Baitz Refuses to Push Fail-Safe Button : Television: The playwright--and now director--experiments with a new format in ‘Three Hotels’ for PBS’ ‘American Playhouse.’

“Embrace failure.”

Two words, big idea. It has been rolling around inside the head of playwright--and now director--Jon Robin Baitz for some time now.

He got the advice from playwright John Steppling, whose Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival workshop Baitz attended 10 years ago, when he was a precocious 19-year-old with ambitions as a writer.

While directing his play “Three Hotels” for PBS’ “American Playhouse” (at 9 tonight on Channel 15, at 9:30 p.m. on Channel 28), the phrase came back to him like a mental life preserver.

“It was the most valuable thing John ever told me,” Baitz said by phone from New York. He continued, recalling some of the fears of most first-time filmmakers: “I felt a bit paralyzed on the set. I didn’t quite know how to handle the swirling miasma of technicians while also attending to the actors, Richard Jordan and Kate Nelligan. On top of this, I had to find a visual style.”

Considering that the form his play takes--a triptych of monologues by Jordan’s corporate tycoon businessman and Nelligan’s nerve-worn wife--isn’t typical stuff for TV drama, Baitz proves remarkably successful in using his camera as an unswerving eye, peering into these damaged souls.

More remarkably, “Three Hotels” is following in the wake of some rave reviews for Baitz’s new full-length play, “The Substance of Fire,” at New York’s Playwrights Horizons theater. The New York Times’ Frank Rich declared that “Substance” is “the harbinger of what is likely to be a major playwriting career,” with “writing . . . so articulate, witty and true that it’s only a matter of time before (Baitz’s) theatrical know-how, some of which comes with experience, catches up with his talent.”

So, with all this success, why think of failure?

Because, Baitz will tell you, he perfectly exemplifies the notion of the artist who must fall before he can run. Because, Baitz will go on, neither “Three Hotels” nor “The Substance of Fire” would have been possible without another play--”Dutch Landscape.”

Commissioned and developed by the Mark Taper Forum for more than three years, the ambitious “Dutch Landscape” came on the heels of the rousing triumph of Baitz’s piercing “The Film Society” at Los Angeles Theatre Center. Hopes were high when “Dutch Landscape” opened in 1989. It was a rare case of L.A.’s oldest prestige theater putting an L.A. playwright’s work on its main stage.

It was also, even (or especially) by Baitz’s own account, a disaster. Critics lambasted the drama of a frazzled American family living in South Africa, where the father is to assume a post with a company accused of making life-threatening baby formula for Third World mothers. Audiences fled at intermission.

“I have material that’s very valuable to me,” Baitz said, “and I hadn’t dealt with it very well in ‘Dutch Landscape.’ But I wasn’t prepared to let it go either. I suppose ‘Three Hotels’ comes out of ‘Dutch Landscape,’ but it was accidental, not a salvage job at all.”

In “Three Hotels,” Jordan’s Kenneth, a former State Department official, works for an international conglomerate peddling the nasty baby formula (it’s his idea, he admits in extreme close-up in his Tangier hotel room, to have his saleswomen pose as nurses in African villages). He’s confidently cocky with a talent for ruthlessly firing people.

Puttering around her beachside suite on St. Thomas, Nelligan’s Barbara is quietly unhinged, just having finished giving a talk to company wives she titled “Be Careful”--a phrase Baitz took from “Landscape.” She has no idea what an effect her frank comments have on Kenneth’s position, until we see him, defeated and haunted by the memory of his dead son, at night in an Oaxaca, Mexico, hotel room.

Though it can be off-putting watching the very strong but very WASP-ish Jordan in a role that’s specifically Jewish, Baitz meant this ironically: “It’s a way of showing how much Kenneth had to WASP-ify himself to fit in with the business. He can’t reinvent himself, though.”

“Three Hotels’ ” monologue form, it turns out, didn’t come from Baitz, but from “American Playhouse,” which commissioned him to experiment with the unusual format.

“I had been thinking about directing for a few years, and (“Playhouse” executive producer) Lindsay Law made a leap of faith and agreed right away when I suggested it to him.”

Despite some self-criticisms--”I was so under the thrall of (John) Cassavetes’ movies while making this, that I think I let shots go on too long”--Baitz was happy to report that Law and company have given him the green light for his first feature-length film, “This Winter.” It will be produced and released in the same manner as last year’s Oscar-nominated “American Playhouse” film by Craig Lucas, “Longtime Companion.”

Like “Three Hotels,” “Dutch Landscape” and “The Substance of Fire,” “This Winter” deals with a family being ripped apart at the seams. Baitz’s own family, he admitted, isn’t nearly as unfortunate. “But living in Brazil from seven to 10 years old, then in South Africa from 10 to 16, I lived with a sense of terror that came from moving around in very alien places.”

Right now, Baitz feels “at peace,” trying to take the praise for “The Substance of Fire” as much in stride as he did the pans for “Landscape.”

“I’ve just had my most totally satisfying experience in theater in 10 years, since Padua Hills. Making the film is really like playing with adult toys. And with my new work, I’m realizing how important it is to get back to that feeling of play we had as kids.”