In the Company of Writers : A literary form of male bonding allows Redwood members to translate personal visions into theater

Scene: Late afternoon in a La Brea restaurant known for its desserts and the number of unemployed entertainment-industry types who hang out there during the day. At a corner table, three playwrights try to explain what it is they do.

Why, for instance, are they working as a group? Isn’t a writer’s work solitary by nature?

Why is one of their newest plays a Western? Who stages a Western these days?

And why this name for the group--”Redwood”? What kind of moniker is that for a bunch of playwrights? Especially Los Angeles playwrights?

They look thoughtfully at each other, longtime buddies hoping one of them can come up with The Answer. This isn’t like deciphering the Rosetta Stone, they know, but, still, explaining the ways of Redwood isn’t easy.

Robert Hummer, whose “Peace in the Valley” is the second of Redwood’s summertime mini-season at the Lost Studio, confesses: “There’s a danger in talking a play to death.”

And then, like a chemical reaction, Hummer and fellow Redwoodians John Pappas and Gilbert Girion--whose “Faith’s Body” is now on the Lost Studio stage--start bantering.

Hummer mentions that, some time ago, he told Pappas he was working on a play about two brothers during a range war in the Old West--which became “Peace in the Valley.”

Pappas: “Yeah, that was kinda weird, because I was working on something dealing with two brothers. That was ‘Increments of Three,’ ” in which Hummer and Pappas co-starred at the 1989 Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival.

Girion: “Sometimes, we can be telepathic with each other. John is laughing right now.”

Pappas: “Well, I don’t know if it’s telepathy. . . . “

Hummer: “We don’t talk about this stuff very often. Which is why we write.”

Pappas: “I was just gonna say that!”

Hummer, Pappas and Girion occasionally finish each others’ sentences or talk to each other in what Hummer says is a “kind of code. When people know each other well,” he says, “and we know each other very well, you don’t need to say very much to get your point across. When we’re doing a play, that saves a lot of wasted time explaining things.”

But Pappas is happy to explain the group’s enigmatic name, which seems to come out of the same kind of inexplicable simultaneity as the way they communicate. “I grew up in Oakland, and a favorite street in my neighborhood was Redwood Street.” He adds that fellow Redwood member and actor Nick Flynn grew up in Redwood City, south of San Francisco. “And when we were hunting around for a name, I was painting a desk with a redwood-colored paint. Also, the redwoods are a living symbol of the West, and we’re all Westerners.”

Soon, it’s noticed that the restaurant table they’re sitting around is painted a certain color. Redwood.

At a benefit in late May, “a couple came--off the street, I guess--thinking that it was a benefit for the redwoods,” Girion recounts with a slight grin. “And when we explained to them what it really was, they stayed anyway and had a good time.”

The West’s pull seems very strong. Although Girion, for instance, has lived in New York for 14 years, “I’ve not only not been able to get this area out of my system, I’ve found that my plays are very specifically set near the beach, as in ‘Faith’s Body.’ ”

Place counts for much in this company. (“We want to make it clear that we’re a playwrights’ company,” says Pappas, “not just a generic theater company.”) So does time: Hummer and Girion’s 40th birthdays are only a week apart, and Pappas turns 40 in November. “The music, the times we grew up in, really affected us,” reflects Hummer. “I think it’s why we share so much common ground, and why we don’t step on each other’s toes.”

The playwrights also share a need to retain control over their theatrical ventures. As Girion puts it, “There’s a lot of bull that goes on in theater and film, and we all deeply respect each other. We want to make the decisions--what plays, what actors, what theater--ourselves, and not give it over to an outsider.” Without a home to work out of, Redwood has produced in such havens for vital local theater as The Cast and Theatre/Theater.

The act of grouping has been an act of making private visions public.

Sometimes, perhaps, too private. The epithet “pointless” has been directed at Redwood plays in the past. But since its formation in 1988, the group has quietly built a body of work that explores primal conflicts, often between siblings, and frustrated attempts to put derailed lives back on track. It represents an extension as well as a serious reconsideration of Sam Shepard’s theater of Western and male-female myths, with language and setting stripped to the bone.

“In all of our work--even though we have individual ways of going about it,” says Pappas, “there’s something very contemporary and something very old.”

And although Redwood members gladly accept praise--such as former Times critic Dan Sullivan’s for “Increments of Three” (“The writing . . . and the acting have the point-to-point immediacy of American naturalism at its best”)--they will dispute the “naturalism” label.

“Theater can’t be naturalistic,” Pappas insists. “It’s stylized the second you put it on a stage. But we do try to make it as real as possible.”

This is the formidable task faced by Girion, as director, and Hummer, in the role of a man burdened with total amnesia in “Faith’s Body.” The rehearsal process, they candidly reveal, has had its adventures.

Girion, directing Hummer for the first time, notes that he “wanted Bob to try new things out with his character.” Then Hummer chimes in. “I wasn’t sure I could do it, since I hadn’t fixed the character down at all yet.” Then Pappas, also in Girion’s cast, adds, “So Gilbert called me up, asking me out of frustration how to deal with Bob. And I told him how Bob operates.”

So this is how a company works.

“Well, it helps that the playwrights--except me--are all fine actors,” says Girion, “and this probably explains why our work is character-driven.”

A visitor to the circle at the redwood table gets the distinct impression that these are writers who’d never want to get very far from their working-class origins and day jobs. Pappas does carpentry, Hummer builds sets and Redwood member Jack Hollingsworth is a professional gambler. And although Nick Flynn is now acting in an Amsterdam production of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” and Girion has written a film script with director Wayne Wang titled “Westward, Mr. Ho,” they suggest that what really counts is working with one’s hands.

Or as Hummer phrases it, mentally searching for the Redwood way of theater: “Getting dirty, banging nails, putting words together.”