Perfect Strangers

They know each other thoroughly--and yet not at all.

Los Angeles director Hope Alexander-Willis and East Coast playwright Israel Horovitz have turned out hit after hit, having been paired for productions of “Park Your Car in Harvard Yard” (which logged an extended run of six months at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood), “Fighting Over Beverley” (which ran for four months at the Fountain) and “Unexpected Tenderness” (which played for 2 1/2 months at the Lee Strasberg Creative Center in West Hollywood).

Yet Horovitz--who interacts with Alexander-Willis primarily through electronic messages--is reduced to mere speculation when he talks about her. “I imagine she is quite a colorful personality from her e-mail,” he says.

Playwright and director have met briefly each time Horovitz traveled to Los Angeles to see a finished show, but what they know about each other is gleaned mostly from the work itself.

“We’ve never gone out for dinner together,” Alexander-Willis says. “We’ve never had coffee together. We’ve never socialized in that way. And yet I feel very close to him--I think because I’ve lived in the world of his plays.”

In a separate conversation a short time later, Horovitz echoes her almost word for word. “I don’t know her so well,” he says by telephone from New York. “I don’t know where she lives; I don’t know what her place looks like. I only know her through her work on my plays, and I think her approach has been honest and effective. She’s helped the plays to communicate to people, and that’s all I need to know about her.”

In her e-mails to Horovitz, Alexander-Willis may ask him to share the personal history that he has threaded through a play; she may ask him to clarify a line of dialogue; or she may ask to edit or otherwise revise the text (these latter requests have been known to spark some, shall we say, spirited exchanges).

She sent messages almost every day while at work on the semiautobiographical “Unexpected Tenderness,” since she wanted to make sure she had her facts straight. As she prepares the next project, she feels she knows him better. The messages have slowed to about one a week.

That project is actually their fourth, fifth and sixth pairings, rolled into one. The Fountain has hired Alexander-Willis to stage a trio of Horovitz plays known as his “Growing Up Jewish” cycle. Inspired by the memories of Toronto lawyer Morley Torgov in his book “A Good Place to Come From” as well as Horovitz’s own reminiscences, the plays chronicle the coming of age of two Jewish boys in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, during World War II. “Today, I Am a Fountain Pen,” “A Rosen by Any Other Name” and “The Chopin Playoffs” open back to back next weekend and will continue on alternating days.

Irving Yanover and Stanley Rosen, the central characters, age from 10 to 16 in the plays. Both are the sons of middle-class shop owners, and their parents are friends. The boys probably would be friends, too, if their parents weren’t always pitting them against each other. Engaged in a never-ending game of one-upmanship, the parents are always bragging about their sons’ grades or piano-playing proficiency--and then the boys have to live up to the boasts.

As World War II breaks out, however, the boys end up with more on their minds than homework and piano practice. With anxiety mounting over both the war and the Great Depression, North Americans begin looking for scapegoats, and, as in Europe, Jews are targeted for blame.

Both Horovitz and Alexander-Willis experienced this discrimination.

Horovitz was a member of one of the few Jewish families in the small New England town of Wakefield, Mass. His father, Julius, worked as a truck driver until age 50, then went to law school and became a lawyer. That made him a hero in the younger Horovitz’s eyes, but, apparently, it didn’t mean much to some people in town.

When Israel was in his early teens, his father ran for selectman--the equivalent of a city councilman. “I was handing out leaflets, and somebody came up to me and said, ‘Why are you handing out leaflets for the Jew lawyer?’ [They were talking about] my dad, who had just gone from truck driver to lawyer, and I was so proud of him. For him to be perceived that way was disgusting.

“At age 59, I can say without a doubt that the dumbest thing I’ve seen is racism,” Horovitz continues. “I just don’t get it, on any level.”

Alexander-Willis, 51, relates a similar incident from her girlhood in San Francisco. Her actress mother, Mara Alexander, was blacklisted at the height of anti-communist feeling in the ‘50s, and a vigilante group stormed their home, throwing rocks through windows and yelling, “Jew Commie bitch.”

Though the “Growing Up Jewish” plays address tough topics, they are, as often as not, funny. “I feel responsible to entertain an audience, to draw an audience in,” Horovitz says. “Humor is important to me in life, so why wouldn’t it be important to me in my work?”

Of the more than 50 plays Horovitz has written, he remains best-known for the 1968 play “The Indian Wants the Bronx,” in which mindless hooliganism and racism escalate to violence. In recent years, he has spoken with the voice of the working class in a long string of bittersweet dramas--including “Park Your Car,” “Beverley,” “Unexpected Tenderness,” “North Shore Fish” and “Strong Man’s Weak Child”--set in the economically depressed fishing town of Gloucester, Mass.

In addition to Horovitz’s plays, Alexander-Willis staged the recent “Shame on the Moon” for the Ivy Theatre and “Jack & Jill” for International City Theatre. She is also an actress, having appeared in the Pasadena Playhouse’s production of “Equus” and South Coast Repertory’s stagings of “An Ideal Husband,” “Three Viewings” and “Six Degrees of Separation.”

In the 1980s, Horovitz worked closely with the Los Angeles Actors Theatre, which then became the lead producing organization at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. After that company folded in the early ‘90s, Horovitz dropped from sight here for several years--until the Fountain came calling.

Stephen Sachs, the Fountain’s managing artistic director, says that the theater keeps putting Horovitz’s shows on its schedules because “his plays really seem to strike a very popular chord with our audiences. He writes very human plays, and audiences easily identify with his characters and end up caring about them.”

Alexander-Willis has been hired to direct each production because she understands the plays and, being an actress herself, knows how to draw appropriate performances out of the actors, Sachs adds.

Alexander-Willis had never acted in or directed any of Horovitz’s work until the Fountain approached her to stage “Park Your Car in Harvard Yard” in 1995 and then “Fighting Over Beverley” in 1997. Horovitz, who traveled here to see the shows, was particularly impressed with “Beverley.” “I thought she got it spot-on. It was funny, and it had tremendous dignity, and it had pain. It was what I wanted when I wrote it.”

Horovitz himself then recommended Alexander-Willis to the producers of “Unexpected Tenderness.”

The pair’s interactions have occasionally been contentious, Alexander-Willis says, but always with “a tremendous amount of respect and affection for each other.”

“Israel has his creative voice and I have mine,” she says. “Sometimes, it’s that oil and vinegar mix that makes the plays work. I have my own ideas, and we battle. It’s almost like the Talmudic arguments that go on endlessly. We’re like two old rabbis.

“We’re both very strong, very opinionated, very hard-headed people,” she adds, “so there are bound to be some clashes--and there have been some big ones.”

Horovitz offers: “I’m very difficult to work with as a playwright because I work so hard on the play,” fine-tuning the text “endlessly.” But he says that he trusts Alexander-Willis “as much as I do anybody, I suppose, and more than I would most directors that I’ve worked with.”

Both agree that distance hasn’t hurt the relationship and has, perhaps, enabled it to evolve more smoothly.

Horovitz points out that he simply doesn’t know Alexander-Willis well enough for any personality clashes to have developed into impediments. “It’s a very pure working relationship,” he says. “If there’s struggle, it’s a struggle to get to the same place.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” Alexander-Willis quips.

But, she hastens to add, she always has “a very good time” staging Horovitz’s plays. “It’s always like going home.”

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The “Growing Up Jewish” Cycle, Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood. “Today, I Am a Fountain Pen” opens Friday at 8 p.m. and continues Oct. 18, 24, 29 and 30, Nov. 8, 14, 19, 20 and 29, and Dec. 5. “A Rosen by Any Other Name” opens Saturday at 8 p.m. and continues Oct. 15, 16, 25, 31, Nov. 5, 6, 15, 21 and 27, and Dec. 6. “The Chopin Playoffs” opens next Sunday at 7 p.m. and continues Oct. 17, 22 and 23, Nov. 1, 7, 12, 13, 22 and 28, and Dec. 3 and 4. Performances are Thursdays and Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 3 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. $20 per play or $50 for all three. Phone: (323) 663-1525.