THEATER : She’d Rather Do It Herself : Beth Henley turned to friends to get her new play off the ground. But when it came time to find a director, the writer took matters into her own hands

It was a long day for playwright Beth Henley and actress Holly Hunter. There they were at Henley’s dining room table, hour after hour, writing letters to pals asking for production money. And they weren’t just handwriting each letter--they even used colored pencils and crayons to add drawings.

Their personal appeal apparently worked. Forty people got the letters, and more than 20 responded with checks to get Henley’s play “Control Freaks” produced in her adopted hometown.

No matter that the dark comedy, opening Friday for three weeks, will play the small Met Theatre, a 99-seat house in a pretty tough neighborhood near Western and Santa Monica. Henley is the Pulitzer-winning playwright who brought us the wacky MaGrath sisters of “Crimes of the Heart.” And “Control Freak’s” star lineup includes Hunter, just off a best actress win in Jane Campion’s film “The Piano” at the Cannes International Film Festival, as well as Carol Kane, Bill Pullman and the lesser-known Wayne Pere.

In fact, Henley wrote “Control Freaks” specifically for the Met, as well as for longtime collaborator Hunter, who is also producing the show. The two women are among 18 writers, actors and others on the Met board, and the prolific playwright says she felt that “I should write something for us to do.”

So what did she write? Newlywed Betty (Kane) is fresh from a wedding ceremony at the Elvis Presley Chapel in Las Vegas. Carl, the groom (Pullman), is on his fourth marriage and seems awfully frisky. Sister (Hunter) is a little too attached to her brother, talks to herself, has spontaneous orgasms and is given to wearing wigs. Don’t even ask about weird Paul (Pere).

Actually, says Henley, “once I had written it, I didn’t have the heart to try to explain it to a director, so I thought, ‘I’m going to direct this myself.’ ” But she had previously directed just one other play--a staged reading of college friend Colleen Dodson’s one-woman show “Straight Arrows.” So to “gain a shred more confidence,” she workshopped, then directed, her play first at Chicago’s 85-seat Center Theater last year.

Hunter didn’t play Sister in Chicago, although she did see the show there. But despite all the current attention to Hunter’s TV and film career--most recently, a well-noted performance in “The Firm” as well as the Cannes win--the actress has set aside this sizable chunk of time for her friend’s play.

How could she not? For one thing, Hunter considers Henley “one of my closest friends I’ve ever had in my life.” For another, she speaks appreciatively of the play as “a long poem.” She was even willing to take on the additional role of producer for the first time because, she says simply, “there was no other way it was going to be done.”

The play’s other producer, David Beaird, another longtime Henley friend, apparently felt the same way.

“Beth’s first play (“Crimes of the Heart”) was a home run, and it would have been so easy for her to just do it over and over again,” says Beaird, who also writes and directs TV and films. “But she’s an artist. ‘Before I can be your producer,’ I told her, ‘I want to know what you want out of this production.’ She said, ‘I want one perfect night of theater.’ ”

Henley is waiting at the very first table in the Hollywood coffee shop. Does she want to be near the door, perhaps on the lookout for her interviewer? Not Henley. She wants a good view of the spinning pie slices, she explains.

Henley, 41, just looks conventional, with her Southern grace and style, so ladylike in manner and dress that she should almost be wearing white gloves. Demure and almost fragile in demeanor, she wears minimal makeup and jewelry and speaks so softly you have to strain to hear her speak.

But 10 minutes into a conversation with her, it’s clear that all those paradoxical, eccentric characters weren’t bred in a vacuum. There she sits, picking at her scrambled eggs, smiling sweetly as she speaks of rejected screenplays dropped on her porch like so many dead children, and contemplating, in a whisper, just where that dark, dark Willard family in “Control Freaks” may have come from.

Actress Sissy Spacek told Ms. magazine that she and her “Crimes of the Heart” co-stars Jessica Lange and Diane Keaton (in the play’s 1986 film version) studied Henley to pick up some Southern idiosyncrasies. She was a great role model.

The playwright hails from a South immortalized by Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams and described in Film Comment magazine as a place “where Br’er Rabbit meets Eugene O’Neill.”The second of Charles and Lydy Henley’s four daughters, she was born in Jackson, Miss., where some of her family still lives.

Like Wendy Wasserstein, another young, female Pulitzer winner, Henley effectively mines the world she knows best. “Crimes” is set in her father’s hometown of Hazlehurst, Miss., and “The Miss Firecracker Contest” (which became the 1989 film “Miss Firecracker,” also starring Hunter) in her mother’s hometown of Brookhaven, Miss.

It helped, of course, to have a mother who is an actress and a father who was a Mississippi state senator. At one of her father’s campaign appearances, for instance, Henley’s mother suggested she add mud to her too-smart shoes. And another time, Henley recalls, her broken arm was in a cast and “she’d say, ‘Play up the arm, kid.’ I loved campaigning.”

Henley’s mother inspired her love of theater, introducing her to Chekhov, the playwright’s favorite playwright. “When she was playing Laura in ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ we’d go to the grocery store and she’d be limping around, buying food Laura would buy,” Henley recalls. “She would live the role, and it didn’t matter to her the venue, either--that this was a community theater in Jackson. The important thing was making the play come alive.”

Henley’s mother still acts, often performing selected excerpts of her daughter’s plays for women’s clubs and conventions. And all the fictitious characters and plots she introduced Henley to were apparently soon augmented by the colorful people and happenings that populated the family’s real world.

Popeye, the strange seamstress who sews costumes for bullfrogs in “Miss Firecracker,” acquired her trade from a Henley aunt who did exactly that. The playwright herself worked in a dog food factory, just like Meg in “Crimes of the Heart,” and Henley has said that winning the Pulitzer was an assurance that she’d never have to do that again. Her father’s wake contributed to “The Wake of Jamey Foster,” her third play, which also starred Hunter and closed after 12 performances on Broadway in fall, 1982. Her grandfather’s getting lost in Hurricane Camille set off a family crisis that was an inspiration for “Crimes.”

“I think things like that happen in everyone’s lives,” Henley says in one of many self-effacing remarks. “If you just watch the evening news, odd things are happening all the time. And if you ever sit down and talk very specifically to people about their lives or their families’ lives, it’s always incredibly, unbelievably odd, scary and bizarre.”

But don’t underestimate Henley’s imagination, Hunter cautions: “Jane Campion certainly didn’t grow up on the English moors (depicted in “The Piano”), and Beth has not been brought up in a household of killers. (They) are willing to go out on the verge--to the extremities of imagination, to this other realm of experience which they only imagined.”

Henley says she moved to Los Angeles in 1976 to be an actress, not a writer. “I found her really quite unique as an actress,” recalls acting teacher Maria Gobetti, today also co-artistic director of Burbank’s Victory Theatre. “She made startling choices that were grounded in her own reality.”

While she may still do a rare turn in a friend’s play, Henley quickly left acting. “It was wonderful to be an actress in university because you got to memorize Shakespeare or Chekhov or poetry,” she says, “but when you actually try to work as an actress, you’re scraping to maybe get an audition for maybe a McDonald’s commercial and you have 100 pictures of your face printed to send out to strangers. It just seemed a tremendous waste of life to me.”

At first, Henley says, “I thought I wasn’t smart enough to be a writer; I have dyslexia.” But disregarding her writing fears, she turned to screenplays. Her first screenplay was later made as 1986’s “Nobody’s Fool,” starring Rosanna Arquette and Eric Roberts, but in the early days, she says, producers refused to read her scripts because she didn’t have an agent, and agents she tried weren’t taking on new clients. She decided to write a play because “I could do it on my own a bit more.”

That first full-length play was “Crimes of the Heart,” and her intentions “were not highfalutin.” She kept both cast and set spare, she says, adding that in the first version, “I didn’t even let them cut into the cake, because I thought it would be expensive if we had to get a real one every night.”

Screenwriter Frederick Bailey, who once directed Henley in a summer stock production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (in which she played one of the fairies), sent “Crimes” on to the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Ky., where a play of his had been produced. “I thought it was a great play,” Bailey says. “Still do.”

Henley, however, wasn’t so sure. When she went to see the play in Louisville, she stood out in the parking lot, in the snow, crying, “because I couldn’t believe these people came out in the cold and got baby-sitters to come see my play. I wasn’t really a playwright. I was a charlatan, and it was a hoax. I was just terrified they would lynch me or something for spending money on tickets.”

Instead, of course, they lauded her. “From time to time a play comes along that restores one’s faith in our theater,” wrote John Simon in New York magazine. The hard-to-please critic also called Henley “a new playwright of charm, warmth, style, unpretentiousness and authentically individual vision.”

“Crimes” moved from its world premiere in Louisville in February, 1979, to several regional productions before landing on Broadway a few years later. It played there 15 months, won both the ’81 Pulitzer and New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play, and made Henley a star at 29.

Her next play, “The Miss Firecracker Contest,” was already finishing its premiere run at the Victory Theatre when Henley won her Pulitzer, and she’s been averaging about one play a year ever since. “Beth is always writing,” says actress Hunter. “She’s always working out stories in her mind that can captivate her.”

Asked if winning the Pulitzer the first time out made those next plays more difficult, Henley says: “Always before I have a production of a new play, I have started on a newer play, so that no matter how it’s received, I’ll be into the next play. So although (winning the Pulitzer so young) was difficult in certain ways, it was a blessing as far as being able to write plays.”

Besides the Pulitzer, “Crimes” also brought Henley a sizable film deal and the freedom to write what, where and when she wanted. “Control Freaks” is her ninth produced play, and there have also been several films. She co-wrote “True Stories” with both musician David Byrne and actor-director Stephen Tobolowsky, with whom she lived for several years and who often directed her plays.

“Crimes of the Heart” has played in Turkey, Peru and Japan, in French, Spanish and Hebrew, and is usually being revived somewhere. “The Miss Firecracker Contest” has played Germany, Mexico, Sweden and Holland. Her play “Abundance” will be performed in Vladivostok, Russia, later this summer.

“The great thing about Beth is she doesn’t need the encouragement of commissions,” says her agent, Gilbert Parker. “She loves the theater and she keeps writing plays.”

Henley, in turn, has called writing a way of survival, a provider of purpose, and says directing also meets that need. “It’s kind of the same feeling,” she says. “It always gives you something to occupy your mind if you’re going in the car or at the grocery store or taking a shower. It’s like working a puzzle, an emotional puzzle, all day.”

The playwright sorts out those puzzles at her Westside home, described by one friend as “her 1800s writing villa.” There she writes in longhand, then types it up; there is no computer in the house. Victory Theatre founders Gobetti and Tom Ormeny decided to produce “The Miss Firecracker Contest” after hearing it at Henley’s kitchen table, and readings of new plays are still held in her house.

“Beth is one of very few people I’m clear on as an artist,” says producer Beaird. “She’s not interested in playing Hollywood. She passes up big-money projects all the time--things other writers would jump at. She writes what her heart tells her to, whether it makes any money or gives her agent a coronary.”

Henley has known Beaird since she was in college, and many of her professional connections date back in time. Aside from “Control Freaks” cast member Pere, who was brought in by Beaird, Henley knew her three other actors well. Kane helped plan the fund-raising appeal even before she was selected for the cast, and Pullman played Hunter’s husband in TNT’s “Crazy in Love” last year.

“Control Freaks” marks the sixth time Henley and Hunter have worked together since meeting in 1981 in a stalled elevator. Hunter was going up to meet director Ulu Grosbard to read for “The Wake of Jamey Foster,” she recalls, when another woman got on the elevator “who was small like me.” Both punched the same button, the elevator took off, then broke down between floors. Hunter turned to her companion and asked if she was Beth Henley. “Yes,” she responded. “Are you Holly Hunter?”

The two women are today friends and colleagues both, but Hunter points out that the professional relationship came first. “When I began to do her work, somehow I felt that there was a hook into it for me,” she says. “The thing with Beth is that our whole relationship is an ongoing process. It’s just always been a series of ‘yeahs’ between Beth and me.”

Hunter believes that Henley’s appreciation of language and its rhythms was apparent as early as “Crimes of the Heart,” but that it “has reached a sophistication and an ease that I think is on a new level. She’s just getting more and more economical, more honed ... (and) characters can rest more in a kind of suspended area between decisions. It’s almost like there’s more of a generosity about the characters, and that they can hang between good and bad, right and wrong in decision making.”

Is there a common thread linking the different Henley women she’s played over the years? “I think Beth’s characters are very buoyant,” Hunter responds, “and they’re all kind of tightrope walking between despair and ecstasy. I think that’s where her comedy comes from. . . . She can flip so adroitly back and forth between the two, and her characters skate that line with a lot of grace.”

Hunter also thinks Henley’s characters are “quite brilliant manipulators,” and nowhere is this more apparent than in “Control Freaks.” Essentially, Carl and his new wife, Betty, want Sister’s inheritance to start a furniture company after they buy Paul’s building. But their manipulations are played out amid both incest and murder. Everyone in “Control Freaks” lies to everyone else, and the play is awash in brutality, deceit and desperation.

“Control Freaks” is a departure for Henley, more angry and lusty than some of her earlier work. “When we first read it, it seemed like a different voice from her other plays,” says actor Pullman, currently featured in Nora Ephron’s film “Sleepless in Seattle.” “And I think she knew it too. Somehow these people had come to her who were much more hostile and desperate. She kept calling them ‘horrible people.’ And now she says, ‘I love them.’ And she does. She loves every one of them.”

True, says Henley. But where do these four strange people come from? “That’s a good question,” she replies, looking down and laughing nervously. “They really came from a very mysterious place inside me. I didn’t like those characters very much at first, (and) I really had to trust myself. They were scaring me. But now I really love them. So much. Because this play really embraced a darkness and truth about the terror of life.

“I feel they are all different parts of me, these characters. It was really difficult but it was very . . . mmmm . . . cathartic to delve into those parts.”

In mid-August, she heads back to Chicago’s Center Theater to workshop “Revelers,” her new comedy about a memorial weekend for a dead acting teacher. She recently finished a screenplay based on her play “The Lucky Spot” and is currently working on a screenplay called “Paying Up” for Paramount Pictures.

Could “Control Freaks” have a future beyond the Met? “My goal was so tunnel vision, just to do it with Holly at the Met and see it realized,” Henley says, shooting back one of those demure Southern smiles. “I would, of course, love for the play to be done on Broadway, all over Europe, be made into a major motion picture and a TV series and win a Nobel Prize. But my real reason for doing it is to see it done at the Met with Holly and these actors. The way it’s working, I feel like I brought a loaf of bread to the table and suddenly it’s a banquet.”

Playwright Henley, above, outside Met Theatre,. . .