Anyone for sex, cruelty, squalor?

As a playwright who has made his name writing about trailer parks and fleabag motels, Tracy Letts doesn’t mind acknowledging his own checkered past. Though it pales in comparison to what he luridly depicts in “Killer Joe” and “Bug,” the plays that have turned him into the bard of white-trash America, Letts has a history every bit as harrowing as his protagonists’, even if his recent successes in playwriting and acting have made it seem a lifetime away.

“The characters I write about are not unknown to me,” Letts says over lunch at a Greenwich Village cafe around the corner from the off-Broadway theater where he’s performing with a group of Chicago friends in Austin Pendleton’s play “Orson’s Shadow.” “I grew up around a lower-middle-class environment in which I interacted with the people I write about, so they always seemed very real to me.”

The realism of Letts’ work can indeed be overwhelming. The plays don’t just spill over with squalid sex and violence, they lay bare the emptiness driving the characters to their desperate ends.

Combining the emotional rawness of Sam Shepard and the sensational storytelling of Quentin Tarantino, Letts’ plays have become sleeper hits during their runs in Chicago, London and New York. His most recent drama, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize finalist “The Man From Nebraska,” had its premiere in December 2003 at Steppenwolf Theatre, where Letts has become a member of the company’s acting ensemble, renowned for the daring, visceral style of its stalwarts Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.

“Killer Joe,” which opened Saturday in a Lost Angels production at Hollywood’s Gardner Stages, revolves around a family that stretches the word “dysfunctional” to the breaking point. In the play, 22-year-old Chris Smith hatches a plan to get a few loan sharks off his back: Hire a hit man to kill his alcoholic mother and collect on the life insurance plan. Without much coaxing, his father, stepmother and sister are brought on board. Joe, the title character, is the gun for hire who takes over the Smith family trailer, demanding Chris’ virginal sister as down payment for the job, and exposing the levels to which the family is prepared to descend.

“ ‘Killer Joe’ is a very American play about the dream of getting rich quick,” says Scott Cummins, who’s directing the Lost Angels production. “It’s about the consequences of doing whatever you can, in an incredibly entertaining drama that turns gothic in its outcome.”

The play certainly challenges an audience’s capacity for shock. It’s not simply the brutality but the creepy humor accompanying it that disturbs. One notorious instance involves a symbolic rape with a Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick, a scene that bears comparison only to the excruciatingly bloody tooth extraction in “Bug,” Letts’ second play about the budding relationship between a grief-stricken woman holed up in motel room and a paranoid Gulf War veteran who believes the government has planted microbes under his skin.

A hot commodity

Though the grisliness of his work isn’t to everyone’s taste, Letts is clearly tapping a cultural vein. There’s talk of turning “Killer Joe” into a movie, and director William Friedkin (“The French Connection” and “The Exorcist”) has optioned “Bug” and signed Letts to pen the screenplay.

It’s a remarkable turnaround for an artist who’s grappled with drug and alcohol abuse and the unexpected death (from a series of strokes) of his girlfriend, Holly Wantuch, who was in the cast of the original production of “Killer Joe” and to whom the play is dedicated.

A strapping 39-year-old with a deep, resonant voice and a pale, round face, Letts was born in Tulsa, Okla., and grew up in Durant, where his parents both taught at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. Though being raised in a college town by professors doesn’t sound all that hardscrabble, Letts says he was well acquainted with the wrong side of the tracks. Opting to skip college, he moved to Dallas after high school to pursue his ambition to become an actor. It was a drug- and booze-addled time in a place he calls “hell on Earth, the worst city in America.”

Still, there was material to be mined. “I hung out with some unsavory guys,” Letts says with a distant look. “And some of those unsavory types I liked quite a bit.”

He liked them so much, in fact, that they inspired his first play. Set in a trailer home on the outskirts of Dallas, “Killer Joe” is filled exclusively with such captivating lowlifes -- characters who, though morally pathetic, have a dicey charm and undeniable theatrical power.

“Early on I heard all these dire predictions of people storming out of the theater in outrage,” Letts says. “None of that ever happened because we had a story and they wanted to see what happened. The last thing I ever want to do is bore anybody.”

The playwright recalls his parents’ reaction to the play’s original production, in Evanston, Ill. “The show was going very well, and when we walked out at intermission, my father turned to me and said, ‘These people don’t know what’s real.’ What he meant was that the people buying tickets to the theater weren’t necessarily aware that the world I’m writing about is a real one. In the least successful productions, it’s because the people who are doing it don’t embrace the idea that it’s real. They try to embrace the ironic side that’s commenting on the people rather than living in that world.”

Letts owes his success largely to that first shoestring staging of “Killer Joe,” which he produced with a number of his Chicago buddies. From there the play went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it got picked up by London’s Bush Theatre, before moving to the West End with the original non-Equity actors. “It was really cool,” he says.

This blue-collar approach to the profession informs everything he does. “One of the impulses behind writing the plays was to write good roles for actors,” he says. “I wanted to give them something down and dirty that they could sink their teeth into.”

Becoming a Steppenwolf ensemble member was a breakthrough for him personally and professionally. “It gave me a base, a sort of home in which to work. I had been living in Los Angeles prior to that, and I had no interest in returning. I love Chicago.”

“As an actor in America, you’re taught by the culture that you’re not really an actor until you’re working in film and television,” he says. “I realized that even when I was getting work in L.A., I didn’t like doing it. I’d dread going to the set and just didn’t like the technical stuff, the dressing-room trailers, all the strangers. Once I embraced that working in the theater is what I really wanted, a lot of good things started happening.”

Splitting the difference

How does he find time to juggle burgeoning careers? “I don’t do both at the same time,” he says. “I don’t write and then act. It’s almost a brain thing. I’m using different sides of my brain, which is probably why I’ve never had any interest in acting in my own plays.”

He has, however, performed in some of his favorite plays -- Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” and most recently Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” -- an experience he heartily recommends to other playwrights. “I’d read ‘Virginia Woolf’ a hundred times and have seen the movie and productions. But until you’re in it and doing it, you don’t fully understand the mechanics of how Albee is taking you through that ride.”

Most often compared to Mamet and Shepard, Letts detects a crucial stylistic distinction: “Because theater is a writer’s medium and therefore relies primarily on language, plays quite often deal with characters who express themselves poetically.” He recognizes that for Mamet the writing is often stylized, even when the language is impoverished, and that Shepard can’t resist composing great spoken arias. Letts says he’s “interested in exploring people who don’t have that vocabulary or access to poetry to see if there can be poetry in that -- in the lack.”

“When we were doing the original production of ‘Killer Joe,’ we encouraged the actors to fill the trailer with their personal belongings,” Letts recalls. “One of the actors brought in a handful of books. I said: ‘There are no books in this trailer. It’s not part of their world.’

Paul Dillon, who originated the role of Killer Joe and is reprising it for the L.A. premiere, wryly observes that “if any of the characters ever read a poem, it was on a placemat at a restaurant.”

But clearly something profound keeps him returning to the play: “The damage of the people Tracy writes about is pretty vivid, and yet they’re still driven to find love, feel better and ease whatever pain they have.”

As Letts understands it, “Because the characters don’t have the means to express themselves, they feel things really hard. And so the possibility for violence and sex is always there.”

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‘Killer Joe’

Where: Gardner Stages, 1501 N. Gardner St., L.A.

When: Runs 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: April 17

Price: $20 to $25

Contact: (866) 811-4111, www.lostangelstheatre.com

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Charles McNulty is theater editor at the Village Voice. He can be reached at calendar.letters@latimes.com.