THEATER : Step On Into His (Funeral) Parlor : Death becomes ‘Three Viewings’ playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who finds funeral settings to be ‘somber places with odd pockets of hilarity.’

Jeffrey Hatcher sees nothing unusual about his interest in funerals.

“I’ve found that most playwrights, at some time, want to write about funerals or funeral parlors,” insists the 38-year-old Minneapolis-based writer, whose treatise on the subject, the funeral parlor-set “Three Viewings,” opened Friday on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage after a run last year at the Manhattan Theatre Club. “It’s almost unconscious: you write about things that are important to you personally, and that also connect with an audience. That kind of ideal is always swimming around in my brain.”

Those musings began to take shape two years ago when Hatcher’s father died, and suddenly he was immersed in this peculiar new arena. “Funeral parlors are somber places with odd pockets of hilarity,” notes the writer, whose piece is made up of three separate monologues. “Undertakers are like mai^tre d’s to the underworld. There’s never any levity or joking with the public--so what you see underneath is a lot of repression.”

When Hatcher asked his father’s funeral director if he had any interesting shop stories, the reserved mortician suddenly became animated, regaling him with tales of exploding pacemakers and hush-hush police investigations. In the resulting monologue, “Tell-Tale,” a funeral director speaks of a crush he has on a woman who’s a regular funeral attendee--a real estate agent on the make. That too, Hatcher says, has its seed in reality: “A lot of my mother’s friends, widowed or divorced, became Realtors. So they come to the funerals to be supportive, but also for this other thing.”

The impetus for his second monologue, “The Thief of Tears,” also came from Hatcher’s research: a funeral director’s story about a family who suspected that one of their own had stolen a ring from the body of their newly departed kin. The character here is a jewel thief who makes the rounds of local funerals. “The challenge is making this woman likable and delightful--which is tricky when she’s doing this very unlikable thing,” Hatcher concedes. “When we did the play in New York, I found that older audiences were the least delighted with this character.”

The third piece, “Thirteen Things About Ed Carpolotti,” skates the closest to his own life: the lament of a widow who just learned her husband’s business dealings have left her up to her eyeballs in debt.

“When it came to putting my mother [at risk], my father didn’t tell her what he was doing,” Hatcher says grimly. “When he died, she was personally responsible for everything: We had to keep the [construction] business going, pay off enormous debts. She’s OK now; I think she’s forgiven him. But he put her through hell. When someone you love doesn’t tell you the truth, you begin to wonder about the relationship, what it was based on.”

Hatcher admits he was a little skittish when he realized he was hanging out the family linen for all to see. “When I wrote it, I never thought it would go anywhere,” he explains. “I’d been working with the Illusion Theater in Minneapolis on another project, so we did a little workshop of this. I thought, ‘No one’s going to see this--and my mother will never know.’ ” But the great response convinced Hatcher to send out the script to a few theaters; soon afterward, the Manhattan Theatre Club came calling.

“At that point, I still didn’t tell my mother anything,” he says sheepishly. “Then it struck me: from my worst times, when I was doing dopey jobs during the day and grisly showcases at night, my parents had always been supportive--emotionally and financially--of my life in the theater. Also, I think if you’re going to write about your family, you want to find the grace notes within it. So while the play revealed some things about my family that people didn’t know, it also revealed this core of trust and faith between my parents.”

Hatcher’s mother didn’t see the New York staging, but he did give her the script, and when it was done in Philadelphia, she saw it there--twice. “She cried when she read it,” he says, “but she didn’t think it besmirched my father’s memory.” For someone who’d previously penned comedies, the across-the-board emotional response to “Three Viewings” has hit Hatcher from out of the blue. “It’s been kind of amazing,” he allows. In his 1995 review in New York Magazine, John Simon hailed the writer as “what we have all been waiting for: a new, true, idiosyncratic voice in the theater.”

Born and raised in Steubenville, Ohio, Hatcher made his theater debut as an actor in the sixth grade, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father and Polonius in his own 45-minute version of “Hamlet.” At Ohio’s Denison College, he majored in theater/cinema, then segued to NYU, where he dropped out “in a crisis of confidence.” It wasn’t until the mid-’80s that he moved into writing. “I knew immediately that I was much more confident,” he says. “I’d been so self-conscious as an actor, but I found it much easier to [express myself] on paper.”

The resulting plays include “Scotland Road,” “Neddy,” “Fellow Travelers,” “Comfort and Joy,” “Vandals” and “Two, Nikita.” As an adapter, his “Bon Voyage,” based on Noel Coward’s “Sail Away,” opened at the Denver Center Theatre in 1993, his adaptation of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” appeared last year at the Portland Stage, and “Smash,” his adaptation of G.B. Shaw’s “The Unsocial Socialist,” will premiere at Seattle’s Intiman Theater during its 1996-97 season. On the home front, the project most eagerly anticipated is his and wife Lisa’s first child, due in early March.

Yet Hatcher isn’t finished with the subject of funerals: He sold a treatment for a yet-to-be-filmed “Columbo” TV movie. “It’s about this chichi Hollywood mortician who murders someone during a funeral,” he explains, “then cremates him to hide the evidence--except for one little thing. . . .”*

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“THREE VIEWINGS,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Dates: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 25. Price: $26-$36. Phone: (714) 957-4033.