Theater Attempts to Scale Mt. Fitzgerald : Stage: The novel ‘Tender Is the Night’ has never been done as a play. It’s a daunting task, and it opens today at Fountain Theatre in Hollywood.

“Tender Is the Night,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s finest and most serious novel, which was a flop when it was published in the middle of the Great Depression, has been adapted to the stage for the first time in the face of open-mouthed wonder.

Fitzgerald fans, academics and those who remember the disappointing 1962 movie version are questioning the audacity of bringing this American masterpiece onto a stage at all.

At the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood, where the play premieres today, adapter Simon Levy, director Heidi Helen Davis and a cast of 20 are compressing the work and transforming its multiple shades into theater.

Producer Jay Alan Quantrill negotiated the rights with the F. Scott Fitzgerald Estate. “The estate seemed mildly surprised,” Quantrill said. “I finally asked them, ‘What have you got to lose?’ ”

Quantrill said the estate’s lawyers asked only for a small percentage of the grosses, giving the Fountain limited exclusivity and three conditions: Be true to the characters, the period and the basic story.

In the novel, decadence and glitter on the Riviera--a Jazz Age spree of booze, spangled costumes, the tango and the Charleston--vie with a whole society’s corruption and moral disorder.

At the bittersweet heart of this adaptation, a veritable golden boy, psychiatrist Dick Diver (Larry Poindexter), marries his half-demented and impossibly rich mental patient, the schizophrenic Nicole Diver (Tracy Middendorf, making her stage debut).

In the greatest of ironies, as the doctor-husband returns his wife to mental strength, his own moorings are destroyed by emotional bankruptcy.

Diver, as Fitzgerald wrote in the novel, “had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it.” Of course, that kind of literary language is hard to put in a character’s mouth. As adapter Levy said with a grin, “I did make up some dialogue.”

Dick and Nicole are fictional representations of not only Scott and Zelda but their dear Riviera hosts Gerald and Sara Murphy, whose grand soirees served Fitzgerald’s artistic imagination.

But if Fitzgerald’s pictorial language is, as often claimed, unfilmable, can the stage be any different?

Even adapter Levy became so paralyzed by what he calls “the enormity” of dramatizing and directing this ambitious novel, that he turned over the directorial reins to veteran acting teacher and director Heidi Helen Davis.

Levy, who ventured into theater in the ‘70s, says, “I couldn’t be the playwright, mother and psychiatrist at the same time. I spent 18 months working on this adaptation, and I needed to sit back and get distance.

“If I can capture anything, I want to capture the feeling of the book and how it made me feel.”

Director Davis compared her involvement to that of a hired gun: “I’m not an expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was brought aboard to tackle a huge project. Reading the novel for the first time gave me great appreciation for it, but my forte is working with actors. What I’m bringing, I hope, is a depth of emotional understanding.”

When Larry Poindexter first auditioned for the role of Diver, he lost out to another actor. However, when Davis was brought in as the new director, he got a second chance and won the role of the tragic hero.

“The character is so terribly American,” Poindexter said. “I’ve always been attracted to darker characters. And what’s poignant, when you think about it, is Scott writing a happy ending for Zelda.”

In real life, Zelda never did get well and died in a fire in a North Carolina sanitarium in 1947. Fitzgerald had died of a heart attack seven years earlier, at age 44, in Sheila Graham’s Hollywood apartment while reading a Princeton alumni newspaper. (To the end, Fitzgerald remained devoted to Princeton, which will be the site of his centennial anniversary in 1996.)

When “Tender” was published in 1934, the author was out of critical and popular favor and at odds with the social dialectic. The book sold only about 13,000 copies its first year. When Fitzgerald died it was out of print.

Now long-accepted as a quintessential American novel, “Tender Is the Night” was made into a little remembered cable TV movie in 1985. In the most unlikely re-creation of all, it’s now become a play.

* “Tender Is the Night,” Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood, Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. Matinees Sunday and March 19, 3 p.m. $22.50-$18. (213) 663-1525. Ends April 8.