Making Up Lives : Playwright leaves TV characters behind and finds niche in creating people and situations from scratch.

Leslie Caveny admits that nobody put a gun to her head two years ago and forced her to give up the lucrative TV writing work that had been increasingly coming her way so that she would be able to write a play.

No, Caveny says, it was all her doing.

“I am probably committing professional suicide,” she says, almost hiding her face in laughing embarrassment. “I lost my agent. I’m down to nickels and dimes.”

Sounds grim, but if Caveny’s new comedy, “Impact This!” is anything like her previous hit (and first play) at Theatre West, “Love of a Pig,” then she needn’t worry for very long. “Pig,” a hilariously hyper piece about a depressed woman and her dating nightmares, first enjoyed a months-long run in 1989, then six separate U.S. productions, a staging in Australia, and an invitational production at Ireland’s Dublin Theatre Festival. In a rarity for any play conceived in Los Angeles’ small theater scene, “Pig” was published by Samuel French, a New York-based company that publishes theatrical scripts.

Actually, the very success of her first work has Caveny bothered about the reception to “Impact This!,” opening tonight at Theatre West. “I’m scared that people are expecting a sequel to ‘Pig,’ ” she says, “and it couldn’t be more different. It might even be pre-’Pig,’ about a woman who might become my heroine Jenny in ‘Pig.’ ”

But what “Impact This!” is about more than anything else is the comic, mad, creative struggle between a playwright writing characters into life, and the characters themselves, who tend to rebel against the playwright’s wishes. Caveny’s central, archetypal people are named Man and Woman, and once they escape from a plot they find repulsive, they discover that they have no “backstory”--shop-talk for character biography. Without their creator around, they have to create themselves, while falling in love with each other.

“In a way, what you see on stage (are) the changes I made to this play,” says Caveny, 32, whose charming nasal twang has the kind of distinctive lilt that a stand-up comic would kill for. “It started as a straight play; I wasn’t going to break the fourth wall or anything like I did in ‘Love of a Pig.’ But when it came to the moment when Woman is about to kill Man, I couldn’t make her do it.

“A writer in the writer’s workshop here,” she says, pointing around at Theatre West’s upstairs workshop-library-rehearsal space, “suggested that it was interesting in itself that I resisted letting her go through with murder. Then it occurred to me that I didn’t really know why I wanted to write what was becoming this man-hating piece. It was probably because of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith cases, which were going on at the time, plus the intellectual arguments I was getting into with men in my life.”

It was time, Caveny realized, to “get personal and stop the preaching.” Sure enough, the writing started breaking down that fourth wall and producing a steady stream of ironic situations and a tonnage of quirky twists. “I can’t describe,” she says, “what it is about my humor, or where it comes from exactly--it’s just the way my mind works, which I always thought was the way everyone’s mind worked.”

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Director Deborah LaVine says that “what attracted me to this play is its desire to break the rules and be provocative. And yet Leslie presents some weighty ideas about men and women, art and life in a style that’s never didactic. It’s ambitious, and pushes the limits of what can be done on a small theater budget.”

Caveny’s voice was skilled enough and odd enough to gain her a staff writing position with HBO’s non-mainstream sitcom, “Dream On,” but two years ago, the lure of “Impact This!” began to pull her further and further away from the grind of writing material for a set of characters created by another writer.

“It’s pretty clear to me now,” she says, “that I can’t write that way. I have to make everything up. Underlying everything in this play was my own struggle in not wanting to write for the industry, or at least not in the way I was doing.”

Caveny knew as a girl growing up just outside Princeton, N.J., that playwriting was more immediately gratifying (“I wrote these little plays I made my sisters act in, just like in ‘Little Women’ ”). She carried her hobby to Boston University, where she studied with Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott (“He didn’t take me seriously as a writer,” she says, “because I spent too much time acting in shows”).

Now, playing Woman, Caveny is back writing and acting, which she hasn’t done since her performance in “Love of a Pig.” The acting, she says, is “therapeutic,” but keeping track of her stacks of drafts and script changes has been something else.

“In a word,” she says, it’s “crazy.”

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WHERE AND WHEN:

What: “Impact This!”

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

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursday to Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday. Ends March 26.

Price: $25 tonight (opening night), regularly $12 to $15.

Call: (213) 466-1767.