Playwright Bitterman Gets a Taste of Sweet Success : Stage: 29-year-old Shem Bitterman works at a torrid pace; three of his plays opened this month.

Shem Bitterman claims to be slowing down. There was a time, he says, when it took him no more than a day to write a play. Now it takes weeks, sometimes even months, to finish a first draft.

Not that the 29-year-old playwright is complaining. By anyone’s standard, including his own, his recent pace has been torrid. “Three plays opening at the same time doesn’t usually happen,” he acknowledged the other day.

“The Ramp,” Bitterman’s obliquely drawn Holocaust drama about a romance between a Nazi doctor and a young Polish woman, premiered last week on the South Coast Repertory Second Stage as part of the Costa Mesa theater’s California Play Festival.

The prior week, “Self Storage,” a Hollywood satire co-written with Tony Spiridakis, opened at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles (to a negative review in The Times). “Beijing Legends,” his epic-sized drama about the Chinese cultural revolution, opened Monday at the Pacific Jewish Theatre in Berkeley.

Speed aside, can a playwright address such different subjects and say something meaningful about each of them? Apparently a lot of theater experts think so. This year alone, three of Bitterman’s plays won major awards.

“Beijing Legends” received a $30,000 grant from the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays. “The Ramp” earned second place and $2,500 in SCR’s 1990 California Play Contest. And “Ten Below,” a drama about homelessness, took top honors in the National Playwrights Competition of the Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City, Kan., where a production was mounted in January.

If Bitterman feels any hubris, he doesn’t show it. Pale, thin and blue-eyed, he looks like an intense intellectual in his small, round tortoise-shell glasses. And he sounds even more so, explaining that it was a book--Robert Jay Lifton’s “The Nazi Doctors,” which documented the participation of the German medical profession in Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews--that initially compelled him to write “The Ramp.”

“As a Jew and as a writer, I had to examine how such a thing could happen,” Bitterman said of the Holocaust. “It’s a very tough, personal play. Ostensibly, it’s about a doctor who selects people to live or die on the ramp at Auschwitz, but it’s really about waking up to the evil in one’s life.”

Despite its subject, Bitterman notes, “The Ramp” makes no references to crematories, ovens, gassings or other evils associated with Auschwitz. The word Jewish is mentioned only twice and the camp itself only once in a line taken from an actual letter written by a real Nazi doctor: “Auschwitz is a lovely place to summer, but in the winter one should really stay at home.”

The man and the woman in “The Ramp” suppress so much about themselves, Bitterman asserts, that unless playgoers were to read the program (or articles such as this one), they might not know until late in the play precisely what the protagonist does in his work.

The oblique abstraction of “The Ramp” is intended not as an evasion of a historic reality, he adds, but rather as its psychological reflection. The Nazis, after all, preferred euphemisms and the nullifying language of bureaucracy for their extermination program. People chosen for the gas chambers were being given “special treatment.” Those who did the choosing were “processing pieces.” “Nobody ever said, ‘We are gassing people,’ ” Bitterman noted. “We know now that as the trains pulled up to the camp, incoming German Jews would see Jewish women with long hair and polka-dotted dresses sitting on green lawns, singing, telling jokes. It was all an instrument of denial and, for the Nazis, schizophrenic denial.”

Bitterman contends, moreover, that the veil of hypocrisy enveloping the central couple of “The Ramp” is not unlike the contemporary moral blindness that enables us to ignore the homeless or to live with environmental pollution.

Lacking any personal experience of the Holocaust, the New York-born playwright visited Poland and Auschwitz, which is preserved as a memorial to its victims and a warning to the world. Both the camp and the country imparted an unutterable “sadness,” he recalled.

Like “The Ramp,” many of his plays--some 30 over the last 10 years by his count--have evoked what he calls “the drama of place.” And they frequently grow out of his travels. Two trips to China led to “Beijing Legends.” His years in the graduate playwriting program at the University of Iowa prompted “Iowa Boys,” which was developed in 1986 at a Mark Taper Forum workshop and has become his most widely produced play.

Bitterman, who was brought to Los Angeles by the Taper that year, recalls being “totally blown away” by the city. “It was my first trip out here,” he said. “I thought it was one of the weirdest places anywhere.” Not surprisingly perhaps, he wrote a trilogy of short plays about Los Angeles: “Tulsa,” “Death in Venice, Ca.” and “Exile in Century City.”

If anything besides a sense of place unifies his work, it would seem to be a certain grimness of material. In “Iowa Boys,” a man beats his fiancee to death and wakes up in the morning with no recollection of it. In “Self Storage” a psychotic serial killer sells his life story to a pair of would-be screenwriters. In “Exile in Century City,” the protagonist is strangled to death by a transsexual.

Bitterman, who settled in Los Angeles in 1988, also has written screenplays for the mainstream gore flicks “Halloween IV” (uncredited) and “Halloween V” (credited, but rewritten by someone else). “I knocked off the first one in a week,” he recalled. “They asked me to write ‘Halloween V.’ I did that one in three days. It was like writing a comic book. But it paid the bills.”