South-Central Still Smolders in ‘Souls on Fire’ : A new play takes us to a bar near Florence and Normandie on the night of April 29, 1992.

Danny Glover is on his daily lunch break during shooting of his latest movie, “Going West,” which stars Glover and Dennis Quaid. But he is not lunching on the Raleigh Studios lot where he’s working today. Instead, he’s wolfing food in a car parked outside the Met Theatre, located unglamorously in southeast Hollywood, in order to spend the precious hour talking about a play called “Souls on Fire,” the first production of the Robey Theatre Company, a nonprofit division of Glover’s Carrie Productions and named after the late Paul Robeson.

Also taking a break from the Hollywood scene today is “Souls on Fire” playwright Patrick Sheane Duncan. “Souls”--which takes place the night of April 29, 1992, the day the Rodney G. King verdict sparked the Los Angeles riots, in a South-Central bar located just blocks from the corner of Florence and Normandie--is the first play for Duncan. His Hollywood writing credits include “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” the heartwarming story of an inspirational high school music teacher that netted an Academy Award nomination for its star, Richard Dreyfuss.

The show’s director, Bennet Guillory, is artistic director of the Robey Theatre Company and an alumnus of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre with extensive theater, film and television credits as an actor and director. He has also worked in far more elegant venues than the Met Theatre, which was rescued from dormancy in 1991 by an alliance of actors and producers that included Holly Hunter, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan and Beth Henley. Those prominent actors and writer defected in March to form a new company on the Westside, leaving the remaining board members embittered and unsure of the theater’s economic future.

Glover, Duncan and Guillory don’t have to be here. They want to be.

“Isn’t it wonderful to be able to go somewhere and just see actors working?” says Glover in a conversation in a meeting room at the theater, as a rehearsal proceeds onstage. “We get the sense, because we are always inundated with what happens in ‘the business,’ that if you are not somewhere on the screen or on the tube, what you do is not valuable. So what we want to do at Robey is to give value to that.”

Glover, executive producer of the play (which is produced by “String of Pearls” producer and “The Country Club” director Paul Codiga), seems genuinely surprised when asked why he did not cast himself in “Souls.” “I didn’t even think about it,” he says. “I just thought this was something special to get us off the ground. There are a whole lot of talented actors out there.”

Guillory--whose regal posture and resonant voice suggest he stepped directly off a Shakespearean stage for this interview--agrees. “This play has a social conscience, it is current, it is about a very important issue,” he says. “It is something that will make a difference and make people think. That’s what the Robey Theatre Company is about, as well as giving people a place to act.”

Duncan’s play was selected as Robey’s first production during a once-a-month play-reading series held at the Met since last July. Duncan, a Vietnam veteran who grew up as the oldest of 12 children of a migrant farm worker and who was in and out of jail as a teenager, says he wrote the play because he noticed that virtually no playwrights had attempted to write about the Los Angeles riots since Anna Deavere Smith presented her one-woman show, “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” in 1993.

“I could write another $2-million screenplay in the time I’ve spent on this,” says Duncan, dressed in a bright red shirt, a black leather vest and tooled black western boots. “I could have taken another assignment they [Hollywood] threw at me, but that’s not the point. I wanted to do a play to become a better screenwriter.”

And, Duncan adds, “the only time we seem to talk about this is when [people] start burning the city. We should be talking about this every [expletive] day, excuse me. The fire is still smoldering, it ain’t put out by any means. It’s going to go again, and maybe it won’t be 20 years this time.

“The reason I wrote a play and not a movie is I go downtown and I go to the theater, and I see that audience, and I wanted to reach them. Those are the movers and the shakers and the talkers. I want them to talk about something that nobody is talking about anymore. And if we don’t talk about it, we don’t fix it.”

But will that influential audience that shows up at downtown’s Taper and the Ahmanson theaters also come to the Met? Duncan hopes so. “All the readings were highly attended,” he says. “[Smaller] theaters like the Matrix, the Odyssey, the Tiffany and LATC [the Los Angeles Theater Center downtown] have been presenting good work for years and years--people go to them, wherever they are.”

Glover, too, believes a play is the best medium for a call to action. “What happens here is a dialogue, and the dialogue has to take place at the basic level, in the situation that is most immediate. Maybe a film wouldn’t be the best place to bring this out,” he says.

The soft-spoken Glover becomes agitated when questioned about politicians who blame on-screen violence--such as his own top-grossing “Lethal Weapon” movies--for today’s rampant urban unrest. “No! It’s easy to find those little scapegoats--it makes us feel comfortable to blame it on something,” he says.

“It’s an easy target. I’m not going to say [Hollywood screen violence] is irrelevant; the point is that when it comes to what is happening in South-Central, what is happening in our inner cities . . . we need to be able to ask ourselves the right questions as a society. The needs that brought about the revolt are still out there. It’s for us to assess the reasons, the deep reasons why it happened, what could have prevented it from happening, and what things we can do to change the conditions under which it happened.”

While writer Duncan’s own background contains a fair share of poverty and struggle, do the play’s producers fear criticism for presenting Duncan--the successful white screenwriter of a “nice” movie like “Mr. Holland’s Opus”--as a defining voice for the Los Angeles riots? Not at all, Glover insists.

“I don’t think so. That didn’t come into our frame of mind,” he says. “It was a wonderful piece of work, that’s all that mattered. We assessed its validity in terms of the issue, by its attempt to bring us the voices out there. It wasn’t about a ‘black writer’ or a ‘Latino writer.’ . . . We often get into that, and we move to the wrong place. The possibilities reside in all of us--you can’t limit it to one race. That’s a problem in this country: We say that the possibilities don’t lie in all of us.

“It’s about discovering, in whatever ways we can, the real sense of our multiculturalism. If we want to talk about the person this company is named after, Paul Robeson--that certainly was what Paul aspired to do. Paul decided he wasn’t just going to sing Negro spirituals, he sang in 20 languages. He created all the possibilities.”

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“SOULS ON FIRE,” Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood. Dates: Previews May 1 and 2. Plays Thursdays to Saturdays and Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends June 16. Price: $20. Phone: (213) 957-1152.