Through the magic of theater, Jeffrey Hatcher is appearing in two places at once.

The playwright's "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde" has been in previews at City Theatre on the South Side, while "Ella!" has been occupying the Pittsburgh Public's Downtown theater since Oct. 1.

Hatcher, a Steubenville, Ohio, native who makes his home amid the Minneapolis-St. Paul theater scene, said having two works playing concurrently "happens once in a blue moon" there, but he couldn't remember such a strange case in another city.

It's appropriate that the dueling Hatcher works would occur in conjunction with "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde," perhaps the best known exploration into the duality of human nature.

For Hatcher, it's all just a happy coincidence.

"It's not like [City's] Tracy [Brigden] and [the Public's] Ted [Pappas] got together and said, 'Wouldn't it be great if we did this?' But if they want to get together to do another Hatcher Festival, that'd be cool," he said last week.

Hatcher's pleased to have an excuse to come back to Pittsburgh, even though the shows are not premiere productions. His works have debuted at City before, and there's another one already in the works, but that's a while off. In the here and now, it's time for Mr. Hyde to leap out of the shadows and make his appearance ...

Or should we say, appearances.

A few years back, Hatcher was asked by San Jose Rep and Arizona Theatre companies to put a new twist on Robert Louis Stevenson's familiar tale of the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. That should have been a tall order when it comes to a work that's been retold for stage and screen, for laughs ("The Nutty Professor" is a prime example) and as a musical that brought David Hasselhoff to Broadway.

Audience members, even if they've never visited the source material, believe they know the story of "Jekyll & Hyde" before they've settled in their seats.

"So you know that the audience has expectations, which creates this weird double thing -- give them what they want and at the same time give them what they don't expect," Hatcher said. "Certain kinds of things you just don't do, like in 'A Christmas Carol,' you'd never add a fourth ghost." The playwright went back to Stevenson's novella and quickly found a way in, recalling a play in which Jekyll's alter ego was played by two actors.

Why not a different actor to represent each transformation?

"It's never a question on film; you have your lead actor, then you do makeup to show the transformation," Hatcher said. "Most times on stage, [Jekyll] ducks his head under the lab table and then comes up with different hair. That seemed hammy and a little creepy. "

It's important to the playwright that the multi-actor character of Hyde not be seen as a gimmick but as part of the theme of transformation.

"Every time he makes the transformation, Jekyll is in a slightly different state of mind, depending on the amount of potion and other factors. For every manifestation, there's a different personality."

Using several actors to play the manifestations "is fun, theatrically, for audiences, and it's also connected to a theme. ... I rather hope when, for example, a woman plays Hyde in a fairly seductive way, it has a certain androgynous feel, because that's what's happening in his subconscious at that point."

If there's any confusion for the audience, it's usually gone by the third variation -- not that a little confusion is necessarily a bad thing, as long as it brings up the level of concentration, too.

"I knew August Wilson from the O'Neill [Theater in Connecticut], and one time he was talking about language, and he was saying that he was told to change the way his characters talk because white audiences weren't going to understand them. He said, and I hope I'm quoting him right, that 'If I have characters talk the way I think they should and the audience doesn't understand, then they will listen more carefully.' Sometimes he would emphasize the jargon, let's say the patois, at the beginning, and do it less so as he got deeper into it. You don't have to be quite soooo ... exotic, if you know the audience is paying attention."

The play is written to open with an attention-grabber -- a woman screams, police whistles blow and we hear someone scream, "Break it down!" And a light shines on a red door.

That visual jolt runs throughout the play, with the door serving as the main set piece.

"There's a joke in various productions, they call it the Elizabeth Arden door," after the company's Red Door Spas, Hatcher said, chuckling.

"I think the red door represents passion, emotion and violence, too. It can be locked, broken down, sealed ... And I think it just looks cool. Elizabeth Arden must have, too."

Mounting a production that has legs doesn't demand as much time and attention as a premiere. It also helps that the playwright and City have collaborated several times before (including premieres of "Compleat Female Stage Beauty" and "Mercy of a Storm"), and are about to do so again.

Hatcher has been commissioned by City, in partnership with Arizona Theatre, to create a new work about Pittsburgh native and legendary playwright George S. Kaufman.

"It's farcical. ... The story is he's tired of writing with collaborators like Moss Hart and Edna Ferber, so he decides to revisit the house he grew up in in Pittsburgh to try to write by himself. It's a boarding house, where communists hang out, and as a result, the FBI is interested -- the conceit is he's stumbled into one of his own plays. And it was during that period of time when he was running from the newspapers because of [Kaufman's affair] with Mary Astor."

The play is titled "Louder, Faster," and that it's set in Pittsburgh puts Hatcher in a comfort zone.

As a boy, the playwright was taken along on hospital visits in Oakland and discovered the wonders of Jay's Bookstall. He was sorry to hear of the demise of the independent bookstore, for it was there he had first delved into books on theater and entertainment that weren't available in the stores back in Steubenville.

Over the years, Hatcher pointed out, Pittsburgh has a track record as an inspiration for writers.

"August's plays, 'Hill Street Blues' [Carnegie Mellon grad Steven Bochco, the show's creator] obviously picked up things here and ran with it. ... Pittsburgh is very grounded and its theater has just the right amount of grit and sweat in it, plus something that feels sophisticated in all the right ways."

The city's multifaceted nature makes it an ideal spot to invite folks back in time, to the mean streets of Victorian London and behind close doors, where danger lurks and a theatrical experience challenges our imaginations.

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