‘Dialogue Guy’ Finds Success Writing Plays, but He Doesn’t Know What to Do With It

To someone struggling to perfect a golf swing, there is nothing more infuriating than to watch a newcomer step up to the ball and drive it long, hard and perfect.

For all those struggling writers, we present for your frustration one David Steen. No one needs to tell Steen that he’s a natural writer. He knows that he is.

“I would show my plays to Jim,” Steen recollects--referring to his Cast Theatre director, Jim Holmes--in a lazy Southern accent that could stretch from his native Tennessee to Hollywood, “and he’d praise them as classic American dramas. But I’ve never read O’Neill! He called my first play, ‘A Gift From Heaven,’ beautifully structured. I swear, I didn’t know what in hell he was talking about.”

And now that a critic has declared that Steen’s new play, “Avenue A,” at the Cast Theatre until June 1, is “a play with a strong dramatic structure,” he still doesn’t know what to make of it. As far as Steen is concerned, “I’m a dialogue guy.”

Steen, 36, is more than that to those who know him. Director and acting teacher Howard Fine, with whom Steen worked as a guest artist last year at Fine’s acting studio, remarks: “David is a curious guy who you can’t quite figure out at first.” (Steen confirms this, saying, “Producers around town don’t quite know what to do with me.”)

“For a writer who’s so verbal on the page,” Fine continues, “David didn’t speak much during my classes. But when the time came, his insights into human behavior were acute.

“He has an ear for dialogue, but also for subtext. His writing draws you in and stimulates your imagination without sending you a message. What’s really important, though, is that he has an instinct for turning ideas and themes into stage action.”

To hear Steen tell it--and he tells it as only a Southerner can--instinct is his motor. “Man, I can’t analyze my plays and pick them apart. I’m not the kind of guy who’d raise a pig in a 4-H Club and then chop it up and eat it.”

This “dialogue guy” started off as someone completely different, and completely removed from both the incest-ridden Appalachia setting of “A Gift From Heaven” and the destitute New York world of “Avenue A.” Growing up in Memphis, for instance, didn’t exactly steep him in the ways of theater.

“They were doin’ musicals and stuff, and I didn’t give a flip about that,” he says, sitting in his small Sherman Oaks apartment filled with gigantic, Southwestern-style furniture that he made himself. “I’ve never read much, and I sure didn’t then. I fooled around a lot.”

A self-professed “lousy student,” Steen escaped Memphis State University for the road: Florida, then Colorado, and on to Lake Tahoe and San Diego. “I was like a dog, man, searchin’ for a buried bone, sniffin’ here and there, not really findin’ it.”

Then at San Diego’s Mesa Community College, where Steen says he went “to meet people,” he took a theater class that required him to act out a monologue. His teacher was so impressed that he cast Steen in a school production of Alan Bennett’s comedy, “Habeas Corpus.”

Steen, catching that pandemic disease the acting bug , took off on the road again--for Los Angeles. Cattle calls for “The Dukes of Hazzard” ensued, followed by the realization that “in order to have any kind of creative control, you need to write. You can shake the nearest tree trunk in this town and a ton of actors will fall to the ground. But people always need good writing.”

Still, Steen never consciously strove to write a play. He wrote a scene for an acting class that struck his peers as so strange and memorable that it seemed ripe to turn into a drama. “It just spilled outta me,” Steen says. It became “A Gift From Heaven.”

After a quiet start, “Gift” became a critical favorite and the sleeper hit of 1987, playing at the Chamber Theatre for more than six months. Steen, who cast himself as Charlie, the play’s quiet innocent, had his first taste of a playwright’s bittersweet existence when “Gift’s” rave reviews drew attention from New York--including from the great director of O’Neill, Jose Quintero--but never materialized into an off-Broadway transfer.

“Yeah, ‘Gift’ made a lot of things possible,” Steen says with a sigh, “but things are still tough.”

At least, Steen admits, he’s not doing heavy labor anymore (constantly in motion while he talks, Steen mimics working a jackhammer, one of his many past jobs). “I’ve had a lot of fun with Del Shores (author of another small theater hit, “Daddy’s Dyin’, Who’s Got the Will?”) working on a pilot, ‘Lone Star Haven’ for Warner Bros., and it’s given me the money to spend time writing.” (A behind-the-scenes look at the making of “Avenue A” is included in KCET’s May 17 airing of “By the Year 2000,” a special on the future of small theater in Los Angeles.)

Along with “Avenue A,” Steen has written one screenplay, is deep into another and has adapted “Gift” for film. Movie veteran Max Youngstein (“Fail Safe”) is planning to produce it, and Steen’s friend Jordan Fruchtman will direct.

Steen dislikes screenwriting’s mechanical nature, though, and feels most at home with building characters through dialogue. “I always like my people because I invest them with emotions I feel. But--I don’t know why--they tend to be people who can’t release their emotions in a good way, so when they do, they explode. It’s as if they were having sex and could never have an orgasm.”

As with the family in “Gift,” the group in “Avenue A” is burdened with the legacy of parental abuse. Whereas younger brother Chickie (Mark Ruffalo) aims to get educated, his older brother Joey (Gene Lithgow), fresh out of the slammer, can’t seem to get anything on track. His girlfriend, Rosa (Gloria Mann,) tries to help, but Joey’s crazed pal Larry (Steen) unexpectedly barges in.

“Joey thinks that if he can get his family portrait hanging on the wall, everything will fall into place,” Steen says. “But he can’t even get it together to buy a camera. He brings out Rosa’s nurturing instincts. But she can’t deal with the fact that Joey and Larry are almost like Siamese twins, separated at the head.

“It all stems from Joey’s old man abusing him, just like Ma’s incest and abuse in ‘Gift.’ People sometimes look at me and wonder what kinda family life I had, and they’re amazed when I tell ‘em that it was loving and completely normal. Look, man, I don’t buy this ‘write what you know’ stuff. It’s as if folks forgot what make-believe is all about. I invent these stories.”

“Avenue A” plays at the Cast Theatre, 800 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood, at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays, through June 2. Tickets: $10. Information: (213) 462-0265.