THEATER : Acts of Goodness : Jane Anderson explores the tragic consequences of doing the right thing in a revival of her play ‘The Baby Dance.’

“In my generation,” says 39-year-old playwright-screenwriter Jane Anderson, “to be honest, to do the decent thing, is considered a heroic act.”

Sitting in the courtyard patio of her Hollywood Hills home and framed by a window with a panoramic view of the smoggy Los Angeles Basin, Anderson is genuinely puzzled by this cultural devaluation of goodness. Yet she argues--primarily through a growing body of plays and films--that characters animated by the good deed can be dramatically powerful. And when deeds crash on the shoals of good intentions, as in her first full-length drama, “The Baby Dance,” revived and opening tonight at the American Renegade Theatre, goodness breeds tragedy.

Anderson’s opus is unusually visible right now: By a fluke, “The Baby Dance” is also being revived in an acclaimed staging by Bud Leslie at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40, while “It Could Happen to You,” the film written by Anderson about a cop (Nicholas Cage) who shares his lottery winnings with a waitress (Bridget Fonda), is in local theaters.

“The small miracle of that movie,” says Anderson, “is that the idea that made me sit down in front of my computer to write the script over three years ago actually made it to the screen. I wondered how great it would be if good people actually were rewarded.”

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“The Baby Dance” dramatizes the dark side of the decent act. Wanda and Al are poor and overburdened, with too many mouths to feed. When Wanda is pregnant again, they take up an ad offer in the paper from an affluent and childless young Los Angeles couple, Rachel and Richard, who wish to buy “a healthy white baby.”

The coming together of these two couples is a cultural train wreck: Secularism, eco-awareness and business-like efficiency collide with religious tradition, poverty, patriarchy and a common sense born of necessity.

Director Jessica Kubzansky notes that staging “The Baby Dance” at American Renegade is, for her, a “wonderful change” from such stylized theater work as “Monsieur Shaherazad,” which she took to the Edinburgh Festival and London with actor Ron Campbell. Anderson’s play contains “such longing and yearning, with the tragedy that no one gets what they want. It would have been easy to make characters into good and bad guys, but Anderson is incredible in how she manages to make them all people trying to get what they need to survive.”

Of all the issues raised by “The Baby Dance”--a play that is fast becoming a staple in American theaters--it isn’t surrogate parenting that most inspired Anderson: “You know, it was the clash of classes. Class differences are a real concern of mine. I guess I realize how lucky I am. Some of us are born with all of the opportunities in the world, and some aren’t. But it’s no one’s fault how they were born. And I think of this little soul in the play, floating between two completely different kinds of lives. The baby could become a drunk on welfare, or a doctor. Where we’re plunked down is what makes us or breaks us.”

Anderson was plunked down in a well-to-do Bay Area family, then studied at Boston’s Emerson College and Ohio University, and struggled as both an actor and stand-up comic. While she learned “the efficiency of the craft” of TV writing, she also developed a pair of perhaps the most charming and memorable writer-actor performance works in ‘80s L.A. theater: “How To Raise a Gifted Child” and “Defying Gravity.”

Immediately, her voice was in place, her concerns absolutely focused. From then on, every Anderson play and film has dwelt on common folk, their responses to crises beyond their control, all within highly crafted narratives triggered by topical events. “There are two types of writers,” says Anderson, “the ones who feed from within, like O’Neill or Anne Sexton, and others, like me, who feed off of what we see.”

Her plays have observed incarcerated journalist hostages in the Middle East (“Hotel Oubliette”), a homeless family venturing to Disneyland (“Food & Shelter”), and a seminar on crisis preparedness, from quakes to locusts (“Smart Choices for the New Century,” upcoming at the next Humana Festival at Actors’ Theatre of Louisville).

And even in film and TV, where writers can hardly be auteurs , the same themes dominate. The Emmy-winning “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom” was a brilliant display of Anderson’s black wit, and an instant TV movie classic.

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Two upcoming film projects concern circles of unusual women: “Lady Icarus” reveals the hidden tale of female test pilots who almost became astronauts, while “How to Make an American Quilt,” adapted from Whitney Otto’s novel, observes the quilting culture of women. After “The Baby Dance” premiered at Pasadena Playhouse, the play was stopped cold in New York, running headlong into a thorough pan from the New York Times’ Frank Rich.

“‘The Baby Dance’ is out there now, on its own,” she says, a little wistfully. “It’s like a child I raised, and now it’s married with kids.”

Where and When

What: “The Baby Dance.”

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

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

Price: $10 to $12.

Call: (818) 763-4430.