STAGE REVIEW : Sledgehammer Hits ‘Seduced’ Right on the Head : Theater: Sam Shepard’s play about an eccentric billionaire based on the late Howard Hughes is a quietly powerful and disturbing production.

Howard Hughes, the eccentric and reclusive billionaire who was widely publicized for his avoidance of publicity, died in a plane crash in 1976 without leaving a verifiable will or heir.

But he did leave one legacy that even he couldn’t avoid--the image of a man, now mythlike in status, who took the American dream of fabulous wealth and used it to insulate himself from life for more than a quarter century.

By many accounts, the man who had everything was an orphan who lived the saddest and loneliest of lives: fearful of germs, fearful of people, fearful of the daylight, fearful of many foods and in thrall to drugs.

Three years after Hughes’ death, playwright Sam Shepard came up with his version of the man’s final days in “Seduced,” now in a quietly powerful and disturbing production by Sledgehammer Theatre.

Instead of calling his main character Howard Robard Hughes, Shepard named him Henry Malcolm Hackamore. But the outline of Hackamore’s life is the same as Hughes’, even to the extent of showing him about to embark for his fatal flight from Mexico to the United States to seek a medical treatment that he would never receive.

Sledgehammer is presenting the show at the Progressive Stage Company through Oct. 14. And thanks to tight direction by Ethan Feerst (the executive director of the company) and careful attention to the text, this emerges as one of the most affecting productions this company has ever done.

Shepard does not spend any time elucidating why Hackamore as an individual needed to control everything in his life.

Instead, Shepard explores the desire to control as a universal impulse, something he suggests that we all try to do within the limits of our individual power and wealth. Maybe no man is an island, but we all try to become islands in our own ways, Shepard implies. We ward off life when what we really want is to ward off death.

The Sledgehammer production, nicely cast with some of San Diego’s finest local talent, creates an eerie portrait of those hypothetical last days.

Brian Salmon, who has made a name for himself with comic and hapless roles at the Bowery and the North Coast Repertory Theatres, here shows an unsuspected depth of command as Hackamore. It isn’t easy to project power while sitting helplessly in a chair with an intravenous tube hooked up to one’s chest. But Salmon does it. He speaks his commands softly and threateningly into a microphone and we are not surprised to see Steve Soden as his live wire of a bodyguard jump to attention, without a questioning word for the most absurd and pathetic of requests.

Don Loper lurks in and out wordlessly as the doctor who changes Hackamore’s plasma. Verrier Scatolini and Susan Gelman parade and prowl stunningly as the two women Hackamore wants to see before he dies. Scatolini gets to play an elegant, faded movie star type who has still retained her glamour and tries to use her wiles to get Hackamore to turn a few more tricks. Gelman is trampy, a onetime show girl with little patience for pretension. Both are seductively outfitted by Pam Stompoly.

Sledgehammer usually excels in set and sound design, and again, they don’t disappoint.

In a happy match between Vince Moutain’s set design and Dan (Pea) Hicks’ sound design, door panels whoosh upwards and fall again sharply, slicing the air like strokes of a guillotine.

It’s a reminder of how Hackamore sliced off so much of his life. And as a chilling lesson in how a refusal to live does not exempt one from death.

“SEDUCED”

By Sam Shepard. Director, Ethan Feerst. Sets, Vince Mountain. Sound, Dan (Pea) Hicks. Costumes, Pam Stompoly. Stage manager, Samuel-Moses. With Brian Salmon, Steven Soden, Don Loper, Verrier Scatolini and Susan Gelman. At 8 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays, through Oct. 14, at 433 G St., San Diego, 544-1484.