Hoping Troupe Will See the Light : A ‘Strange Snow’ Less Brooding Than the Film Version Would Suit the Author

Back in 1989, Stephen Metcalfe was a reasonably successful playwright ready to embark on a new career in glittering Hollywood.

“Jacknife,” Metcalfe’s screen adaptation of his own play, “Strange Snow,” was about to premiere. Clearly, it was an exciting time for the author, especially since none other than Robert De Niro had been picked for the starring role.

But even then, Metcalfe was worried.

“I have to say I had mixed feelings about De Niro” playing Megs, the Vietnam War veteran who performs an emotional rescue on his soldier buddy, Dave, Metcalfe said.

“There was this little voice in my head saying he wasn’t right . . . his approach (turned out to be) too dark; he didn’t connect (with the play’s) sense of fun,” he recalled during a recent telephone interview from his San Diego office. “I was ultimately frustrated” by the movie.

“Jacknife” received mixed reviews, and Metcalfe was one of its toughest critics. If only it had wound up more like “Strange Snow,” which Metcalfe said isn’t a mire of brooding and despair, even though it addresses a serious subject.

The 41-year-old La Jolla resident said he hopes the Laguna Playhouse will be sensitive to that aspect of the drama as it opens the company’s 75th season tonight. He said the humor should be emphasized because “when I originally wrote it, I wanted to do something of a funny love story.”

The relationship that develops between Megs and Martha (Kathy Baker in the movie), Dave’s spinster sister, is at the heart of the love story. But there’s also love between Dave (played by Ed Harris in “Jacknife”) and Megs, who breaks into their life of solitude one morning with the unspoken mission to bring both brother and sister back into the world.

Megs has come through hell himself and now faces life with gab and vitality. As a Times critic described him in a review of a 1987 production of “Strange Snow” in El Cajon, Megs is “irresistible--part ‘Rainmaker,’ part ‘Music Man’ and part ‘Elmer Gantry’--but unlike those con men, the thing he is selling is the truth.”

In Metcalfe’s opinion, the film version could have been less moody had De Niro switched roles with Harris. De Niro’s more serious interpretation would have fit Dave, while Harris, an actor with a natural comic edginess, may have been more appropriate as the talkative savior, he said.

But Metcalfe had little control over the casting or anything else. Shortly after his script had been chosen, a writers’ strike prevented him from taking part in the production.

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Although this first-time venture was frustrating, Metcalfe has stayed with movies, either writing or co-writing such films as “Pretty Woman,” “Arachnophobia” and “Cousins.” He’s drawn to Hollywood for various reasons; one of the most obvious is the money.

“I think the creative satisfaction of working on a play really can’t be beat,” Metcalfe said, “but it was becoming more and more difficult to make a living in the theater. Film work, if you can get it, is lucrative.”

Metcalfe said he looks at “Strange Snow” with fondness, if only because it is one of his most frequently produced plays (he’s also written “Vikings,” “Half a Lifetime” and “Sorrows and Sons,” among others).

It’s been staged so many times since premiering at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1982 that Metcalfe feels the drama has “taken on a life of its own. Sometimes I think that I don’t really have ownership of it anymore.”

Although Metcalfe never served in Vietnam, the story of Megs and Dave was close to him because it reflected the turmoil experienced by many of his friends once they came home. Metcalfe created their characters and their story as a composite of the people he knew in the aftermath of the war.

“I originally wrote it as a one-act play called ‘Spittin’ Image’ that just expanded,” he said. “What interested me was not so much the Vietnam experience, but what the characters, especially Megs, went through.” As for the Laguna Playhouse production, Metcalfe said he’s kept his distance because he doesn’t want to affect director Robert Leigh’s approach. He does have a bit of advice, though, for Leigh and his cast of Ron Campbell as Megs, Andrew Barnicle as Dave and Linda Gehringer as Martha.

“I think this is a play that has a tremendous amount of things happening between the lines; there’s also plenty of silences,” he said. “If it’s done well, they will fill in between the silences.

“They have to find out what’s going on beneath the surface, what’s going on beneath the words, what’s really happening with these people,” he said. “I guess that’s the same with any good, demanding drama.”

* The Laguna Playhouse’s production of Stephen Metcalfe’s “Strange Snow” opens tonight at Curtain: 8 p.m. Continues Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m.; and Sunday at 7 p.m. through Oct. 9. There will be a signed performance Friday. $13 to $22. (714) 497-9244.