A Lamb Goes to Hollywood : Entertainment: David McFadzean, who began his career with the Lamb’s Players in National City, has gone on to write for two prime-time television comedies.

David McFadzean has two openings this week.

“Carol & Company,” the new Carol Burnett comedy series that he co-created and co-produces with “Roseanne” creator Matt Williams, starts its second season at 10 p.m. Saturday on NBC.

Then there’s the return engagement of the Lamb’s Players Theatre’s 1983 production of “Damien,” which McFadzean directed. This one-man show based on the historical Father Damien DeVeuster, a priest who devoted his life to caring for lepers, opens tonight at the Lyceum Space.

If the two shows represent a vast range of interests, McFadzean likes it that way. He began his professional writing and directing career in 1979 as a staff member of National City’s Lamb’s Players Theatre, a self-described Christian theater troupe. He stayed with Lamb’s until 1985, when he left to teach theater.

He has become known in Hollywood, however, as a television comedy writer, a career which he began by writing for “Roseanne” in 1987 at the invitation of Williams, his college roommate.

Both aspects of his career remain important to him, he said on the phone from his Burbank office. “I believe you need to create three-dimensional Christian characters, Buddhist or atheist characters,” he said. “They are not always going to say what you want them to say. But you have to serve all of them by giving them a strong heart to say what they have to say.”

McFadzean said he has found satisfaction in “Carol & Company” and “Roseanne”--well, at least in the first 12 episodes of Roseanne Barr’s show, before she fired producer and creator Matt Williams.

McFadzean left the show with the rest of the writing staff at the end of the first year. He alternately describes the experience as his “trial by fire,” his “prison sentence” and his “lovely ‘Roseanne’ period,” a phrase he repeats with heavy sarcasm.

“When you watch the first 12 episodes, you can see that there is more love and concern expressed about working out what it means to be a family than there is in other family sitcoms,” he said. “She (Barr) was always acerbic, but you always knew she had her family at heart and there was a good strong relationship between her and her husband. There were good family values, but with an edge.”

After he left the program, McFadzean servered all ties with the show. “I don’t watch it anymore,” he said. “But then, I don’t watch much television.”

As for “Carol & Company,” the constantly changing format allows McFadzean to write small plays every week. Recently he was even able to work in a sketch with a good angel/bad angel routine.

But he hopes people won’t expect him to be injecting religious doctrine in his writing. He has his beliefs, but more and more he finds his range of subject matter widening.

“Most of my friends understand that I don’t call all the shots,” McFadzean said. “Sometimes they’re surprised at what I think is very good.”

Despite McFadzean’s big-time successes, the connection to Lamb’s Theatre is one he values and hopes to continue. He has already written about half a dozen plays for Lamb’s, including “Deep River,” which was later produced off-Broadway, and the award-winning “Oklahoma Rigs.” It was after seeing “Oklahoma Rigs” that Williams asked him to move to Hollywood and write for “Roseanne.”

“I don’t think, for a writer, I could have a better situation to create things,” he said of the Lamb’s Players. “They know my mind because I was with them for so long and I love it. Their esthetics are wonderful for a small theater. They always show me something that isn’t there and they cover the problems in the script so well that you think it’s better than it is.”

McFadzean returns the favor by directing “Damien.”

What attracted him to “Damien,” he said, was playwright Aldyth Morris’ portrayal of Damien as a difficult man rather than as a plastic saint. While it shows him as an imperfect man, it also shows the heights that such an imperfect man can attain.

“For me it is such a fair representation of what it is to be a Christian in all of its strengths and weaknesses,” he said.

“He’s not sanitized. He’s got an angry side as well as a loving side and a compassionate side. He’s got lust. And yet you come out thinking that this is a man to reckon with spiritually. This is a man who knows how to love and to love greatly. But it’s not without pain. In ‘Damien,’ the story shows that, even when you commit yourself to God, it’s a difficult life to live.”

McFadzean, who describes himself as a devout Christian, expresses little patience for the way many Christian troupes “tend to sanitize things.”

That is something that he feels Lamb’s has not been guilty of.

“Oftentimes, Christian theater groups do ‘Oklahoma,’ ‘The Sound of Music’ and original pieces that are only industrial shows for Christians,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that they are bad or wrong, but they don’t have the artistic or literary depth that you need to challenge artists with.

“As a Christian, being able to go into a Christian performing arts company and do Shakespeare was very attractive.”

Ironically, McFadzean’s theatrical career began with the kind of Christian shows he now rejects. He started writing Bible dramas in the mid-’70s soon after he and his wife, Elizabeth, were converted to a Pentecostal religious belief by the high school principal and the guidance counselor in a school where both were teaching. They left the school and began touring the country with shows that McFadzean wrote.

After a few years of that, McFadzean knew he “didn’t want to get caught up in doing only ministry work. I also wanted a chance to direct mainstream plays.”

He and his wife applied to Lamb’s and were accepted. McFadzean didn’t care for acting, so Lamb’s Artistic Director Robert Smyth encouraged him to write. McFadzean’s first full-length play was an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

“It was way too long, but I felt there was real potential there and we produced it,” Smyth recalled. “After that we thought, ‘Let’s try it again.’ ”

“It was amazing to watch him blossom,” Smyth said. “I think he really understands character and the heart of what motivates people.”

McFadzean stayed with Lamb’s until 1984, when he left to teach in the theater department at Judson College in Elgin, Ill. After moving back to Southern California in 1988, he renewed his relationship with Lamb’s.

He wrote another family drama, “Kilts,” during his stint at “Roseanne.” It was produced at Lamb’s two years ago under Smyth’s direction of Lamb’s artistic director Robert Smyth. And they are talking about a sequel to the show, “Blue Moon.”

McFadzean was also instrumental in getting Lamb’s the West Coast premiere of “Johnny Pye and the Foolkiller,” a new musical that will open Oct. 5 at Lamb’s home in National City.

After nearly three years in Hollywood, however, McFadzean said he still doesn’t understand why movies dwell on what he refers to as “evil” rather than good.

“Movies like ‘Ghost’ and ‘Halloween 15’ depict blood lust and excitement. And there is a truth to the evil dimension they represent. You should be scared,” he said.

“But why don’t we buy the truth of the spirit of the good dimension? We buy the evil, but not the good and I don’t know why that is.”

The play “Damien,” by contrast, accomplishes exactly what McFadzean believes a good play should. Evil, which is represented by leprosy, remains terrifying and yet there is a theme of redemption and hope.

“No one is healed. The leprosy is horrific. The evil is not made palatable,” McFadzean said.

“But the victory here comes from persistence and sacrifice and love. That was why the play was very attractive to me.”

“Damien” open s tonight at the Lyceum Space. On Tuesday, Lamb’s will present a benefit performance of “Damien” for the AIDS Chaplaincy Program and Hope Ministries of San Diego, two organizations working directly with AIDS patients and their families and friends.