Hank Shines Through : Drama: “Lost Highway,” at the Old Globe, evolved from a series of songs by a Williams look-alike.

The journey of “Lost Highway: The Music and Legend of Hank Williams” has that been-through-it quality of a country song by the master himself.

The show, which opens tonight at the Old Globe’s Lowell Davies Festival Stage, started out as “No Teardrops Tonight” in 1978 at Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, Calif. It evolved into “Hank Williams: The King of Country Music” later that year. After flirting with the name “Back From the Dead and Ready to Party,” tickets were sold under the name “Lonesome Highway,” before the show opened under its final name, “Lost Highway: The Music and Legend of Hank Williams” at the Denver Center Theatre Company in 1987 and the Mark Taper Forum in 1988.

The search for a title echoes the search for Williams’ heart by the two 41-year-old co-authors Randal Myler, who doubles as director, and Mark Harelik (last seen here as Elmer Gantry at the La Jolla Playhouse), who doubles as star.

It’s been a challenging search. The hard-drinking, hard-living Williams wrote some of country music’s

greatest songs before his death, at age 29, in 1953. As the two studied him, they discovered that he had told more about himself in his songs than anywhere else.

“We tried to reveal more of Hank, but we always hit the wall,” Harelik said. “All you could do was describe what was on the outside.”

“I’ve talked to everyone,” Myler added. “People say, ‘Just listen to the songs.’ ”

Still, the two have managed to weave in the biographical data they gleaned over the years. In the play Williams’ fights with his first wife, Audrey, a would-be singer, who inspired some of his heartbreak songs. He learns to play the blues from black street singers, one of whom, named Tee-Tot, is an important element in the production.

“In the first version, no one knew what was inside Williams, and Hank wasn’t letting on,” Harelik said recently, sitting beside Myler in a conference room at the Old Globe. “He was just singing.”

By the time Harelik and Myler took the show to Denver, there were vignettes that glued the songs together. The characters talked to each other instead of to the audience. The pair have continued to tinker with the script in preparation for its Old Globe opening, but audiences should not expect to find the riddle of Williams’ short, brilliant, self-destructive existence answered even in this latest version.

“We hear a little bit more from Hank, but the question of what was going on inside Hank is still as much of a mystery as ever,” Harelik said.

“What you see in the telling of the story is that he had a gift for singing and a gift for turning emotions into words. He didn’t have a gift for living. He was ruled by his mother. He couldn’t survive fame or a competitive marriage. All he could do was sing.”

That’s why, through all the changes in the script, the one thing that has remained the same is the emphasis on the music. It has always been packed full of songs--20 at the last count. Myler said that, in the end, he hopes the show is “simple and direct like a good country song, and the audience will want to buy a good set of Hank Williams to rediscover the songs.”

It was, after all the songs, rather than the man, that brought the two to the project.

Long before Harelik knew anything about Williams’ life, he was a fan of Williams’ singing.

Harelik didn’t grow up interested in country music, but he was exposed to it in his small hometown of Hamilton, Tex. where his father had his own swing band.

Back then, Harelik brushed off country as “the music of hicks,” but, in 1973, when he moved to Los Angeles, he got homesick. And the only thing that brought home back was country music.

“Country music is all grounded in the land and the earth and simplicity and the honest sincere expression of emotions, and I realized that’s what I missed about Texas.”

To cheer himself up, he would sing some Hank Williams tunes at parties. Myler, who had known him since he arrived in California, heard him sing some of those songs in 1978 and was struck by how much the dark, thin intense actor resembled the dark, thin, intense singer.

There’s a show in that, Myler told him. Harelik agreed. Together, they pitched the idea--sans script--to Donovan Marley, then the artistic director of the PCPA Theatre Festival in Santa Maria. Marley began to sell tickets for it before the two had written a word. It later became a box office hit that the company brought back later that summer.

When Marley became the artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company (where Myler is now associate director), he shepherded the project there as well--a year after he produced the pair’s co-conceived “The Immigrant.”

Harelik may admit to not fully understanding Williams, but he said he has no problem playing the part because he can relate to the music.

“You go into a nameless realm of darkness inside. It’s not so much a matter of understanding him but of understanding yourself. The character of Hank is completely unguarded emotionally. When he sings, ‘I’m so lonesome I could cry,’ I have to find that place in myself that can say that. That’s where Hank and I meet.”

It’s a wearing role. Harelik has elected to share it with actor Michael Bryan French, who will play Williams Tuesday and Wednesday nights through the course of the run.

But it’s rewarding. And, even if Williams has taken the riddle of his personality to the grave, Harelik has confidence that for the 2 1/2 hours he is on stage, he is the man.

“My task as an artist is to sing that song honestly. Once you say it honestly, and you’re wearing the boots and a hat, you’re Hank.”

Performances of “Lost Highway” are 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays through Oct. 4. Tickets are $21.50-$30. At the Old Globe’s Lowell Davies Festival Stage in Balboa Park, 239-2255.