IN KEY WEST, THE SHOW GOES ON

Theater isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions Key West. To me, the Florida Keys are where Flipper lived, or the place where Jimmy Buffett chased the blues with margaritas. But for the past seven years, Key West has hosted a theater festival of some note, and this year I was invited: A play of mine had been chosen for a staged reading, and my best friend, Julie Schlenker Case, agreed to accompany me.

Theater had brought Julie and me together years ago, when we were both starving actors summering at a melodrama company near Pismo Beach, Calif. Over the years, theater has given us an excuse for quick trips away from our husbands to relive our thrilling days of thespianhood.

Julie had booked her ticket to Florida and found baby-sitting for her four children before I finished rewrites for the production. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had a few theatrics of her own to throw our way.

It was the last week in September, and I watched the Weather Channel in dismay as Hurricane Georges edged closer to the end of the Florida Keys. While my heart was sick for all those poor people sitting in the path of potential destruction, I was also heartsick for myself, fearful that the theater might blow away, too, taking with it this chance to bring my new play to life.

But as Georges skirted Florida and aimed for New Orleans, the news reporters who had been doing their stand-ups at Key West’s landmark buoy at Southernmost Point moved on as well. I assumed that no news about destruction in Key West was good news, and folks at the inn I’d picked said damage was minor, come on down. So we did.

Julie and I met at the airport in Miami. We had decided to drive rather than fly to Key West so we could see more of the scenery and, I must admit, hopefully to see more of Georges’ destruction. As a native Californian I’ve experienced my share of earthquakes, brush fires, urban unrest and El Nino, but I’ve never seen the damage a hurricane can do. Now was my chance to expand my repertoire of disasters.

Driving south from Miami, we left the mainland and picked up U.S. Highway 1 at Key Largo, the largest of the Keys. These are dozens of islands and islets, some unpopulated, others fully condo’d, linked by more than 100 miles of mostly two-lane highway. The trip was an amazing contrast of tacky tourist shops and long stretches of nothing but green water, lazy pelicans and coconut palms.

We whiled away the four-hour drive listening to a books-on-tape murder mystery by Miami writer Edna Buchanan and talking about food. Julie, who lives in landlocked New Mexico, had vowed to eat seafood at every meal. Our first opportunity to put this pledge to its test came at lunch in Marathon, a pit stop about three-quarters of the way to Key West.

Julie ordered the Keys’ signature dish, fried conch (pronounced “conk”). I think she just wanted to brag to her kids that she’d eaten a snail. (“Conch” is the word for everything native to Key West, from people to the architecture of clapboard-and-shuttered bungalows.) We had heard that the Keys were not known for memorable meals, and Julie’s conch lived up to that promise: tough, tasteless and over-fried. My shrimp salad was fine, and the Key lime pie was sublime.

Key lime pie has become an all-American dessert, on menus everywhere, but to be authentic it has to be made from the small yellow limes that grow in the Keys. We pledged to taste-test this treat everywhere we went.

As we approached the lower Keys, we began to see the effects of Hurricane Georges. Highway signs were bent over backward. Palm trees were shaved of half their fronds. Roofs were missing their shingles. And all along the roadside were piles of rubble reminiscent of those that lined the sidewalks of Santa Monica and the San Fernando Valley for months after the Northridge quake. Only instead of the concrete and brick debris of retaining walls and chimneys that marked the destruction in California, there were piles of palm fronds, broken lawn furniture, twisted bicycles, window frames and, inexplicably, old refrigerators. Scavengers were picking their way through the more promising mounds of rubble. But we also saw a sign that warned, “No trespassing. Have gun.”

We didn’t believe it would take the full four hours (short lunch stop included) to get to Key West, and we arrived barely on time for the afternoon reading of my play at the Waterfront Playhouse.

At the theater we learned about the hurricane’s effect on those involved in the festival. One of the tech people had lost his home on Stock Island, adjacent to Key West. Half a dozen of the actors who were based here had hunkered down with their four cats and two blind dogs inside one of the other theaters in town. The New York cast of one of the plays had to be evacuated the day after they arrived and spent the rest of the week rehearsing in a condo somewhere in south Florida.

Fortunately, my play was right on schedule. I even got to take a bow.

Afterward, Julie and I made our way to the other side of town, away from the noisy end of Duval Street, toward the water and the yellow and white Victorian that is the Southernmost Point Guest House.

I’d found the B&B; (not to be confused with a nearby motel by the same name) on an Internet listing, then saw it recommended in some budget travel guides. Since the theater wasn’t picking up the tab, our bottom line was the bottom line.

We were greeted like family and escorted to a room decorated to the gills, with maroon ruffles on everything. It had a private entrance and bath; there was also a coffee maker and a refrigerator, a basket of books and a decanter of wine. The window near my bed looked out on the broad porch that stretched around three sides of the house; guests could have breakfast on the porch or at umbrella-shaded tables in the yard.

If we’d had a bigger budget, we might have stayed at the elegant Curry Mansion Inn, a plush Victorian where summer (off-season) room rates start at $125. Or, if we’d had a week, I would have loved to stay at the Truman Annex, a sort of vacation village of former Navy buildings converted to condos and townhouses.

We needed to stretch our backs after a day of sitting, so we took a pre-dinner walk. Down at the water’s edge we saw our first and only serious hurricane casualty: a beachfront cafe that had been thrashed by the storm. A house across the street had survived just fine, but its upper windows were still boarded up.

Down the street we found the buoy made famous by the Weather Channel. Several French tourists were posing for pictures. A weathered and slightly inebriated local, wearing a T-shirt that advertised San Bernardino, of all places, offered to take pictures.

We just had time for a quick shower before dashing off to another Theater Festival offering, this one featuring the New York cast that had had to retreat to south Florida for rehearsals. The acting was fine, the writing mediocre, but the Eaton Street Theater was something to see, a Florida confection of crystal chandeliers and pink flamingos.

We’d planned on a good fish dinner, but somehow it got to be 10 p.m., and the only place serving food near where we had parked our car was a Cuban restaurant, Plantains. Julie ordered the pork sandwich, a succulent mess of meat, onions and cheese, and I had the picadillo--ground beef with peas, raisins and onions, served with black beans and rice and fried plantains. This time, the Key lime pie had a marvelous texture like rice pudding, and the crust, though soggy, was pungent with tart lime juice. Our only complaint was that the whipped cream came from a can.

Key West is definitely a late-night party town. From the street, it sounded like every bar had a Jimmy Buffett clone singing hits of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The real Buffett’s Margaritaville is in the heart of Duval Street.

Parking and traffic are two mainland woes that afflict Key West. The next day, we left the car at the B&B; and rented bicycles from a shop next door--the plain variety without gears, whose brakes work by pedaling backward. At $6 per day, they were a real bargain.

We headed away from the typical tourist destinations and into real neighborhoods. We pedaled past conch-style houses that had been lovingly restored. Other homes on the same street looked as though they’d never seen a paintbrush. Julie said they reminded her of a set for a Tennessee Williams play. And no wonder. Williams discovered Key West in early 1941, describing it as “the most fantastic place that I have been yet in America. It is even more colorful than Frisco, New Orleans or Santa Fe. There are comparatively few tourists and the town is real stuff.”

Today, the town is still “real stuff,” but the tourist population is considerably larger. Even though the local newspapers worried that Hurricane Georges had discouraged visitors, we found most hotels booked for the weekend, and crowds filled the sidewalks of Duval Street day and night.

Refreshed, we returned to the tourist route and a look at President Harry Truman’s Little White House. This classic conch house--a two-story white clapboard with screened porches--on the former naval base was Truman’s hideaway; he visited 10 times during his presidency. Our amusing guide made it sound like quite the vacation retreat for a “man’s man” who loved to fish and play poker, and, according to a reputable guidebook, supposedly started his day with a shot of bourbon.

The guide’s spiel reminded me of what was becoming my most vivid image of Key West: men and women walking down the streets with a beer in one hand and a cigar in the other. And this before lunch! I could imagine another of Key West’s celebrated habitues, Ernest Hemingway, feeling quite at home here. In fact, Hemingway made himself very nicely at home in the 1930s, writing in a room over a converted carriage house when not out fishing. The house, which he left for a new life and new wife in Cuba in 1940, is open to the public, but we decided we weren’t big enough Hemingway fans to ante up the $7.50 entrance fee.

Key West also is home to a different sort of “man’s man.” Much of the city’s restoration efforts have been credited to the town’s large gay population. And a number of hotels and B&Bs; advertise as “gay-friendly.”

We had hoped to swim at the Fort Zachary Taylor Historic Site, which Union soldiers held throughout the Civil War. But Hurricane Georges had torn up the trees and the picnic tables, so we pedaled a few miles east to George Smathers Beach for our dip in the Gulf. The water was bathtub temperature and much clearer than Santa Monica Bay, but I had to walk out for what seemed like miles before the water rose above my hips. The only waves came when a cruise ship sailed by.

We had another evening of theater ahead of us, and this time Julie was determined to get her seafood before the curtain went up. We returned to the harbor area and the highly touted Half-Shell Raw Bar, where we sat by the dock and split an order of a dozen raw oysters. Sea gulls and a school of fish in the clear water begged for scraps. They had to settle for our crackers; my grilled snapper and Julie’s skewer of shellfish were too good to share. But the Key lime pie was boring.

The highlight of the Theater Festival for me was a forum featuring another Key West resident writer, Terrence McNally, whose new play, “Corpus Christi,” had just sparked a public outcry in New York for its supposedly anti-religious theme. McNally said little about that, instead talking about the importance of the nurturing atmosphere of festivals like Key West’s, devoted to new work.

In fact, Key West boasts a very active arts community year-round. Plays or concerts are scheduled for nearly every weekend. And in addition to the fall Theater Festival, there’s the Key West Literary Seminar every January, which attracts participants from across the nation. (The next one is sold out.)

But it’s easy to miss the creative community aspect when the No. 1 business is catering to tourists.

We spent our last morning searching for appropriately silly gifts for our families. Key West has so far escaped the brand-name-mall mentality of most tourist-oriented downtowns, instead clinging to the kitschy T-shirt and shell shops I remember from my childhood beach vacations. Passing up the X-rated T-shirts that seemed to be a Key West signature item, I stuck with the Theater Festival souvenir shirt that sported Shakespeare in sunglasses.

As we drove back to Miami, listening to the last of the Edna Buchanan mystery, Julie had a great idea: I should start submitting my plays to theater festivals in even more exotic locales. I just discovered that Brisbane is planning an Olympic-size one in 2000. Hmm. Australia, here we come!

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GUIDEBOOK: Keys to Key West

Getting there: American and United fly nonstop to Miami, where a car can be rented for the drive to Key West. Restricted round-trip fare is $286 if ticketed by this Thursday. American also flies on to Key West after a change of planes in Miami; fare starts at $320.

Places to stay: We stayed at Southernmost Point Guest House, 1327 Duval St.; telephone (305) 294- 0715. Rates: $55-$125 summer, $95-$185 winter.

Truman Annex Real Estate Co. rents vacation condos and townhouses in recently renovated naval base buildings. Winter rates start at $1,400 weekly; summer, $800. Tel. (800) 884-RENT or (305) 292-1881; Internet https://www .trumanannex.com.

Where to eat: We enjoyed the food and laid-back atmosphere at the Half-Shell Raw Bar, 231 Margaret St., tel. (305) 294-7496; and Plantains, 908 Caroline St.; tel. (305) 294-9658.

For more information: Visit Florida, P.O. Box 1100, Tallahassee, FL 32302-1100; tel. (888) 7FLAUSA or (850) 488-5607. Internet https://www.flausa.com.