Untangling the Ties : A parental crisis inspired the script for ‘Elevator Music,’ about a father and son at odds with each other.

Picture yourself as a playwright, sitting in front of your word processor. You’ve imagined two characters--a father and son-- neither of whom is exactly thrilled to spend time with the other. But they’re your only characters, and, this being a play, they have to talk to each other. How do you get them together? More critically, how do you keep them together?

Well, playwright-actor Walter Bagot has an answer.

In theater’s hallowed tradition of the dramatic rescuing device, the deus ex machina, Bagot came up with his own machina : Trap father and son in a stalled elevator, and see what happens. Thus, “Elevator Music,” opening tonight at the Odessa Theatre.

“I had to contain them in some way,” says Bagot, sitting in one of the theater’s velvety opera-house-style seats and glancing at the elevator set co-designed by Kenneth R. Klimak and David B. Sharp. “Under normal conditions, these two guys wouldn’t be near each other for long.”

Interestingly, conditions weren’t normal for Bagot and his wife, Tanya Everett Bagot (director of “Elevator Music”) when he began writing the play.

He had been struggling futilely with another play about two men in a contained space (an apartment-dweller and the intruding burglar he has trapped in his closet) when, without warning, the Bagots’ daughter, Melissa, 19, left home.

“I sat there at her bedroom desk thinking things over, trying not to get too stressed,” says Walter, “and I just started scribbling down this play.”

Melissa returned after a month, but it made both Walter and Tanya consider what was missing in their family.

“We all had issues with each other,” says Tanya, sitting across the aisle from Walter, “and we weren’t communicating them.”

For Walter, who plays son Eddie and has written two previous works (“Has Anyone Seen Joey?” and “Combinations”), the familial analysis proved even more unexpected: “I actually related to Melissa’s role, as the child of the parent, instead of my own. I think that’s why I created a father-son pole for the play.

“I always saw my own father as either great or an SOB. Never before this, though, had I realized that he hadn’t been very nurturing. Art (Eddie’s father in the play) says, ‘It’s a bad tradition passed on.’ The danger is keeping the bad tradition going.”

*

In many ways however, Art is nothing like Walter’s father. Art is 70, just having endured his retirement party from the Chicago insurance company where he’d worked for decades.

Walter’s father, on the other hand, was a World War II bomber pilot, a POW in the Nazi camps, and employed in the military intelligence establishment for decades. “Which was a little weird, when I think about it,” Walter says, “because my dad didn’t tell us what he was doing at work.”

But the play’s mirroring of Walter’s life is deliberate in other ways.

Actor Burton Sharp, reflecting on his role as Art, says that he is the prototypical father, who “doesn’t think Eddie has done anything he wanted him to do, which he interprets as an act of rebellion. I remember my dad asking me, ‘Why can’t you take my advice? I’ve already been through this.’ ”

Walter immediately adds, “That’s my dad too. One of my desires was to get out from under my need to get approval from my dad, not unlike Eddie’s desire. He didn’t really pay attention to my own acting career, thinking that I would grow out of it.”

Guess again.

Walter survived the unstable acting profession by “finding roots in L.A., which still seems funny to say,” marrying Tanya, a choreographer-dancer-actor who had originated the role of Chava in “Fiddler on the Roof,” and collaborating on projects in and away from the theater.

But despite the runs of Walter’s past plays at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Hollywood, “we weren’t sure that any theater was going to take on ‘Elevator Music,’ ” Tanya says. “But we also never gave up trying to get a full production. We had workshopped it at the Tracy Roberts Theatre and Playwrights Arena (both in Los Angeles), and Burton had been with us since the beginning. Not until I came here to the Odessa to choreograph ‘A Man’s a Man’ (in July) did we find a home for this play.”

The Bagots do not disguise their thanks to Odessa owner and artistic director James Kennedy, but it’s colored with a sense of the harsh L.A. marketplace.

“This town,” Walter says, “is a really tough place to raise money for theater. It seems to me that New York is a bit easier, and, believe it or not, the rents are very comparable. L.A. prices have caught up. That’s new.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Elevator Music.”

Location: Odessa Theatre, 10426 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 16.

Price: $12-$15.

Call: (818) 752-0059.