Long and Short of Fame : * Theater: ‘The Heliotrope Bouquet’ at La Jolla Playhouse looks at lives of two ragtime musicians, the famous Scott Joplin and the forgotten Louis Chauvin.

Why do some artists achieve fame while others are forgotten?

Is it always a question of talent, or is it sometimes a question of how well a talent can play the fame game?

And, even if the game is played well, can’t the game end with fame disappearing even before the end of an artist’s lifetime?

Those are the questions weighing on playwright Eric Overmyer’s mind as he wrote “The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin,” which opens Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse’s new Mandell Weiss Forum in a production directed by Stan Wojewodski Jr., the new artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and dean of the Yale School of Drama. It will be the West Coast premiere of the play, which premiered in February at the Baltimore Center Stage. Already it has been chosen as one of three plays to be funded in AT&T;’s New Plays for the Nineties series this year.

The play portrays ragtime pianist Joplin wondering what will last of his work and that of his friend, Chauvin--with whom he wrote one musical piece, “The Heliotrope Bouquet,” Chauvin’s only surviving work. But the story is also about the questions that plague all artists--including Overmyer himself.

“It is about making art and what survives and the choices artists have to make,” Overmyer said during a rehearsal break at the Playhouse trailer.

These are questions Overmyer, 39, acknowledges fielding in his own life.

“Of what value is art after the artist is gone? I think everyone in the performing arts wonders if what we’re doing has any value. Most artists are tortured by this--especially in the theater. It’s so ephemeral, and it’s so marginal in the culture, the whole idea of posterity may be laughable. Maybe it’s the creation of the moment, and that’s it. I suspect most artists feel both things even though they’re contradictory.”

These questions came to the fore for Overmyer when the first day of rehearsals for the Baltimore production of “The Heliotrope Bouquet” coincided with the beginning of the Gulf War.

“It calls up a lot of questions about the value of art when there’s a war on. You can take both sides.”

Overmyer seems to like taking both sides--in “Heliotrope Bouquet” he sets Joplin’s determination to be remembered against Chauvin’s determination to create art just for art’s sake. The result was that Joplin got his work written down and published, while Chauvin, who was illiterate, had none of his work written down except for the piece he wrote with Joplin.

Indeed, Overmyer’s main rewriting of the story since the Baltimore production opened has been to equalize the argument between the two.

“A lot of people felt Chauvin won the argument (in the Baltimore production),” Overmyer said. “I wanted both to win, both to make the strongest possible argument, and let the audience decide. In certain ways, Chauvin is more romantic and fits that image of the artist as a self-destructive genius. Joplin can be seen as a careerist. Although he was an artist, he also took care of business.”

That Chauvin had more weight in the early version of the play is somewhat ironic, since Overmyer--who says he identifies with all the characters, including Joplin’s wife--seems a lot closer to Joplin in his drive to take care of business.

From his early years of gaining recognition as a playwright, Overmyer has led a double life of sorts. He has long been respected and admired in theater circles as the playwright of such works as “In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe,” “In a Pig’s Valise” and “On the Verge, or, The Geography of Yearning,” but he’s had to support his theater habit by writing for such television series as “St. Elsewhere,” “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” and “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill.”

He calls it “a schizophrenic career” and likens his television work to “being hired to build a cabinet.” But he has been well reimbursed for that cabinet-making. He’s able to find time to write plays, and support residences in New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans, a jazz haven where he soaked up the atmosphere for “The Heliotrope Bouquet.”

If television has had an influence on his playwrighting it can be seen in Overmyer’s using his plays to reach for what television does generally not do--to create dream structure and imagery.

He looked for words and images to match the ragtime music which suffuses the production. In one scene Joplin dreams of “Six horses. Stamping in the black surf. Paper white hides, and moon-colored manes. Black water, surf as black as coffee, and clear as a box of heaven.”

The idea for the play came from composer Roger Trefousse, who originally asked Overmyer to write a libretto for an opera about the relationship between Joplin and Chauvin.

Overmyer wrote the libretto, which in turn inspired him to write the play. The opera has not yet been published or produced.

Asked whether he found it difficult as a white playwright to write about two black artists, Overmyer answered slowly and carefully.

“Any artist can write about anyone. I think any genuine artist can do that. It’s a matter of imagination and empathy,” Overmyer said. “Questions of gender and race are transcended all the time by artists. I was cognizant of it (that people would question it), and I wanted to do it well. Athol Fugard once said, ‘Judge me on the quality of my work.’ Judge me on my imagination and the quality of the work.”

Coincidentally, the celebrated white South African playwright Athol Fugard, who usually writes about conflicts between blacks and whites in his native country, will have his play, “A Lesson from Aloes” produced at the Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre from Aug. 20-Sept. 29, with much of the run overlapping with “The Heliotrope Bouquet.”

Performances of “The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin” are 8 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday with Saturday/Sunday matinees at 2 Sunday through Sept. 15. At the Mandell Weiss Forum of the La Jolla Playhouse, 534-6760.