in a ticklish position. His main task, after all, was to read 360 of the nearly 600 plays that had been submitted to SCR’s first annual contest.

“Fortunately, they never gave me my own to read,” he said.

Neither Patch nor SCR literary manager John Glore, nor anyone else at SCR, had the slightest inkling that Hellesen had written “Once in Arden”--then titled “Pani Helleni”--until he showed up with the post card. But once his identity was revealed, he withdrew from the competition to avoid any appearance of unfairness.

Although Hellesen gave up the chance to win prize money of as much as $5,000--the top award last year went to Marlane Meyer’s “The Geography of Luck”--he feels he got “a better deal” with a full-blown production. By comparison, “Geography” received a smaller staging at SCR last spring (before going on to second version at the Los Angeles Theatre Center), and this year’s competition winner--Mark Lee’s “Pirates”--will receive a staged reading at SCR in May.

While “Once in Arden” is Hellesen’s first major production, he has had previous plays staged professionally. The Sacramento Theatre Company has produced his adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” for the past three years. And last year StageWest in Ft. Worth, Tex., mounted a small production of his original play “Moonshadow,” which takes place on the day of the first U.S. moon landing in 1969. This season, too, SCR toured his children’s play, “Gift Rap,” to county schools.

Nor is “Once in Arden” Hellesen’s first historical drama. He has written two others, both unproduced: “Lower Than the Angels” (about 11th-Century religion in Constantinople) and “Gold’s Fool” (about James Marshall, who discovered gold in California). But if the genre clearly appeals to Hellesen, the term “historical drama” does not.

“People tend to emphasize the word ‘historical,’ ” he explained. “I’d rather emphasize the word ‘drama.’ My concern is whether the play works. With ‘Once in Arden’ I’m not trying to present the audience with a biographical lesson. I don’t want people to leave the theater saying, ‘Gee, it was boring, but I learned a lot.’ ”

Similarly, he sees no great virtue in being called an Orange County playwright. Hellesen guessed that SCR’s interest might be whetted by a drama with local significance. (Modjeska has a canyon and a mountain named for her within 20 miles of the theater. And her farmhouse has been restored as a minor tourist attraction.) Yet, he contends, it would be parochial to consider him or his play in strictly local terms.

“My sensibilities were developed here,” said Hellesen, who was born in Lynwood and grew up in Orange. “You can’t divorce yourself from that. But this play transcends the confines of the particular. It’s about theater and artists everywhere.”

Besides, he added with a sly smile, “half of it is set in New York.”

Previews of “Once in Arden” begin Friday at 8 p.m. on the South Coast Repertory Mainstage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $15-$22. After the opening on April 20, tickets: $17-$28. (714) 957-4033.