Bringing Behan Back : Michael Kavanagh knew writer Brendan Behan as a youth. Now he portrays him in a one-man show.

The young man left school at an early age. At 14, he was a house painter’s apprentice to Stephen Behan. His name was Brendan, Stephen’s son. He had little idea of his upcoming international fame.

A number of years later, another Dublin youth left school to become a house painter’s apprentice to that same Stephen Behan. He had little idea who the portly gentleman was who stopped by at lunchtime to take Stephen for a few pints at the local pub.

Michael Kavanagh does remember that Brendan Behan scared him to death on several occasions.

“I was a skinny little kid at 14 years of age,” Kavanagh says today, in his 50s. “I had a big head of hair in those days, as I have today, and he grabbed me by the hair and he put the fear of God into me. Then he’d say, ‘Oh, here, bejesus, why don’t you go out and get yourself something to eat; you look bloody half-starved.’ And he’d give me a fistful of coins, whatever the contents of his pocket were.”

What’s more, Brendan Behan planted the seed of curiosity that nurtured Kavanagh’s one-man show, “Bein’ With Behan,” which opens tonight at Two Roads Theatre. It’s been a lengthy journey from the play’s inception almost two decades ago, toward a planned opening in New York after this San Fernando Valley run and two weeks at Palm Springs’ new Starlight Theatre.

As the young Kavanagh became aware of Brendan Behan’s fame, his admiration and respect for the novelist, poet and playwright grew. But Kavanagh’s dreams weren’t of writing or acting then. He was becoming a jazz trumpet player in his spare time. After turning professional, he emigrated from Dublin to study at a Boston music college.

Kavanagh remembers that Behan’s image followed him across the sea. He had never read any of Behan’s writing in Ireland.

“The funny thing was,” he recalls, “I didn’t until I came to America and lived in Boston. One day I was in a bookstore, and I can’t remember what I was looking for, but it was alphabetically listed under ‘B’. And I stumbled across ‘Borstal Boy.’ ”

“Borstal Boy,” Brendan Behan’s reminiscence of his World War II teen-age prison term in England for Irish Republican Army activities, and other Behan writings, were until recently banned in Ireland.

“I bought the book and read it. It was a wonderful, funny, touching book. When I had completed it, I had a sense of outrage, because I felt these people in authority had denied me something of my education.”

Over the years, Kavanagh has made up for that denial. He now has a collection of Behan material that he says outdistances that in the Los Angeles Public Library, enough to fill six hours on stage. The show’s current two-hour length was arrived at over the years, in workshop productions and through many rewrites, cutting and shaping his portrait of a man many consider to be one of the finest Irish writers of the 20th Century.

“I wanted to present all the various aspects of Brendan’s personality, the forces that shaped him. The popular image of him today is of a loudmouthed, rip-roaring drunken Irish guy, right? A lot of people don’t realize that beneath that loudmouthed facade was a very sensitive, poetic, wonderful man. In his youth, if he had told his contemporaries that he was interested in writing poetry, they would have laughed and ridiculed him. So he had this hard-boiled persona on the surface to protect those inner, sensitive feelings.”

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In 1989, just after closing his first Valley showing of “Bein’ With Behan” at Edmund Gaynes’ West End Playhouse, Kavanagh took a video of the show home to Dublin, where he played it for Behan’s widow, Beatrice.

“She fell in love with it,” he says. “She thought it was wonderful, but parts of it she found rather sad, because of course it was very true to life.”

The truth and the theatricality of the piece are what first attracted Gaynes to “Bein’ With Behan.” He is again producing it at Two Roads, which he took over after the demise of the West End Playhouse after the Northridge earthquake. There have also been little incidents in his life that sparked Gaynes’ interest. The show’s director, Bruce Heighley, co-starred in the Broadway adaptation of “Borstal Boy” in 1970 and played the title role in Behan’s “The Hostage” in Philadelphia two years later. Heighley, who met Gaynes while they were both appearing in Broadway shows and were on the same bowling team, was responsible for bringing Kavanagh’s work to Gaynes’ attention.

Although he never worked with Brendan Behan, Gaynes used to run into the writer at Broadway’s theater-district watering holes.

Gaynes claims: “It just seems that all those elements come together to make this project inevitable. It was meant to be. And, first of all, it’s an incredibly powerful piece. It’s something you really sink your teeth into. I want to do it in New York so it gets the imprimatur of the New York theater. We want to tour it all over the country, wherever people are interested in learning about Brendan Behan.

“As years go by, more and more people are ignorant of all these great writers and actors of the past. We do need to refresh their memories. And this is special. This is not Emily Dickinson sitting alone reading poetry. This is seething, vibrant. And there’s a lot of humor, it’s funny, boisterous, bawdy.”

Kavanagh adds: “In performing the show, every night I’m touched by the material. I’m really at a loss for words to describe my feelings, other than to say that I’ve a great love and admiration for Behan. He was a gregarious, buoyant character.”

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Bein’ With Behan.” Location: Two Roads Theatre, 4348 Tujunga Ave., Studio City. Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 5 p.m. Sundays. Ends March 12. Price: $15. Call: (818) 766-9381.