THEATER : A Long Way From Santa’s Ride : As a cabbie in Chicago, playwright Will Kern collected a sackful of stories along with his fares. ‘Hellcab’ wraps up the best of them in a Christmas setting.

Will Kern drove a cab in Chicago for seven months and never got mugged. Then he came to L.A.

“It was pretty weird,” admits the Chicago-based playwright, who has been in town off and on to supervise the staging of “Hellcab”--his alternately poignant, scary and funny chronicle of those cab-driving adventures--at the Tamarind Theatre. Returning to his Hollywood hotel late one night, Kern was jumped by three teenagers demanding money. “I couldn’t believe it was really happening,” he says ruefully. “I was so panicked, I started screaming at them, pushing them down. Then I ran down the street, and luckily they didn’t follow.”

Although free of violence, his 1991-92 cabbie stint did provide its share of off-putting experiences.

There were excitable people on drug runs and tense domestic disputes. There was the spooky guy who wouldn’t tell Kern his destination, but kept directing him down dark alleys. For the writer, however, the worst time was picking up a fare who revealed that she’d just been raped. “This woman is suddenly in this terrible place, having to rely on a stranger to take her home,” he recalls sadly. “She was touching my shoulder, crying--it just broke my heart. It’s not just another fare; it’s a human being, and you can’t do anything to help. You feel so powerless.”

That true episode joins two dozen-plus vignettes that make up the 70-minute “Hellcab,” a rapid-fire flurry of pre-Christmas encounters taking place over a single night. Although many of the conversations are “practically verbatim” replays of actual encounters, Kern retains his creative license; he notes in the program that “90% of the tale is true.” And the process did require judicious editing for balance and tone. Says the writer, “I left out some juicy stories--like the mental patient cackling in the back seat--because I felt like I’d put in enough crazies.”

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The San Antonio native, now 36, was a film major at the University of Texas when he got interested in playwriting; he wrote his first play, “Shattered Visage,” for a student production there. Looking back, he says wryly, “I was really naive. It was like, ‘I’m going to be a playwright now’--except it doesn’t work like that. It took me about 10 years before I got to be any good. During that period, you’re absorbing, trying to find your own voice. By 30, I started to find it.”

His repertoire includes “A Tumbleweed in Cowtown” (co-written with Jeff Swan), “The Elvis: A Cartoon With Music” and “Skeleton,” all produced in Chicago. Yet in 1990, itching to get out of the city, Kern headed off to Japan and spent a year teaching English as a second language. Upon his return, he found himself reduced to an odd job here and there, debts mounting, yet determined not to go on welfare. Instead, he got his cabbie’s license and started driving: 16 hours a day Monday through Friday, 10 hours on Saturday, and eight hours on Sunday.

“You get up at 6 a.m., drive around for 16 hours, go home really tired, sleep for eight hours, then get up and do the same thing,” he recalls grimly. “After a while it wears on you, the car becomes part of you.” Yet the job served its purpose. “In a matter of weeks, I had paid off my bills,” Kern says proudly. “In six weeks, I had $2,000.” He’d also begun mentally shaping the experiences into theatrical form. “You replay the conversations over and over in your head so many times,” he explains, “so by the time you put it on paper, you know exactly how you’re going to write it.”

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Initially billed as “Hellcab Does Christmas,” the show premiered in November 1992 at the Famous Door Theatre in Chicago. “The only reason it got done was that the owners of the theater were friends of mine,” the writer admits cheerfully. Originally scheduled to run as a late-night show for 12 performances, the play was an instant holiday hit--and has been running in Chicago ever since. Six of the seven Los Angeles cast members originated their roles in Chicago; the play also has been done in Cleveland, Dallas, and a handful of college stagings.

Paul Dillon, who played the cabbie for seven months in Chicago, re-creates that role here. The actor (who can currently be seen on-screen as a one-armed pirate menacing Geena Davis in “Cutthroat Island”) is directly responsible for bringing “Hellcab” here: his Bang Bang company is co-producing with the Tamarind.

“As an actor, it’s really sweet to find something you’ve created and are good at,” says Dillon, who was a member of the Taper’s Improvisational Theatre Project in the ‘70s and later trained at Second City in Chicago. “This is not a bells-and-whistles show; it’s a play about these people. The reason I think it works is the cabdriver, the throughline of that characterization. You have all these wacky scenes tied together, the material is wildly turning--but because you have the story going with the cabdriver, the audience is allowed to go along with those changes.”

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Playwright Kern pleads ignorance when it comes to assessing “Hellcab’s” success.

“I had no idea it’d be as popular as it’s been,” he says modestly. Yet the regularity of those royalty checks has allowed him to quit his post-cabbie job of the last two years, as a trade-show analyst for Quaker Oats. Once again, the writer used that job experience as theatrical fodder: his newest play, “Mother Scorpion,” is about a woman who turns to dirty tricks to save her corporate post. Kern has also just finished a screenplay, “Lost in Hell,” which he describes as an urban “slice of life--with a ghost lost in the city.”

Unfortunately, there probably won’t be any “Hellcab” sequels in his future. “One day a friend borrowed my cab and got pulled over,” he says dryly. “They took my cab and suspended my license.”

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“HELLCAB,” Tamarind Theatre, 5919 Franklin Ave., Hollywood. Dates: Tuesdays-Sundays, including tonight, 8 p.m. Through Jan. 7. Price: $15. Phone: (213) 466-1767.