LIVES OF A DINER

NOT quite 65 years ago in Greenwich Village, a famous and famously melancholy artist named Edward Hopper came upon an idea for a painting -- a diner scene of lonely souls under harsh light.

Nearly twenty-two years ago, in an apartment on Cardiff Avenue in West Los Angeles, aspiring young writer Douglas Steinberg was broke and celebrating his birthday. His wife gave him a poster of Hopper’s oil painting. He put it on the wall above his desk and went back to pitching television scripts for “Moonlighting” and “Cagney & Lacey.”

And then, as Steinberg recalled in a recent conversation, the characters in his poster “started whispering to each other.”

Steinberg started typing. Four months later he had a plot -- not a skit, not a parody, but a two-act, 100-page play. Now, after more than 20 years on the shelf, Steinberg’s “Nighthawks” is getting its premiere -- it opens Wednesday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City -- and one of America’s most-seen artworks is getting yet another round of inspection, now from a new angle.

When he started writing, “I didn’t realize that I was messing with an American icon. I just went after it emotionally,” Steinberg said, seated amid the weathered counters and battered barstools of the Farmers Market on Fairfax.

As he is quick to admit, Steinberg is far from the first to imagine what might be up among the four figures in Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” Nor is he the only writer to use the image as a jumping-off point. In fact, one wonder of “Nighthawks” is just how many other acts of imagination have been built upon it.

It is the most-reproduced image in the vast collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and one of the most appropriated American artworks. Across America and beyond, untold millions have seen some version of that image, often without knowing the work’s name.

In “Staying up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’ and the Dark Side of the American Psyche,” published in June, author Gordon Theisen argues that the work is the foremost expression of pessimism in all American art. The picture, Theisen writes, is “a window onto an America that never became what America might have been.”

“There’s something deeply sad about it,” Steinberg said.

Yet for many a writer, artist and filmmaker, there’s also something irresistible.

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Painting’s provenance

HOPPER started painting “Nighthawks” in December 1941, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in a flurry of work that could be called optimistic or merely self-absorbed. He finished it several weeks later, including no references to the war. He based the diner on a real restaurant (since leveled) along Greenwich Avenue near his studio.

His notes show he intended the counter attendant to be a “very good-looking blond boy.” As was his habit, Hopper used his wife, Josephine, as a model for the woman in the picture, and he used himself as a model for the man at her side.

By that time in his career, Hopper was nearly 60 and a star among artists. He had already had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and sold “Early Sunday Morning,” his other signature work, to the Whitney Museum of American Art. In November 1941, the month before he began “Nighthawks,” the tall, circumspect Hopper sat for a portrait by renowned photographer Arnold Newman, looking glum as usual.

Biographer Gail Levin has written that Hopper and Josephine had frequent and sometimes violent fights, and other artists often found him morose. Even when his subjects are bathed in light, his paintings carry an air of melancholy. But they also resonate.

“Nighthawks” landed in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection in 1942. In December 1956, Hopper made the cover of Time magazine. By the time of his death in 1967, he was counted among the country’s foremost artists, and the afterlife of “Nighthawks” was just beginning.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, spokeswoman Erin Hogan said she gets requests to reproduce the image just about every day. By that measure, “Nighthawks” is more popular than such masterworks there as Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” and Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -- 1884.” (The Seurat work, however, made it to the stage well before Hopper, as the starting point for Stephen Sondheim’s 1984 musical, “Sunday in the Park with George.”) And its reach may extend even further than that.

In his 1997 history of American art, “American Visions,” critic Robert Hughes writes that Hopper’s paintings “have become part of the very grain and texture of the American experience.” Beyond the many homages and parodies the painting has provoked on paper and on canvas, he sees Hopper’s influence radiating even further -- in the “Addams Family’s” cartoon house, for instance, and the lonely cinematic home of Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

As for “Nighthawks” -- “a sort of geometrical aquarium with four inscrutable fish in it,” writes Hughes -- “each person is locked within the self, and held like a specimen in the firm grip of Hopper’s receding space, with its greenish light cast on the pavement and the ivory blaze of the inner wall.”

But none of the explications, histories, homages and parodies, of course, can answer the essential question that “Nighthawks” poses: What’s up with these people?

“A rare bout of insomnia?” asks Theisen in his book. “Unemployed? Addicts? Thieves? Nothing better to do? Might one of them suddenly decide to rob the place?”

Or maybe these are people whose dramatic moments are all behind them.

“The single man whose hunched back we see / Once put a gun to his head in Russian roulette, / Whirled the chamber, pulled the trigger, won the bet, / And now lives out his x years’ guarantee,” wrote Indiana University English professor Samuel Yellen in a 1951 poem on the painting. As for the couple, Yellen continued, “Not long ago together in a darkened room, / Mouth burned mouth, flesh beat and ground / On ravaged flesh, and yet they found / No local habitation and no name.”

Sister Wendy, the populist art critic and nun, has suggested that the man behind the counter “is, in fact, free. He has a job, a home, he can come and go; he can look at the customers with a half-smile.” Wendy sees the neighboring male and female customers as a couple, “but they are a couple so lost in misery that they cannot communicate; they have nothing to give each other.”

The mark of Hopper’s work, poet Mark Strand told an NPR interviewer a decade ago, is that “you always wonder what those people are thinking, and they’re always thinking. Every one of his characters is deep in thought.”

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The play as catalyst

WHEN Steinberg finished his take on “Nighthawks” in early 1985, he was still broke. But in the following years, as the play lay unproduced, a strange thing happened: “Nighthawks” started getting Steinberg jobs.

Submitted as a sample with other writings, it helped Steinberg win a National Endowment for the Arts playwriting grant and playwright-in-residence gig at South Coast Repertory in 1987, and it helped get him onto the writing staff of the television series “St. Elsewhere.” His other television credits have included “Boston Public” and “Beverly Hills, 90210,” and Steinberg now serves as consulting producer and writer on the new USA Network series “Psych.”

“All I ever wanted to be was a playwright,” said Steinberg. “But I couldn’t make a living at it.”

When Michael Ritchie arrived as the new artistic director at the Center Theatre Group last year, Steinberg sent over the play. In March, Ritchie and company said yes, and Steinberg started “doing a lot of rewriting to cover my young dumbness.”

In the version of Steinberg’s script now in rehearsal at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Hopper’s four lonely souls chatter and squabble, their patter echoing Samuel Beckett and Damon Runyon. They disclose unexpected relationships, make intriguing use of a side of beef, anger the mob and wrestle with betrayal, deception and the residue of unrealized dreams.

The woman at the counter is Mae, who has more authority than is obvious, but as much baggage as her careworn face suggests. The guy next to her in the fedora is Sam, an off-duty bellhop with conflicting allegiances. The man washing dishes behind the counter is Quig. As for the other customer, the one with his back to us -- maybe he’s Hopper.

Mae was the first character to materialize for him, Steinberg said, in part because the painting’s composition leads the viewer straight to her red hair and sullen face.

“She immediately had attitude,” said Steinberg. Sam, the man to her right, was trickier to sort out, but eventually Steinberg came to see him as “the guy who is saddest, who has some understanding of himself, who is reflecting on his life ... and is making one last effort to find love and find meaning in life.”

Anyone expecting a carbon copy of Hopper’s tone and composition on stage will find a surprise or two. Steinberg has seasoned his plot, especially early on, with more humor than any of Hopper’s work ever showed. And the lack of any visible exit in Hopper’s composition -- a detail remarked upon and beloved by many a critic and art historian -- proved a theatrical nonstarter. Director Stefan Novinski and set designer Donna Marquet have given the diner a modest renovation, adding a door stage left.

But at this point in the history of “Nighthawks,” even the original might disappoint some people. Steinberg, who saw the painting at the Art Institute during a brief spell in Chicago years ago, has a warning for those who have yet to make that pilgrimage.

“It’s not that big,” he said. “I thought it would be bigger.”

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Forms of flattery, sincerest or not

Edward Hopper’s original painting ‘Nighthawks’ (33 by 60 inches) has hung at the Art Institute of Chicago for most of the last 64 years. But its spawn are everywhere, including plays, poems, prints, paintings, moving pictures and music. Here are just a few examples.

1970: When Parker Brothers came out with the art-auction board game Masterpiece, “Nighthawks” was among the 24 artworks to be bid upon.

1975: Singer-songwriter Tom Waits borrowed heavily from Hopper’s language and moody mise-en-scene for the album “Nighthawks at the Diner.”

1980: Painter Red Grooms made a drawing he called “Nighthawks Revisited,” showing the diner in daylight, the sidewalk litter-strewn, with Hopper as a customer at the counter and Grooms as the attendant.

1981: Director Herbert Ross re-created it in the film “Pennies From Heaven,” with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters taking stools at the counter.

1982: Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein made James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe the customers and Elvis Presley the attendant, retitled it “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and printed an epic number of posters.

1989: Artist and “Sitting Ducks” author Michael Bedard offers his take in “Window Shopping.”

1992: Playwright Evan Guilford-Blake unveiled “Nighthawks: A Play in Two Parts Suggested by the Edward Hopper Painting,” which explores race relations and takes place half in 1943, half in 1983.

The ‘90s: That old diner has also turned up in a 1997 Wim Wenders movie (“The End of Violence”), a 1998 episode of “That ‘70s Show,” at least two “Simpsons” episodes, Christmas cards (Santa at the counter), comic books and a promo campaign for “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” this year.

2000: The Willow Cabin Theater Company in New York premiered Lynn Rosen’s “Nighthawks,” which linked four scenes taken from four Hopper paintings.

2006: In September, Norton will publish a second edition of its 1995 Edward Hopper catalogue raisonne -- a three-volume, $250 overview of the artist’s career that includes “Nighthawks” among more than 700 oils and watercolors.

Christopher Reynolds

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Reading between Hopper’s painted lines

Who are those “Nighthawks” people? Here are answers from two Southern California storytellers and one art expert, as told to staff writer Christopher Reynolds.

The parents

“These are parents of a 10-week-old baby who were on their way out the door to a ‘50s costume party and realized they overshot. Their ambitions got the best of them. Who are they fooling? They’ll never make the 30-minute drive across town to where the nonparents are. They are so haggard from manically entertaining the baby 24/7, they are but former shells of themselves. The man and woman are 25 years old but look 60. They barely have the strength to sit erect at the counter of this faux new nostalgia-diner coffee place that, oddly enough, sells only Kenny G CDs. Playing over the Bose speakers is “Kenny G Does the Songs of Tin Pan Alley.” Pondering the why of it all, the woman morosely examines the cigarette she can never have again in the state of California.”

-- Sandra Tsing Loh

Author, performer, presenter of

“The Loh Life” on KPCC-FM

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The job problem

“You see the fedoras, so you know it’s the Depression. The couple has been out looking for work all day and have not been able to find it. And they’re spending their last 50 cents in this restaurant. The waiter’s name is Al. He’s a high school dropout and has been working at that job for 20 years and knows perfectly well he’ll be doing that for the rest of his life. He’s glad to be working. The other man -- that’s you. He’s the observer of the passing scene. Like you, he’s going to go home and write a story.”

-- Henry Hopkins

1954 Art Institute of Chicago alumnus,

former director of the Fort Worth

Art Center Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the

Armand Hammer Museum at UCLA

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The crime

“Look at the couple. The guy, in the hat, is Gene. And her name is Sally. And Gene is the inside man on a burglary that’s happening as the picture is taking place. Sally is his girlfriend, a barmaid who lives and works nearby. They’ve been together a long time, but Gene is still married to somebody else. The gang that he’s with is pulling the heist right now, and he and Sally are waiting to hear about it. The guy behind the counter is Jan. From Minnesota. He tried to enlist in the Army, but he’s 4F. He lives alone in a room over the cafe, and he’s a real baseball fan, loves to listen to games. Yankees. Then the guy with his back to us -- his wife left him and he can’t sleep. He’s just killing time. They all live in the neighborhood.”

-- Janet Fitch

Author of “White Oleander” and

“Paint It Black,” released this month

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‘Nighthawks’

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays to Fridays,

2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Sept. 24

Price: $20 to $40

Contact: (213) 628-2772