Dreaming of a Dark Christmas : Playwright Marion Gallo assembles an unattractive clan at a holiday dinner in her grim comedy ‘Home Fire.’

When asked where in the world she dredged up the violent, foul-mouthed and foul-minded family at the center of her play “Home Fire,” playwright-director Marion Gallo gives one of those pained, did-you-really-have- to-ask-that-question expressions. Looking for a second as if she has gulped down her entire salad whole, Gallo pauses in a booth at a Universal City restaurant.

“How do I put this?” she asks.

Her hesitation is quite understandable. The Baldasari family is one ugly clan. Rocco is freely cheating on wife Rita, and their two children, Andrea and Bobby, fill their hours insulting everyone and each other. Rocco’s brother Danny is terrorized by his mother Mary’s emotional manipulations, while Danny’s wife, Laura, tries to psychoanalyze it all. “Home Fire,” opening tonight at Theatre West, puts all of these people, and more, under the same roof for a Christmas dinner that might be Lucifer’s version of Noel.

While it’s best to assume that Gallo imagined all the bile and madness and scatology that course through her very black comedy, she didn’t. Without going into much more detail, she says, “This family lives and breathes in Brooklyn. Are they going to read this?”

When she started writing “Home Fire” in 1988, Gallo had been driven by her fear of gun-toting men, especially the unbalanced sort. “The mixture of guns and men absolutely scares me to death,” she says, “and with that as a catalyst, my imagination went on to tell me a million other stories,” some of which ended up in her play.

Understand--this was a new thing for Gallo in 1988. The Bronx-born writer had stumbled into the theater world like somebody getting dropped off at the wrong address. Growing up, she found out that she was too short to be a dancer. Then, she wanted to be an actor, but she had a stuttering problem. Her next option was to go into art, and she enrolled at the Pratt Institute of Design, which led her into the fashion industry.

“When I presented annual reports to fashion sellers,” Gallo says, “I found that I didn’t stutter if I read from written notes. Then, at a costume party, people loved an act I made up, and out of nowhere, I just signed up for an acting class.”

Gallo admits that her teacher, Warren Robertson, didn’t exactly teach her how to act. “But because he specialized in Primal Scream therapy (developed by Arthur Janov), he had me screaming for two years, and I lost my stuttering for good.”

Diving into the New York cabaret circuit with a solo act, Gallo subsequently snatched an award as best comedienne from the Association of Concert and Cabaret Artists for her show “A Comic Affaire.”

Nevertheless, she says: “I never thought of myself as a writer in New York. It never occurred to me that I could even sell my material. I would get offers and turn them down. In 1983 and ‘84, I was one of the most deeply-in-the-fog human beings you’d ever see.”

*

Gallo continued soloing in Los Angeles with her show “Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!,” which brought her to the Cast Theatre--precisely the theater one would think of as ideal for the savage satire of “Home Fire.” Gallo says that she showed her script to the Cast’s artistic director Diana Gibson, “who really liked it and probably would have done it, but I knew that the Cast’s stages were too small for the staging I had in mind.”

Besides, Gallo had discovered that Theatre West was a good place to workshop a new play on a sizable stage. And workshop it she did--”until I realized,” she says, “that it wasn’t what I wanted, and I didn’t want to fool with it anymore until I hit on what it needed.”

This happened when Gallo saw director Daniel O’Connor’s staging of Howard Korder’s brilliant black comedy, “Search and Destroy,” in Hollywood. “Until then, ‘Home Fire’ had been an unbroken sequence of action,” she says. “ ‘Search and Destroy’ showed me that you can write with impact in a bunch of short scenes. I didn’t think you could have so many short scenes on stage. It was a revelation.”

As Danny, the photographer who can’t muster the courage to tell his mother that he might be leaving for greener pastures in Italy, actor James DiStefano says that he likes “the conflict Danny is in, this universal idea of things that keep us from moving on with our lives. This play’s a monster--it’s a huge, emotional play that has so many aspects to it.”

“Part of my humor,” says Gallo, “is also part of my bitterness. Bitterness that I’ve felt at times, for instance, that life was cheating me out of something. I know that my writing can be very hurtful, very sarcastic. It’s a dark humor, which I hope I don’t lose. If I do, I’ll write very differently.”

For now, though, Gallo and company are ready to bring us a very nasty little Christmas.

Where and When

What: “Home Fire.”

Location: Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Universal City.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursday to Saturday; 7 p.m. Sunday. Ends Jan. 15.

Price: $15.

Call: (213) 660-8587.