BACK TO EDIE

If Edie Sedgwick were alive today, odds are she’d be the subject of her own reality show. The original celebutante was a gorgeous, rail-thin socialite who left her wealthy, dysfunctional Santa Barbara family for a modeling career and the gritty allure of the underground scene in 1960s New York. Pop art icon Andy Warhol adopted Sedgwick as his muse and companion, but like so many in his entourage, she succumbed to addiction and, in 1971, she died from what was ruled an accidental overdose of alcohol and barbiturates at age 28.

“She lived many lifetimes in one very short life,” offers David J. The founding member of celebrated post-punk band Bauhaus and its psychedelic offshoot Love and Rockets is sitting, legs crossed, at a small table inside the performance space of the Met Theatre in Hollywood, where “Silver for Gold,” his multimedia production about Sedgwick’s life and untimely death, opens Thursday and runs through March 16.

The project, starring San Francisco-based actress Monique Jenkinson, is very much in keeping with an experimental aesthetic. J’s script and direction make extensive use of monologue, mythology, stage design and, naturally, music -- he penned an album’s worth of thematically connected songs that comment on and advance the action, and he’ll perform with a backing band during the show.

It’s ambitious, certainly, but “Silver for Gold” is only one of the artistic endeavors J’s pursuing these days. On Tuesday, “Go Away White,” the latest -- and final, J. insists -- Bauhaus album will be released, and he’s also gearing up for Love and Rockets’ reunion performance at next month’s Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival.

Still, J is focusing most of his energies on the final preparations for “Silver for Gold,” fine-tuning the script he’s been working on for the better part of four years.

The idea originated in 2004 after he read a screenplay about Sedgwick’s life called “Girl on Fire” by David Weisman and Leonard Schrader. J contacted Weisman and told him he’d been inspired to write a song with the same title, even though the “song” was only a lyric at the time.

“He said, ‘Come round and play it for me.’ So I immediately put the phone down and wrote the song because I had to,” J recalls.

He began to research Sedgwick at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, studying hours of tape recordings and movies she made with the artist. “I kind of fell in love with her,” J says. “Sometimes she comes across as an old dowager duchess, somebody who’s been on the planet a very long time. Very different to what you would imagine, not this sort of vacuous, silly little fashion plate.”

Drawing inspiration from those tapes and conversations with others who had known Sedgwick, J spent the next months writing. “It was very odd because I felt her calling me even when I really didn’t want to write and I was dead tired. But when I did write, she would glow and become brighter.”

That’s not to say “Silver for Gold” doesn’t include the darker moments of Sedgwick’s life. At the midway point, the Edie character crawls across the stage wearing a black bra and tight black jeans that are undone, her arms outstretched. Later she confesses to the audience, “The biggest scars are the ones inside. The ones you can’t see. Yeah [pause]. I got lots of those.”

It’s those passages that would seem the most challenging for Jenkinson, who admits that, at first blush, she might seem on odd choice for the role. “I’m not a 23-year-old waif- lette,” she says with a laugh.

But J, who cast Jenkinson after seeing the one-woman show, “Crying in Public,” she performed in San Francisco, says, “I’m going to be using a lot of physical craft to project a certain kind of thing rather than turning into Edie. It’s going to be about the sort of drag-queen approach to Edie as opposed to the Method actress approach.”

However difficult it might be mounting what is essentially a one-woman show -- the only other character who appears onstage is Nohric, a “wounded healer” played by Ronin Ensemble founder Steven Price -- no creative endeavor could be fraught with as much volatility as the recording of “Go Away White.”

Bauhaus -- vocalist Peter Murphy, guitarist Daniel Ash, bassist J and his brother, drummer Kevin Haskins -- recorded the album, the band’s first collection of original material in 25 years, after their 2005 Coachella appearance.

“When we were rehearsing for Coachella, we started to come up with original material, but it wasn’t the time to explore it,” J says. “We said, ‘OK, if we get a window of opportunity we’ll go in and record something.’ That window came up just before the tour with Nine Inch Nails. We went in, unprepared, in a studio in Ojai for 18 days. We’d start playing, and usually something would start happening pretty quickly; we would pick a lyric that was inspired by that music. We’d just lay it down, first or second take, move on, have a big argument, split up, go away, come back, kiss and make up, do another one, and then repeat the whole cycle over again.”

In the end, the explosive nature of the relationship won out -- J says that “Go Away White” is being released “posthumously,” that Bauhaus will not tour to promote the record and that the group has disbanded permanently.

“If it wasn’t volatile like that, it wouldn’t spark, but the thing that makes us also destroys us,” he says.

The chemistry among Ash, J and Haskins is easier when it comes to Love and Rockets, the trio they formed some years after Bauhaus split the first time. “There’s a degree of friction in our ranks as well, but it’s entirely manageable,” J says. “The time feels right, the climate, musically and politically, it’s time for Love and Rockets.”

This week, though, J’s most pressing concern is fine-tuning “Silver for Gold,” now that dress rehearsals are underway. Plans are for the production to travel to San Francisco and possibly to other major cities, including New York, and for the show’s soundtrack to be issued as a stand-alone album.

In the end, he and Jenkinson expect Sedgwick’s enduring appeal to generate interest in their tribute to her legacy.

“Edie is this iconic figure,” Jenkinson offers.

“There’s so much space for people to project a lot onto her, like a lot of people who died young. There’s this tragic story, in a way it functions as a cautionary tale.”

“It’s surprising how many young girls now are obsessed with Edie,” J concludes. “They relate on some level. I think they find it refreshing that she was her own original person. She didn’t have a stylist. She wasn’t designed. She made herself.”

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gina.mcintyre@latimes.com