Defense Mechanisms : In a Premiere at SCR, Scared Men in a Declining Industry Face an All-Too-Familiar Boogeyman

COSTA MESA — Southern California’s defense industry, hit by the double whammy of the cold war ending and corporate downsizing, is making daily headlines.

At South Coast Repertory, it has also made a play: Tom Strelich’s “BAFO,” a black comedy written by a computer software engineer from a national think tank for defense contractors. “BAFO”--the title stands for “best and final offer”--opens Friday on the SCR Second Stage.

“When I first read it, I frankly didn’t know quite what to make of it,” said SCR artistic director Martin Benson, who is directing the play. “I liked the writing, but I thought, ‘I need to get the guys in and hear it.’ As soon as I did, I realized it was terrific. Strelich has a unique voice.”

The “guys”--for whom the play was commissioned and written--were SCR founding artists Ron Boussom, Richard Doyle, Art Koustik, Hal Landon Jr. and Don Took. Guest artist Susan Patterson is the lone woman in the cast.

Although a playwright, Strelich makes his living at General Research Corp. in Santa Barbara and has a decade of industry knowledge and experience. His company title is senior scientist. Not surprisingly, he empathizes with the characters in his play--the “silver backs,” “chin-pullers” and “propellerheads”--whom he depicts trying to survive in the trenches of the defense and aerospace industry.

“I’ve met these people,” Strelich said in a recent interview. “They’re drawn from me and from people I’ve known. But they’re basically composites, pieces of people, snatches of conversations, thoughts I’ve picked up over the last 10 or so years.”

He maintains, nonetheless, that it was a thematic idea rather than the topicality or immediacy of the subject that led him to write the play.

“Superficially it’s about scared, white middle-class men working in a declining defense industry,” he said. “But really at its core, it’s about the boogeyman, which is the big thing in my life. It’s about threat. It’s about death, about our need of a threat to unify us. I didn’t realize it when I was writing, but it was percolating out of me.”

It still is.

“The great cosmic mother of all threats is nonexistence,” he continued. “I chose to set the play in the declining Southern California defense industry because it’s a metaphor for dealing with threat. Given this kind of heavy theme, I wanted to approach it comedically. Comedy is my natural inclination anyway, and it may be the best way to deal with such universal, primal, scary material.”

Strelich, 43, looks less apocalyptic than he sounds. At a recent rehearsal, sitting in the darkness taking notes, he might have passed for a slighter, younger version of Harrison Ford. He had just flown from Santa Barbara in a light plane, which he’d piloted himself.

On stage, Koustik, Boussom and Landon were running through a scene in the proposal room of a small defense contractor. John Iacovelli’s set design, complete with a generic corporate logo, caught both the physical and spiritual atmosphere of the industry with such dead-on accuracy that Strelich did a double take.

“I know exactly where that hallway goes,” he quipped, although the hallway was only partially visible at the back of the set and, in fact, went nowhere.

In an SCR season remarkable for the number of new plays--four--being presented, “BAFO” arrives with the least amount of ballyhoo. Anticipation was greater for Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories,” which played here in November, and for David Henry Hwang’s “Golden Child,” now on the SCR Mainstage. And it is safe to say that expectations are also higher for Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain,” which will premiere here in March.

The reasons are various, but not least of them is that “BAFO” was a late addition to the season, decided on after the season had begun. “Collected Stories” had a promising public reading in the NewSCRipt series last season, as did “Three Days of Rain.” And “Golden Child,” while not glimpsed ahead of time in that format, had the advantage of a widely publicized run in New York co-produced by SCR before its arrival here.

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You have to go back to 1988 for Strelich’s last play at SCR, “Dog Logic,” which also had its world premiere on the Second Stage. The Times’ then-critic Dan Sullivan praised the production, mildly faulting a script that dealt “with all kinds of theories about how the human race got disconnected from itself and how it might repair the connection.”

Somewhat rewritten, “Dog Logic,” which centered on the owner of an abandoned pet cemetery doing battle with land developers, later won a prestigious grant from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays and went on to a New York staging in 1992.

Strelich, a native of Bakersfield, has had a handful of his plays produced, among them “Embarcadero Fugue” (his first, written in college at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and mounted at the Dallas Theatre Center in 1982) and “Neon Psalms” (staged at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre in 1985 and New York’s American Place Theatre in 1987).

“BAFO” represents a departure, Strelich says. “Before this, all my plays have come from Bakersfield. I wrote desert-y things. I wrote about people who live in trailers. This is the first time I’ve had a play about guys I work with on a daily basis, guys like me.”

Likening its mood to “a farcical ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ ” (if only because of the desperate bunker mentality of its five men and one woman), “BAFO” is “close to a cross between ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ ” Strelich said.

“It’s got that hostage thing,” he explained, “and that weird Strangelovian satirical element to it. I’ve thought about this play for the last 10 years. When I heard the term BAFO, I thought, ‘What a great metaphor.’ Best and final offer. It spoke of destiny.”

* “BAFO” begins previews tonight and opens Friday on Second Stage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesday through Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2:30 and 8 p.m; Sunday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $18-$25 previews, $26-$39 regular run. (714) 957-4033.