Tearing Down Walls in a Fearful World : Stage: Keith Reddin’s new play, ‘Life During Wartime,’ takes a look at the moral implications of selling terror for a living.

Little did anyone guess that sweet, ruddy-cheeked Barnaby Tucker, whose biggest fantasy was to kiss a girl once before he died in Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker,” was dreaming of war and nuclear destruction on his days off.

That was in 1987 when the La Jolla Playhouse cast actor-playwright Keith Reddin in the role.

Reddin is no Barnaby Tucker.

The 34-year-old has written about such politically charged fare as the Korean War (“Life and Limb”), the Cuban missile crisis (“Rum and Coke”), life in the United States versus life in the Soviet Union (“Highest Standard of Living”) and the bankers-traders-dealers (“Big Time”).

Reddin’s latest work, “Life During Wartime,” will have its premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse’s Warren Theatre through July 29.

Reddin made his first indelible impression as a playwright in San Diego when his “Nebraska” had its premiere last year at the La Jolla Playhouse. In that play, Reddin took a dark, intense look at what life at the bottom of a missile silo may be like for the men who keep watch over the fatal buttons.

It was not a pretty picture, but it was a critically acclaimed one that won Reddin an award for the best new play from the San Diego Critics Circle. “Nebraska” has just completed a run at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

“Life During Wartime” tackles another contemporary and, for Reddin, morally loaded subject: home security systems. In the play, a young salesman wants to make it as a home-security salesman and learns in the process that what he is selling is fear. As Reddin put it in a conversation in the Mandell Weiss Theatre, the question the salesman tackles is: “How do you protect yourself in this world that seems so chaotic without building walls so that you’re cut off from the entire world?”

“It’s about making connections,” explained Reddin, who, for the record, does not have a home-security system and does not intend to get one.

“He’s selling these systems which are about how to keep out a world that’s violent and crazy. At the same time, he’s falling in love and trying to break down walls.”

It’s also a very different play from “Nebraska,” Reddin said. Where “Nebraska” was realistic, with a claustrophobic air to match the explosive feelings of the men in the silos, “Life During Wartime” is fanciful and expansive. There is even a scene in which John Calvin, the 16th-Century religious philosopher, waltzes in to talk to the audience about free will and original sin.

Breaking theatrical walls is in keeping with the theme of the play, which is about building up and breaking down walls between people. Reddin confessed that some of the ideas he got for doing this may have come right out of--of all things--”The Matchmaker,” where Wilder, playfully moves his actors from within the action of the play to the edge of the stage where they address the audience directly.

And then, too, there is an innocence to the young salesman that Reddin--who may be just a little bit Barnaby-like after all--relates to.

“I want to fall in love and have a family,” the still single Reddin said. “I don’t want to give myself up to paranoia and insecurity and see the world as a scary place.”

He grew up in New Jersey and attended Northwestern University as an undergraduate and studied playwrighting at the Yale Drama School. He would have preferred to go into the drama school as an actor, but being afraid that it was too hard to go into, he wrote a play.

Still, his first move after graduation was to go to New York, where he became . . . an actor. It is in the last six years that he has written a play every year. That may seem a big deal to some, but not to Reddin.

“People think I write a lot because I write a play every year,” he said with a shrug. “It’s a couple of months of writing and then a couple of months of acting.”

His most recent acting stints are in the movies. He has the role of a Rolling Stone reporter in Oliver Stone’s upcoming film “The Doors,” about rock star Jim Morrison and that of a Harvard Law student in the film “Reversal of Fortune,” a story about Claus von Bulow starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close.

And the writing continues.

Fluency in Russian, which he studied in college, inspired him to write “Highest Standard of Living” and translate “The Russian Teacher,” a story about a doctor who illegally rents out hospital beds near a seaside resort by Soviet playwright Alexander Buravsky.

South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa will present the premiere of “The Russian Teacher” March 12 through April 14, 1991, at its Second Stage.

Reddin has been produced at America’s finest regional theaters including the Yale Repertory Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the American Repertory Theatre, the Goodman Theatre as well as the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference and American Playhouse. And “Life During Wartime” is already scheduled for its next production, at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in October.

But he doesn’t take anything for granted.

“Every time you write a new play, it’s like the first play and it’s judged on its own merits,” said Reddin. “It never seems to get easier. It’s just a matter of learning to listen to your own voice and having confidence in what I have to say and the way I say it. Finding your voice and your style is something I’m still trying to do. I don’t have a formula.

“I feel like Nebraska was good, but I didn’t want to write the same thing in ‘Life During Wartime.’

“I want to make sure that I’m not too comfortable or too safe. I want to dive into the world. I want to experience things. This play is about diving in and taking chances.”