The Gospel According to a Nonbeliever Playwright Del Shores confronts the collision between his religious upbringing and his sexuality in ‘Southern Baptist Sissies.’

Del Shores, reared as a Southern Baptist in Texas, arrived in L.A. as a would-be actor in 1980 and soon joined the First Baptist Church of Beverly Hills--which is actually in West Hollywood, a block away from the 90210 city.

One day, Shores said, the minister at that time called Shores into his office and asked him if he was gay. He denied it--which he thought was true: Although he had gay feelings, Shores says, he had never acted on them, and he believed it was wrong to make gay “choices.”

Cut to the late ‘90s. Shores has become one of L.A.’s best-known playwrights, as well as a TV writer for such shows as “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and “Ned & Stacey.” And he’s now openly gay. He no longer belongs to the church. But one evening, walking back from his first gay pride parade on nearby Santa Monica Boulevard, he and his date pass his former church.

Shores tells his date that he used to teach Sunday school there--as did Shores’ ex-wife. His date suggests that they kiss on the church stairs. “I felt squirrelly,” Shores later recalls. “I was scared that lightning would strike.”

But his date assures him that “God’s light will shine down on us.”

So they kiss--and just as Shores opens his eyes, the glare of bright searchlights from the nearby parade passes over their heads.

This story may sound too dramatic to be true, but in a recent interview in his Sherman Oaks home, Shores offered to attest to its veracity on a Bible. Then he noted that people might not believe his declarations on a Bible. So he offered to swear on a bound copy of his hit play “Daddy’s Dyin’, Who’s Got the Will?”

Shores, 43, the son and brother of Baptist preachers, confronts the collision between his religious upbringing and his homosexuality in “Southern Baptist Sissies,” his most personal play so far, at the Zephyr Theatre.

“Sissies” also uses more stagecraft than most of his plays, relying on direct address to the audience and quick transitions back and forth in time. Shores credits such plays as “Melody Jones,” a revival of which he produced, and “Wit” and “How I Learned to Drive,” as influences in his developing dramatic technique.

By the standards of the sub-100-seat theater scene, “Sissies” has become a big hit since it opened in September--often selling out, extending at least through February and drawing fans who return repeatedly. Reviews have been enthusiastic, with only a few quibbles about didacticism and length.

The play recently became the subject of a mock protest by the satirical Web site https://www.landoverbaptist.org, which spoofs Christian fundamentalism. That “protest” has, in turn, become the subject of a short film that may soon be on iFilm.com.

The play’s primary focus is on four friends who grow up together as members of a Texas Baptist church. One of them, Mark, becomes an angry gay activist and serves as the play’s foremost narrator. Mark’s teenage crush, T.J., ultimately resists his gay impulses, and sticks with the church and a girlfriend. Benny emerges as a relatively untroubled drag queen, who makes several lip-synced turns as country music divas. Andrew becomes a gay club habitue, but he can’t shake his upbringing--a conflict that leads to tragedy.

The boys’ pastor (played by Newell Alexander, Shores’ ex-father-in-law) and several of their mothers (all played by Rosemary Alexander, his ex-mother-in-law) make appearances.

At stage right, the play also looks in on two older barflies--a straight woman and a gay man--who amuse and console each other. Although these two initially were added for comic relief, Shores believes they “unlocked the play for me. A lot of the people who are cast out of the church end up in bars.” Only near the end does this pair briefly interact with the others.

At one point in “Sissies,” the activist character, Mark, laments that his writings on gay issues appear only in a gay magazine, so he’s preaching to the choir. Shores sometimes feels he’s doing the same with this play.

The Zephyr seats 93, and it’s located in the heart of the Melrose district--not the most conservative precinct. Although Shores has heard several anti-gay remarks from passers-by, and a poster in front of the theater has been vandalized twice--once defaced by an anti-gay epithet--it’s a good bet that most of the people who enter the theater already share Shores’ live-and-let-live attitude on issues of sexuality.

Even so, Shores said, “sometimes the choir needs preaching.” The play “has become a sanctuary” for those who feel that they have been driven away from Christianity by fundamentalist doctrine.

“Sissies” has drawn more audience mail than Shores’ four other plays combined, and three of those had similarly long runs. (“Sordid Lives,” the immediate predecessor of “Sissies,” will soon be released as a movie, featuring Bonnie Bedelia, Beau Bridges, Delta Burke, Olivia Newton-John and a few members of the original L.A. stage cast).

Some letters are from people who had no gay issues but felt estranged from their early religious training for other reasons. Yet Shores has received no response from anyone representing the Southern Baptists, despite the explicit reference in the title (which prompted his mother to wish that he had titled the play “Nondenominational Sissies”).

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When The Times contacted Tom Stringfellow, the current pastor at Shores’ former church in West Hollywood, he was unfamiliar with the play, though he was aware that Shores had attended the church. Stringfellow said he would not ask churchgoers about their sexuality, though he knows a few gays attend services there. “We are not anti-gay, but we don’t think the gay lifestyle is consistent with the Bible,” he said. Homosexuals are not allowed to speak to the congregation or take leadership roles in services.

The “Sissies” characters are not based on particular people from Shores’ past, although he said each of the young men “is an extension of me or what I could have become.”

For example, one monologue relates how Mark, as a young teenager, developed a crush on a particular image of Jesus. Shores said that when this happened in his own life, he knew that his sexuality and his church “would smash up against each other.” In another scene, teenage Mark asks his mother how God could condemn a favorite teacher, who is Jewish; this is based on a warm relationship Shores developed with a Jewish woman when they worked together as telemarketers, and a subsequent conversation with his father on the subject.

The arguments that the straight-and-narrow T.J. makes in defense of Baptist doctrine are loosely based on comments from Shores’ preacher brother. Indeed, Shores’ troubled relationship with his brother--as well as a photo of the home of one of Matthew Shepard’s attackers, which revealed a picture of Jesus on the wall--were among the influences that led him to write the play. However, he took pains to express his admiration for his brother’s good deeds as a preacher.

The play isn’t entirely one-sided, Shores hopes. The barfly characters express criticisms of gay bar culture, he noted.

Shores has some fond memories of the church: “I do miss the hymns, the sweet old ladies.” And he acknowledged that on a deeper level, the church is “part of my fabric, and it will never go away.” The character Benny speaks of bolting up out of deep sleep in response to a sudden noise and momentarily thinking the rapture had arrived; with Shores, for many years, “if an earthquake happened, before my thought processes clicked in, I’d think it was Jesus coming back.” Just before the play opened, “I had anxiety attacks in which part of me thought I was about to become Job.”

Shores said he is no longer a Christian. He believes in a loving God. And “Christ was a wonderful teacher,” he added. “But Christianity doesn’t embrace me, and I don’t embrace something that doesn’t embrace me.”

Not every church is as unaccepting of homosexuality as the Southern Baptists’, and Shores said he’s open to experiencing what other churches might offer. “But I don’t really believe in the theology. I don’t think Del Shores can be a gay Christian.”

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“SOUTHERN BAPTIST SISSIES,” Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., L.A. Dates: Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Feb. 28. Prices: $22-$25. Phone: (310) 289-2999.