I Work, Ergo, I Write : Taxi dancer, waitress, you name it, Kelly Stuart has worked it--and worked it into her writing.

Waitress, hostess, taxi dancer, temp. The minimum-wage jobs that Los Angeles has to offer may be nothing to write home about. But they’re fodder for Kelly Stuart’s weirdly wacky plays.

A Valley girl by birth and an absurdist at heart, she has a knack for turning the existential comedy of low-pay L.A. into a poetry of the perverse. But stylish as her plays may often be, they never seem to lose touch with their source of inspiration.

Nor, for that matter, does the playwright.

“Almost all of my plays come from crummy jobs that I’ve had,” says Stuart, 34, over lunch in a dim sum restaurant near the Chinatown home she shares with stage director Robert Glaudini and their two young daughters.

“I used to write at McDonald’s and overhear conversations, and that gave me material too. Now I write at the train station. But I have enough memories of dumb jobs to last me forever.”

Stuart does not, however, simply re-create the quirky workplaces of her pre-career past. She reinvents the dives and the drudgery, along with the scrappy men and women who work there, adding broad physical comedy and other unusual elements to the mix.

Consequently, her scripts run the gamut from verite to vaudeville.

“Her work has an Expressionistic sense of humor and certain vaudevillian elements,” says Murray Mednick, the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival artistic director, who has mentored Stuart since she was a teen-ager. “It has a sophisticated irony that’s not common from someone her age.”

Stuart’s latest work, “Demonology,” will be presented as part of this year’s 16th Padua festival, which offers six new works on two separate bills of three each, playing in repertory beginning Friday at USC’s Bing Auditorium. The other writers whose plays will be staged are Mednick, Maria Irene Fornes, Gil Kofman, Marlene Mayer and John O’Keefe.

Stuart, a veteran of many Padua festivals, says her piece this year is comparatively upbeat:

“I used to be a lot more negative. I’m a lot more hopeful now. I’m more interested in characters who are just trying, however they can, to make some kind of life despite [lousy] circumstances.”

S tuart’s own circumstances have often been less than ideal. Stuart’s teacher father and police officer mother divorced when she was young. She grew up with her mother in the Valley and El Segundo.

In high school, Stuart was a jock. She had a talent for swimming but little interest in the arts and had no idea what she wanted to do with her life.

Then, when she was an 18-year-old student at the University of La Verne, Stuart signed up for one of playwright Mednick’s writing classes.

“I was a Valley girl,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about theater.”

Mednick, a veteran of a decade in New York’s Off Off Broadway scene, had been teaching at La Verne for a few years, during which time he founded the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival.

Although the festival started in 1978 as a modest gathering of some of Mednick’s friends (including such noted writers as Sam Shepard and Fornes) at a decaying estate in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the retreat quickly became known as an artist-run nurturing ground for writers.

In 1981, Mednick arranged a Padua scholarship for Stuart.

“I went to Padua and that was it,” she says. “I just knew that what I was going to do was write plays.”

It gave Stuart not only a vocation but also a new home base.

“It became my place to stay for the summer,” she says. “It became my family, really. I would plan my life around how I was going to do Padua the next summer.”

After a couple of years, Stuart left La Verne, a move she now acknowledges “was probably a big mistake.” She moved to Los Angeles and took a job as the live-in caretaker of a small Melrose-area theater.

It was the first of a series of low-paying jobs that she held while pursuing her writing.

“All I wanted to do was write, and I didn’t want to go and work a job,” Stuart says. “I was a taxi dancer and every other horrible job that you can imagine. I was a waitress and a hostess. I even answered fan mail for a guy once.”

Stuart did, however, have Padua to look forward to. She continued to study there--with Mednick, Fornes and others--and became a regular at the annual gatherings.

She stopped participating in the Padua enclaves in 1987, when her daughter Kathleen was born. But she did not stop writing.

In 1988, she had her first production outside of Padua, although not without the help of festival people. Under the auspices of Heliogabalus--a theater company founded by Padua veterans John Steppling and Glaudini--her play “The Secret of Body Language” was staged at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood.

It was in 1989, however, that Stuart presented what was perhaps her breakthrough play. “Taxi Dance,” directed by Glaudini, was, Robert Koehler wrote in The Times, a “hypnotic descent into female hell . . . more interesting than much of [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder’s work.”

The material for “Taxi Dance” came from Stuart’s stint as a partner for hire in a pay-per-dance parlor. And although her subsequent plays have tended to be more comic, they too draw on the playwright’s brushes with the workplace at its worst.

In 1990, the year her daughter Isabelle was born, Stuart returned to Padua, where she cast her new infant in her play. Not surprisingly, given her proclivity for dramatizing her own labors, “Ball and Chain” features a central character who takes care of children (specifically, a preschool director).

“Stuart balances great empathy with a broad comic sense,” Koehler wrote of “Ball and Chain.” “She shifts her central characters . . . from a place of ridicule to one of sympathy.”

Stuart’s 1991 Padua entry, “The Interpreter of Horror,” again focused on a job from her past. It featured a waitress named Horror at work in a divey coffee shop.

A part from Padua, Stuart has also found a base of sorts at the Mark Taper Forum. She has twice been presented at the theater’s New Work Festival (in 1989 and 1993) and has been a member of the Taper’s Mentor Playwrights Project since 1992.

Yet despite support from Padua and the Taper, full productions have been harder for Stuart to come by. Aside from a small, self-produced staging of her play “Shoot” at the Cast last spring, Stuart’s work has been getting more attention out of town.

“The Peacock Screams When the Lights Go Out” was staged by Sledgehammer Theater in San Diego last year. The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Michael Phillips called the script--about a shoe salesclerk who faces nutsy customers, nightmarish memories and breast cancer--”a harsh journey, edgier but not unrelated to mainstream black-comic odysseys.”

The same play was also given a reading at the Public Theatre in New York in May. But a full staging of this or any of her other works at a major regional theater still seems elusive.

“It’s very frustrating if you’re a woman and you’re not writing a certain kind of play,” she says. “There’s a reason why Wendy Wasserstein is the Woman Playwright.”

As Stuart sees it, her own work can’t simply waltz down the Wasserstein path: “My work isn’t going to go into regional theaters easily. It’s too weird. I love absurdism, but the theaters are not interested in it at all.

“I’m having to struggle between my whimsical-absurdist thing and what they consider ‘deeper’ and more important. But I’m trying to find a way to get that stuff in there without them really knowing what it is.”

Nonetheless, Stuart continues to be encouraged by Padua and the New York-based New Dramatists, an organization to which she was recently admitted. The latter is an artist-run organization, like Padua, although it doesn’t actually stage works.

“They don’t produce you, but they do talk your work up to other people,” Stuart says. “[Both Padua and New Dramatists] are playwright-driven organizations. They give you a place to stay and you arrange readings and do what you want.”

And that, she says, is the invaluable room of one’s own that a writer most needs.

“I go there every three months or so and it’s like a vacation,” she says. “Sometimes they just need to leave you alone. I wish more play development was like that.”*

*

“1995 FESTIVAL OF NEW PLAYS,”Meet at the Bing Auditorium, USC, Gate 5, Jefferson Boulevard and McClintock Avenue. Dates: Friday-Aug. 13. Series A: Thursday-Friday, 7:30 p.m.; Series B: Saturday-Sunday, 7:30 p.m. $20 per series, $35 for both. Phone: (213) 466-1767.