A Change of Scene : Chance drove actor Bernard Baldan to become a playwright. It also drives his new comedy.

Playwright and actor Bernard Baldan rolls his eyes at mention of the phrase “midlife crisis.”

He says his new play, “The Boise Club,” which opens Thursday in a world premiere by the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach, is definitely not about that.

“It’s about change,” he says above the clatter of dishes and the hum of breakfast conversations at a busy diner here.

“Midlife crisis is just a label for almost anything that goes wrong with anybody over the age of 20. It’s one of these catchall phrases.”

His voice rises, mimicking a whine: “I’m broke. I must be having a midlife crisis. I’m getting divorced. It must be a midlife crisis.

“The concept of change,” he adds, “is much more important to me. Always has been.”

At 46, Baldan has had plenty of time to consider the matter. Still, discussing what he calls “the main problem in life,” he sounds more cheerful than earnest.

“When you’re young, you’re, like, skyrocketing. Bam! Bam! Then things start holding you down. For different people it’s different things. For some it’s a mind-set. For others it’s a mortgage. But it keeps you in the same place.”

The principal characters in “The Boise Club,” two men who have known each other since grade school, illustrate the point.

Ed (played by Baldan) married his high school sweetheart upon graduation and went straight into television sales, becoming the best TV salesman in Boise. He has two children, owns a home and makes a fine living.

Bill (played by Randy Kovitz) has been going in different directions from the moment he got out of school. Intellectually brilliant, he’s an inventor who has never married or even settled into a solid career. He has never seen through any of his projects.

“Ed literally could do his job in his sleep,” Baldan says. “Nothing changes. Ed never takes a risk. Bill lives for risks. It’s his style. But Bill wants the things that Ed has. And Ed looks at Bill and sees freedom.”

The pair hang out together, meeting at least once a week to watch TV sports in Ed’s basement, where most of the play takes place.

A third major character (Warren, played by Darrell Sandeen) is a talk-show host who uses his radio program, “Open Phone Idaho,” as a personal forum to vent his rage or to put people down. Ed, who listens to the program, sometimes uses information he picks up from it in his sales pitch.

Why Boise, Idaho?

“It’s a very odd town,” says Baldan, a lifelong San Diego resident who’s about to move to Los Angeles. “I’ve been going to Idaho for, like, 18 years. My parents retired there. I fell in love with the state. Boise is kind of an emerging city, both rural and cosmopolitan. You’ll find the latte house right next to the feed store.”

Unlike the character he plays in “The Boise Club,” Baldan has never married. He started out as an actor and turned to writing through a quirk of circumstance at Universal Studios. He’d been hired to play Dracula in the “Dracula’s Castle” show on the Universal tour after playing Bertram, the lead, in Shakespeare’s comedy, “All’s Well That Ends Well,” for the Los Angeles Shakespeare Festival.

“I had no idea what I was getting into,” he recalls. “We were doing Frank Langella’s version of ‘Dracula’ for tourists from around the world in this 3,000-seat theater with surround sound and animatronic gargoyles. The script just didn’t work there.”

On his fourth day in the show, Baldan did an 11-page rewrite and left it, unsigned, on the desk of Jay S. Stein, who was then chairman and chief executive officer of the recreation division of MCA, Universal’s parent company.

“I was an idiot,” he recounts. “You had to sneak into the Black Tower”--where the executives had their offices--”on tippy-toe. But then this announcement came over the public address system: ‘Would the person who left those pages please report to Jay Stein’s office?’ ”

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Baldan says Stein hired him on the spot. “I got a contract with Universal and ended up redlining scripts and writing three more tour shows.” He stayed from 1981 to 1989. Since then he has freelanced, both as an actor and writer, frequently performing at San Diego Repertory, where he’d worked earlier in his acting career.

Why write “The Boise Club,” his first full-length play, for the stage when he might have written it as a screenplay for a potentially more lucrative movie?

“We do have thoughts of doing it as a movie,” he said, referring to former San Diego Repertory Artistic Director Doug Jacobs, his chief artistic collaborator, who directs the Laguna Playhouse production.

“But we want to see it done as a play first. A produced play is a viable product. You can actually get someone to come look at it instead of saying to someone, ‘Let me tell you about it.’ ”

Even so, he says, he doesn’t see the Laguna production as a steppingstone to a film. He was raised in the theater. It’s his first love.

Besides, he’s already at work on a screenplay, “Rose Hill,” for a feature about an accidental murder in the Imperial Valley.

“That’s next,” Baldan says, as if reminded that the more change in his life, the better. “We’ve got a producer and everything.”

* “The Boise Club” previews today and Wednesday and opens Thursday at the Laguna Playhouse, Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m.; (no performance Feb. 1). $29-$35; $15-$18 (preview). (714) 497-2787.