Open for Repairs

Peter Hedges, best known for his 1991 novel “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and the 1993 movie made from it, began as an actor, then became a playwright who became a novelist who became a screenwriter.

But the theater has always been his touchstone.

After influential critics in New York trashed one of his plays, he started writing fiction, he says, “because I just didn’t see how I was ever going to have a place in the theater.”

Speaking the other day from his office in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y.--a rented room near his home that he uses for writing--the Iowa-born author added that a change in personal circumstances has altered his attitude toward unfriendly scrutiny of his work.

“Now I have a family,” says Hedges, 35. “So I have something in my life that gives me much greater perspective. At that point in my life, it was just me.”

His intention these days is not to worry about the reviews. “I realize that none of them kill you. You go on.”

West Coast critics will get a crack at him later this week. His play “Good as New,” staged off-Broadway for the first time in March, previews tonight and opens Friday at South Coast Repertory in a California premiere. It deals with what Hedges calls the “two great crimes”--lying and excessive truth-telling--and with what one of its three characters, a 16-year-old, regards as a felony: her mother’s face-lift.

“Good as New” explores how “a loving family’s best intentions can wiggle off into secrets and deceptions,” Hedges says. It grew out of a conversation he had one night with playwright Richard Greenberg, to whom he is dedicating the SCR production.

Not to be out-dedicated, Greenberg will reciprocate with “Three Days of Rain” when it opens at the Manhattan Theatre Club in November. (Greenberg’s bittersweet play premiered last season at SCR.)

“I’d always heard about Richard but never met him until a few years ago,” he says. “One day we had a writers’ meeting--Nicky Silver, Richard, myself and Douglas Carter Beane--and I ended up walking home with Richard in the rain. The conversation was magical. It was all about the kind of plays we both wanted to write.”

Coincidentally, each had a burst of creativity, Greenberg with “Three Days of Rain” and Hedges with “Good as New.”

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The presumption that Hedges lifts his work from his life has dogged him since “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” perhaps because it’s such a quirky, homespun saga told in an intensely personal voice. That tale centers on Gilbert and his siblings living in a small Midwestern town with their widowed, 500-pound mother, whose girth and embarrassment keep her from leaving the house.

To spare himself and his parents the irritation of literal-minded questions from a curious public, Hedges changed the novel’s dedication in the paperback edition. It reads:

To my mother

who is not fat

and my father

who is not dead.

To forestall any presumption that “Good as New” is autobiographical, he points out that he does not have a teenage daughter; he has two sons, ages 3 years and 9 months, and a wife, actress Susan Bruce, who has not had plastic surgery.

His most autobiographical work, he says, is his second novel, “An Ocean in Iowa,” due from Hyperion in April. “I worked long and hard on that one,” Hedges says. The story, set in 1969, “is about a boy who announces very early in life that 7 is going to be his year.

“He turns 7, and his mother leaves the family. Up to that point, of course, his mother has been his world. I tell what he does to get her back. And when he can’t get her back, what he does to replace her. And when he can’t replace her, what he does to remain forever 7.”

If his dozen or so plays have a common thread, it is thematic, not literal, spun from the domestic dysfunction of troubled families. He says he tends to write about people “who are trying to negotiate this very delicate thing called living.”

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Sometimes they are rendered in edgy tones of black satire, as in his latest play, “Baby Anger,” which premiered three months ago in New York; other times, as in “Good as New,” they are bathed in a somewhat comical light, less bleak but almost as dark. “This play really depends on the actors,” Hedges says.

In fact, Hedges is used to writing with specific actors in mind. Beginning in 1985, he produced about a dozen works of varying length for friends at The Edge Theater in New York, which he founded way off-Broadway with Joe Mantello, Mary-Louise Parker, K. Todd Freeman and others he knew from the North Carolina School of the Arts.

Hedges, who says he was the kind of kid who could quote Stanislavsky in sixth grade, discovered in arts school that he had small talent as an actor. So he wrote his first play. “I created roles to show [my friends] off because I didn’t think they were getting the attention they deserved.”

In his senior year, another of his plays

convinced him that he might have a future in the theater. “Oregon” had a born-again Christian hitchhiking to Bible college and two punk rockers who pick him up. “We did it in a garage,” Hedges recalls. “The students went crazy for it.

“I sat there thinking that I’d been in 60 or 70 productions from the time I was 13, and none of them ever had this impact. It’s funny how careers change. You go where you’re wanted.”

Hedges was not the only one who switched. His friend Mantello moved on to the lab program at Circle Repertory in Greenwich Village and asked Hedges to write a play for him to direct.

“I gave him ‘Imagining Brad,’ ” the playwright recalls. “It was the only thing I’d written that didn’t have a role for him.”

Mantello staged a workshop version, then directed a full production on the Circle Rep main stage in 1989. Today he ranks among the theater world’s top directors, recently staging Terence McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and Neil Simon’s latest, “Proposals.”

Hedges, notwithstanding his novels and his screen adaptations of Jane Hamilton’s “A Map of the World” and Harry Kondoleon’s “Diary of a Lost Boy” (both yet to be made), remains as committed as ever to the theater.

“I love its immediacy,” he says. “But it’s a balancing act. I also love the impact of film and the intimacy of fiction. Each form has its attractions.”

* “Good as New” begins previews tonight and opens Friday on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $18-$27 (previews); $26-$41. Ends Oct. 19. (714) 708-5555.