Straight From the Harts : The son of playwright Moss brings a respectful rather than worshipful touch to his new revival of ‘Light Up the Sky’

The photo shows Moss Hart grinning, looking like a man who knows his play was a hit. Which it was: Hart’s “Light Up the Sky” had opened on Broadway in late 1948, and at the time of the photo, in early 1949, Hart was in the middle of “Sky’s” healthy 219-performance run. It would prove to be his last playwriting triumph, after a string of them charting back to 1930 and his first collaboration with George S. Kaufman, “Once in a Lifetime.”

Chris Hart, Moss’ only son, is looking at the photo, and although he’s been told time and again of his resemblance to his father, he’s flushed with amazement at the mirror image. Especially when he realizes that he’s the same age--44--as his dad in the picture.

“Wow, this is spooky,” he says, “although don’t you think he looks older than 44?” Hart checks the date on the back of the photo. “1949. I was a baby then.”

No longer. Hart has been around long enough that he’s retired from one profession--stage producer, when he brought “Light Up the Sky” to the Ahmanson Theatre in 1987, under the direction of Ellis Rabb.

He now wears several other hats, including that of stage director. And though the hats may change, the projects don’t: Hart is staging a new “Sky,” opening Friday at Hollywood’s West Coast Ensemble, the same theater where he last year staged Kaufman and Moss Hart’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”

Is the switch from the Ahmanson to the relatively small Ensemble a problem? “This isn’t a matter of scaling down,” Chris Hart says in the living room of his Hollywood Hills home. “The Ahmanson is a huge venue for a small comedy. With ‘Light Up the Sky,’ you sometimes have eight actors on stage at once, and it heats up into some frenzied activity. The smaller stage at West Coast really percolates the comedy.”

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But there is another crucial difference, related to the purely commercial theater world that Hart has left behind. “Had we taken the cast we assembled at the Ahmanson--Peter Falk, Barry Nelson, Nancy Marchand, Fritz Weaver--to Broadway, the show would have cost $750,000. Here, it’s no more than $15,000, which is why small theater is alive and well in Los Angeles. You do make the deal with the devil that if actors get outside work, they’ll leave the show--they’re not making any money at this, after all. But you also get a commitment to the play and theater you just don’t get in the commercial theater.

“I loved Ellis’ staging at the Ahmanson, but with all that star power, it was hard to avoid having these arias. That really isn’t the way it should be, since this is a true ensemble comedy. Everyone has to work together.”

Hart, perhaps because he feels naturally close to his father’s work, isn’t shy about criticizing Moss Hart revivals he comes across (which also may explain why he occasionally writes reviews for the L.A. Reader). He terms, for example, the 1988 La Jolla Playhouse production of “Once in a Lifetime” “disappointing and cartoonish,” which leads him tm explain his own directorial approach to what could easily become a cartoonish farce.

“It’s very easy to fall into that,” he says. The play is a backstage comedy. “I’ve moved up the time to the early ‘50s, when theater was the king of American entertainment. The mood is total can-do, America-on-top-of-the-world. But at the same time, these people aren’t one-dimensional goofs, but insecure and fallible. My father and George Kaufman invented this whole new kind of comedy, not based on jokes or situations, but on the characters. I tell my actors that they need to know where these people live, inside. I think they’re finding it.”

Referring to Hart, actor I. M. Hobson says, “I expected someone steeped in Moss Hart’s words as Holy Writ. But Chris was very amenable. There are people for whom directing is a blood sport; Chris is not one of those. You’d assume that the author’s son would bring so much baggage to the project, but he was respectful rather than worshipful, which makes all the difference.”

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Hobson, who played Whiteside, the larger-than-life title role in “The Man Who Came to Dinner” for Chris Hart, can’t seem to stay away from the Harts: He is rehearsing the South Coast Repertory’s main stage production of--what else?-- “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”

And Chris Hart is really drawn into that same orbital pull. His TV adaptation of “You Can’t Take It With You” aired as a syndicated NBC series during the 1988 season. He’s hoping to get off the ground a major revival of the Hart-Ira Gershwin-Kurt Weill Freudian-tinged musical epic, “Lady in the Dark.” While that’s developing, he’s searching for a screenwriter to adapt “The Man Who Came to Dinner” for his planned updated ‘90s film version with co-producer Walter Parks at Columbia.

At the same time, he’s struggling to carve out an identity apart from that as a Moss Hart revivalist. “I’m aware that directing my father’s plays has given me opportunities nothing else could. I mean, I’ve seen these plays staged all over the world, and I know them very well. But I don’t want to do just his work.”

In fact, he is producing an American version of the “Rock Challenge,” an Australian show with an anti-drug theme that pits high school performers against each other in friendly, rock ‘n’ roll battle.

His nerviest project, though, must be the play he’s co-writing with Geoff Grode. He’s calling it “T Time” and describes it as being “about life, love and golf and bending genders.”

And as far as he’s concerned, it’s like nothing Moss Hart ever dreamed of writing.

“Light Up the Sky” opens Friday at West Coast Ensemble, 6240 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Plays 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, until Nov. 1. Tickets: $15. (213) 871-1052.