Playwright Ketron’s ‘Sun’ Rises in the West : Stage: Well-known in New York, the Southerner hopes his San Diego debut will create a fresh audience for his work.

SAN DIEGO —  Larry Ketron has high hopes for his latest play, “Sun Bearing Down,” which premieres at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage tomorrow.

A well-known playwright in New York, Ketron, 43, has done more than a dozen plays there, including eight at the WPA Theatre. “Sun Bearing Down” will be his San Diego debut, and, if successful, it could bring a whole new audience to this tall, soft-spoken, deeply Southern writer who hails from Tennessee.

As an established screenwriter (he adapted the screenplay “Fresh Horses” from his play of the same name and also wrote “Vital Signs”), Ketron is also hoping that Hollywood will see “Sun Bearing Down” as a potential screenplay.

“Nothing would please me more,” he said in an interview in an office of the Old Globe Theatre.

But his greatest satisfaction to date has come from writing plays.

“When I sit down with a blank piece of paper to write a play, I know I can do anything I want to do, go in any direction I want to go. There are no parameters, no boundaries.

“When you sit down to write a screenplay or a TV show, the opposite happens. Something has to happen on Page 26 or Page 60.”

“Sun Bearing Down” is about four people who frequent Forester’s Seafood Restaurant and Bar, an intimate place on the Southeastern coast not unlike the area in South Carolina where Ketron lives.

The characters are Lamar Forester, who owns the restaurant; Price, who was raised as his sister even though they are not related by blood; Clint Mallory, Price’s latest in a string of boyfriends, and Luke Cawhill, a corrupt politician.

“I love eccentric characters,” Ketron said. “I love Southern characters. A lot of my characters are dreamers; I think there’s a real longing quality to a lot of my people. I’m certainly a dreamer myself.”

In the play, Price and Lamar deal with how Price will dispose of the coastal property near the restaurant that she inherited from her father (should she go for a bird sanctuary or big money from developers?), and Luke and Lamar struggle with bribes involving land deals and a possible indictment resulting from three deaths.

Also pulsing through the story is the issue of male-female relationships, a dynamic that Kyle Renick, artistic director of the WPA Theatre, sees as one of Ketron’s trademarks.

“He’s very interested in the relationships between men and women--the urge to come together and the forces that keep people apart,” Renick said by phone from his office at the WPA. “There are many odd relationships, mismatched characters or people with odd needs who come together because of particular circumstances.”

Playwright Stephen Metcalfe, a longtime friend of Ketron’s who will direct this play, also sees the core of this story as romantic.

“It’s about the environment, it is about exploration and responsibility and the heritage that we are leaving to our children, but it is first and foremost a love story,” Metcalfe said.

But the element of love is not there to soften the tension in the play; it adds to it, according to Ketron, who sees love as a very dangerous business.

“Relationships are very complicated,” he said. “This is about two people who have known each other all of their lives and never knew how to handle each other. She (Price) is a dangerous character.”

Ketron, who is married, doesn’t like to talk about dangerous relationships he may have known himself. Reluctantly asking that his hesitation in talking about himself not be taken personally, he clearly preferred to talk about the encouragement he got for his writing from his mother and about friendships, such as his with Metcalfe and their mutual friend, actor-director Dann Florek, who introduced them 10 years ago.

Although Ketron’s mother spent most of her life in a small town in Tennessee, and no one in his family ever tried to become a writer--or has seen any of his plays--his mother always encouraged him to pursue his literary ambitions in New York, he said.

“My mother once went to New York with her twin sister to be a dancer,” Ketron recalled. “That didn’t last long, but it was always in her blood, and she always encouraged me. Thank God I went to New York, otherwise I would still be in Tennessee selling cars.”

As for Metcalfe, he gets much of the credit for putting “Sun Bearing Down” on the Old Globe’s boards. It was he who first urged Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Globe, to see Ketron’s “Fresh Horses” in 1987--a show O’Brien said he “enjoyed tremendously.”

It was Metcalfe who suggested to O’Brien that the Globe do the successful February, 1990, reading of “Sun Bearing Down” with stars Molly Ringwald, John Goodman and Dann. (In the current production, Annette O’Toole stars with Bill Geisslinger, James Harper and Adam S. Philipson.)

And it was Metcalfe who said he would be happy to take on the direction of the play when O’Brien decided there was no time in his own schedule to do it.

“They have a very intense relationship, and I’m always interested when one writer likes another’s work,” O’Brien said.

As for Metcalfe, the show is an opportunity to help a friend, promote work he believes in and to make his Old Globe directing debut--something he and O’Brien have discussed for some time.

Metcalfe, who has written the screenplays for “Jackknife,” based on his play “Strange Snow,” and “Cousins,” which starred Ted Danson, said he also has ambitions to direct his own movies someday.

“I love (Ketron’s) characters, he said. “They leap out of the page. I love his humor because it comes out of character, not out of jokes. And almost as long as I’ve known him, Larry has been concerned with issues. He doesn’t write about issues, but uses issues as backdrops to his plays.”

For Ketron, too, there is also the hope that, with 16 plays to his credit, he may at last have his breakthrough play in the hopper.

“In all the plays I’ve done, I’ve never had that mega-hit,” he said with a self-conscious smile. And despite being what he terms “financially rewarded” for his screenwriting, he has yet to write the kind of movie he has wanted to.

“Sun Bearing Down,” he says, might just be it.

At the very least, if the show is successful here, it might encourage him to take more time out from his screenwriting assignments--his focus for the past few years--to write plays again.

“It’s hard to make a living in the theater,” he said. “I struggled for so many years, just hanging on, just trying to make a living. Plays can be more rewarding because, as a writer, you have control over the work. You have none of that in the movies as a writer. They compensate you for that financially, but it hurts.

“I’d like to write another play soon. It all depends on how this play goes.”