THEATER : The Silver Standard : Formerly fat, permanently gay, mordantly witty--playwright Nicky Silver spins modern neuroses, family dysfunction and even AIDS into darkly comic dramatic gold.

Nicky Silver sits on a bench in New York City’s Union Square Park not far from the Vineyard Theatre, the site of last season’s acclaimed production of his play, “Pterodactyls,” and where his new work, “Raised in Captivity,” opened to excellent reviews last week.

A photographer snaps away, capturing the 34-year-old playwright in his usual sartorial splendor--penny loafers, white socks, khakis, vest, tie, shirt and overcoat.

“It is a little comforting having a uniform,” says Silver, his owlish glasses glinting in the sunlight. “It gives one an identity. Otherwise, I’m so very bland.”

Hardly.

Silver has, in fact, been making a name for himself by being anything but bland. He has been described by a friend as “the love child of Morticia Addams and Liberace,” and his wild and darkly comic plays challenge all the pieties of the day.

Back inside the Vineyard Theater, he can’t help but betray the edgy ebullience behind his demure outfit. “I’m an organic writer,” he says, letting loose with a tornado of camp gestures and rapid-fire chatter interrupted only by puffs on a cigarette. “I only eat brown rice and gluten. Well, actually, that’s not true. I eat Snickers bars and tuna-fish sandwiches, Chinese food twice a week. I’m so rigid, so very rigid. . . . Do I seem unnaturally loquacious to you?

“Maybe it’s because the sound of my own voice is like Beethoven to me, though it’s been known to give other people a rash.” He rubs an eye. “I’ve had something in there all morning and can’t seem to get it. Oh, well, never mind. I’ll just have my eye plucked out later!”

Just a little over a year ago, Silver was merely the puckish boy wonder among the latest group of promising playwrights. Then “Pterodactyls” won both Newsday’s Oppenheimer Award and the Kesselring Prize, prestigious nods honoring early works, and suddenly a much wider theater audience was sampling and applauding his particular brand of outrageousness. On March 17, “Pterodactyls” will open in Southern California at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.

In Silver’s work, as in his conversation, the one-liners come fast and furious. But so does the unfocused rage and Angst among a raft of needy and self-absorbed characters who are simply trying to find their place in the world.

The dislocations in “Pterodactyls” center on Grace, a WASPish, alcoholic social butterfly, and her loony, doom-ridden family who are stand-ins for the last survivors of a new American Ice Age. The freeze sets in when Todd, the prodigal son, returns to announce, amid ditsy Noel Coward-like banter, that he has AIDS.

“Raised in Captivity,” which the New York Times called “a cause to celebrate,” examines the cyclical nature of good and evil, death and rebirth through Sebastian, a depressed gay writer, and his bulimic twin sister, Bernadette, who reunite to bury their mother who’s been killed suddenly by a flying shower head.

All of Silver’s plays are declarations of war against the notion of a cozy “Ozzie and Harriet” America. Those volleys are usually lively and funny at first, but audience whiplash occurs when Silver’s protagonists suddenly turn ugly: gay young men knowingly infect others with AIDS; a teen-age pop-culture buff abuses and rapes his mother and murders his father; a fat boy obsessively pursuing a narcissistic model puts a gun to his mouth. The audience is left to puzzle over the playwright’s moral ambiguities.

“It angers me that people think that if you ask that something be understood, you are asking that it be condoned,” says Silver. “People must accept responsibility for their actions, but I don’t think it’s OK to tell people, ‘You don’t deserve to live. You are no longer a human being.’ Human potential is rather limitless and we have no business giving up on it at any point.”

“Nicky’s work tests the limits and definitions of forgiveness,” says David Warren, who won an Obie for his New York staging of “Pterodactyls” and is now directing “Captivity.”

“There is evil in the world and there is evil within us, and if we can understand that and laugh at it, then we can defuse it. His compassion and hope shine through the muck.”

S ilver comes by his particular sympathy for outsiders and los ers honestly, it seems. Like so many of his characters, he has experienced life at the bottom of “the food chain.”

“I became aware of that place in junior high,” he recalls. “I was zeppelin-like in my physique and homosexual, and this was not a cheerful combination for a youngster growing up in Philadelphia. I wasn’t even at the bottom of the food chain. I was looking up at the bottom.”

Raised in a Jewish middle-class family in the Philadelphia suburb of Wynnewood, young Silver cast envious glances at the “beautiful WASPs” cavorting at the country clubs along the blueblood Main Line.

“I was desperate to be a wealthy, repressed WASP with tennis courts and manservants,” he says, and he would later get his revenge by satirizing them in a number of his plays.

Not that his own life escapes his mordant eye. Books and food were early lifelines for Silver, thus planting the seeds for his characters’ manic obsessions with weight. Moreover, his sister’s chronic childhood illnesses left him with a sense of life’s fragility, and hypochondria is pervasive in his work.

“All work is autobiographical to some extent,” says Silver, “but people assume that if you set a play in Philadelphia and you’re from there that you must be writing about yourself. They asked me that even about ‘Fat Men in Skirts,’ in which a child and his mother are marooned on a desert island for five years and become incestuous cannibals. I always answer, ‘Of course. I did rape my mother and then eat my father and his mistress, and now I’m out on a work-furlough program.’ ”

Silver’s early years were rather more commonplace, to hear his parents talk about it. His father, Jerry, was a commercial loan broker; his mother, Jill, now a pharmaceutical company representative, did volunteer work at a suicide hot line, and he has one sister, Laurie.

“I’d hate to think I’m like some of the mothers in his plays, which I don’t mind telling you I don’t understand entirely,” says Jill Silver in a phone interview. “I don’t think he gets it from us. We were a normal family, really. We’d watch ‘Lassie,’ the four of us, and cry together. And he’d always cry the most. For all his caustic remarks and big-shotedness, Nicky really is very soft-hearted.”

According to Silver’s father, there were heated family discussions--his wife’s liberalism pitted against his own conservative counterpoint. “I admired the way that Nicky listened to all sides and then prepared his arguments,” he recalls. “He was very opinionated, but with a wicked sense of humor and a lot of self-discipline.”

Jerry Silver says he also frequently took his son to the theater, and while Nicky was bored by “The Fantasticks” and “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” he perked up when he saw “Three Penny Opera” and “Porgy and Bess.”

Later, Edward Albee, Stephen Sondheim, John Guare, Noel Coward, Bertolt Brecht and Joe Orton, the prince of ‘60s dark comedy, would number among Nicky Silver’s heroes. “Sondheim and Guare came to see ‘Pterodactyls’ and that was scary, scary-good,” he recalls. “Albee came to see it too, and that was just scary.”

Silver’s youthful insecurities lasted until he discovered his own source of empowerment: playwriting. It all crystallized in his junior year in high school, when he wrote the school show entitled, “Your Children Are Not Your Children.” The play, a confessional along the lines of “A Chorus Line,” was a bit of a cause celebre, and suddenly the bright but chubby young man had found a cudgel with which to prove, as he put it, “everyone wrong.”

Skipping his senior year, 16-year-old Silver moved to New York to study theater at New York University from which he graduated in 1980. He also lost 100 pounds and became, in his words, “a Beau Brummell.” To this day, there are sweaters in the kitchen cupboards of his East Village apartment instead of food. “I think I may have a bag of microwave popcorn around somewhere,” he says.

At the same time, Silver was coming to terms with his homosexuality. This was complicated not only by the advent of AIDS, but also by an early therapeutic intervention that had supposedly “cured” him of being gay. When Nicky was 3 1/2, nursery school teachers recommended to his parents that they place him in therapy to rid him of his effeminacy. After three years, the therapist announced to Nicky’s parents that his homosexual tendencies had been successfully curbed.

“At the time, 1963, it was a progressive thing to do,” says Jill Silver. “Throughout the years, I’d ask Nicky if he was gay and he’d always deny it. Of course, now we know better. It’s not a choice. And about three or fours years ago, Nicky wrote us a letter about it, a beautiful letter, one that made us cry.”

“I’ve repressed it completely,” says Silver of the early intervention. “I remember playing with puppets, an alligator, and I remember (the doctor) had one leg longer than the other so she walked with a limp. But they were apparently mistaken about curing it. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Silver said that years of therapy following college proved more effective, helping him “to politicize” his bottled-up anger, shifting it into his plays. His creative development took a giant leap forward in 1987 when Robert Coles at New York’s Vortex Theater encouraged him to come up with works to fill holes in the group’s repertory schedule. He said he would do so if he’d also get the chance to direct.

“I learned a lot,” says Silver of the five-year apprenticeship that saw productions of his plays “Liars, Pinheads and Geeks,” “Wanking T’Ards” and “Fetid Itch.” “Fat Men in Skirts,” which he co-directed at the Vortex in 1989, was also produced at Washington’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre, in 1991. David Richards, then the Sunday critic of the New York Times, raved about the production and, as Silver puts it, with an Ethel Merman flourish, “my career was born!”

Woolly Mammoth has continued to produce Silver’s work, including “Free Will & Wanton Lust” in 1993 and “Food Chain” last year. “Food Chain” is also scheduled for an Off Broadway production this season. Meanwhile, Silver says he is working on new plays, commissioned by the Manhattan Theatre Club and Playwrights Horizons. He is also busy resisting the blandishments of Hollywood.

“I passed on ‘Mr. Ed,’ ” he says of an offer to make a screenplay out of the old TV series about a talking horse. “I said that I was interested in doing it only if the entire thing consisted of flashbacks from the glue factory,” he jokes.

That wit, and its undercurrent of harsh reality, remains Silver’s calling card. He has no plans to abandon his fascination with outsiders, or with a society that worships inclusion but eventually sends everyone to the glue factory.

“I mean Robert Redford is the ideal, isn’t he?” he points out. “You know, I once followed him around Bloomingdale’s and he’s tiny! He’s Lilliputian! And has bad skin! Even he’s got to feel like he’s not exactly on the top rung of the food chain.”

And Silver isn’t likely to soften his bite for the sake of adding luster to his new wider appeal. When asked what he considers to be the ultimate taboo, he responds without hesitation: “Fear. It’s denying anything about yourself or not doing something because you’re afraid of offending people. For a writer, this is where all the treasure is, all the stuff that people repress in an effort to be accepted.

“I really write to amuse myself,” he continues. “And while I think this communication stuff is highly overrated, if you do it with enough artistry, you might even be able to convey a message or two that people don’t really want to hear. But that’s not uppermost in my mind.”

What is?

“Sex. Food. Cigarettes. To keep amused. That’s the most important thing and it’s something that very few people are willing to take upon themselves. So I take up the slack. Or I try to. Do I seem unnaturally odd to you?”

* “Pterodactyls,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Opens March 17 and runs through April 16, Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Previews start March 14. Tickets, including previews: $20-$34. Information: (714) 957-4033.