A Dramatic Start : Novice playwright Michael Creith goes by his instincts and ends up with a play in production.

Michael Creith may be living proof that what you don’t know can help you.

He didn’t know if anyone would ever read any of his writing.

He didn’t know anyone in Hollywood, and as he puts it, “couldn’t buy a meeting” for any of his film or television scripts.

He didn’t know if any theater would ever stage any play he wrote, but he wrote one anyway.

He didn’t know that first-time playwrights aren’t supposed to show up at a theater unannounced and ask someone if they could read a script.

He didn’t know what to think when the people at American Renegade Theatre in North Hollywood actually read his script and liked it.

And he really didn’t know what the theater’s artistic director, David A. Cox, meant when he asked Creith if they could “workshop” the play.

What? Hammer nails into it? Run it through a buzz saw?

“What I’m experiencing,” says Creith, sitting in the book-lined den of his Porter Ranch home, “is simply the beauty of not knowing the ‘right’ way of going about things. By doing it ‘wrong,’ sometimes you get it right.”

Aspiring writers, take note.

On the other hand, Creith also didn’t know that he had a little luck on his side when he sidled up to American Renegade’s patio--it operates on the Spanish-style property formerly occupied by a mortuary. He handed the script to an actress with the company, Ann Gibbs, who then passed it on to Cox’s partner, Elizabeth Meads, who then passed it on to Cox.

Cox started reading Creith’s “Hobo’s Lullaby” and got caught up in it. “I really related to what Michael had written. I’m 55, and when I was 40 I was going through a lot of the things, the midlife crisis,” that affects David, the central character.

It was this crisis that resulted in a match between playwright and artistic director, script and theater.

Perhaps Creith’s good fortune had something to do with the theater’s neighborhood. Creith, 43, knows it well, having grown up three blocks away and attended Lankershim Elementary School, across the street from the theater.

“I love those streets, and spent hours and hours in the old El Portal movie house (on Lankershim). One time, me and my buddies sneaked into the mortuary where the theater now stands to see Lou Costello’s funeral, which had gotten a lot of press. I was a big fan, and wanted to see him one last time.

“We got kicked out.”

Still, Creith could not come from a world further removed from that of the North Hollywood theater.

For although he writes and rewrites plays by night, Creith by day is a banker for the Ventura-based Bank of A. Levy.

“In our current economy, what I see on a day-to-day basis isn’t pretty,” says Creith, dressed in his banker’s clothes, his face framed by a thick, whitish beard. “I have to deal with delinquent loans, with people--some of whom might have just lost their job--way behind on their mortgage payments. I need to tell them that I’m not the enemy, that I’m their friend.

“One of the most important things for me, at the office or at home writing, is keeping a sense of humor. I try to keep it loose at the office, since things can get pretty uptight in the banking business. I’m not a fearsome authority figure with my kids (Matthew and Jessica), but I have loads of fun and games with them. With humor, the point you want to make lasts.”

Creith then jumps from finance to cinema to drive his point home: “You think about all those films that came out in the ‘60s about nuclear war, and the one that really lasts is (Stanley) Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ Why? Because it treats the Cold War with comedy.”

Creith also refers to “Strangelove” in regard to what he learned from the workshops for “Hobo’s Lullaby.”

“I realized that there’s the line as written, and then there’s the action of the play, and how different the two are. You know that scene in ‘Strangelove’ where Peter Sellers is trying to talk to the drunken Soviet ambassador on the phone? The guy who steals the scene is George C. Scott, reacting to the conversation by not saying a word.”

In “Hobo’s Lullaby,” Creith said, “I’ve seen the actors do the same scene 20 times, and it’s never quite the same. Just the other day, Nathan Legrand, who plays David, inserted some new things into a few scenes I had never seen him do before. This is something to see, since I’m a layman at this. It’s such a rush to be able to laugh at a joke after the 20th time.”

According to Cox, “Michael was honest about not knowing anything about the workshop process, how we would take the script through improvs for a few months, how he would go home and use any new stuff for rewrites. I also didn’t want to step on the toes of a fledgling writer. But he’s gone through it and hugely improved the play. And he’ll probably rewrite up to the last week of the run.”

Creith also confesses to being a layman about interviews, saying that he’s very uncomfortable revealing too much about his play. “Well, it’s both that I want the audience to discover it for themselves, and my not being able to sum up everything the play means.

“I can tell you this, that I’ve been fascinated for a long time about how people deal with loss. David is under observation at a psychiatric hospital, suicidal, not able to cope with things in his life. We’re told, of course, that suicide is wrong, but I’ve tried to create a character for whom suicide might be the most rational option if he can’t get the right kind of help.”

Those who wonder if a banker can write a play might consider the American poet, Wallace Stevens, who kept a senior position in an insurance company during most of the years he wrote his distinctive verse. Creith, though, refuses to aspire to Stevens-like greatness: “I think by not expecting that I would make such a huge success in writing, I’ve been able to keep my head, and write in my own way.”

He’s even managed to use the workday to his advantage: His hourlong commute from Porter Ranch to Ventura affords him time to think about the play and “sometimes, about things I don’t understand--like the Holocaust. How could it have happened? The things I can’t grasp are just the things I want to write about.”

But what about the writer’s maxim of writing what you know?

Creith doesn’t know about that, either.

Where and When

What: “Hobo’s Lullaby.”

Location: American Renegade Theatre, 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, through Oct. 25.

Price: $12.

Call: (818) 763-4430.