Pulling double duty

It's Monday, Nov. 5, the first day of the writers strike, and Adrian Pasdar has time for lunch. With production for his NBC series "Heroes" shutting down behind picket lines and rehearsals for his new musical "Atlanta" off for the day, the actor and neophyte stage director is suddenly, temporarily, at liberty. He has not been at liberty for months, and it feels good.

"The strike could not have happened at a better time," he says, seated at a window table at M Cafe de Chaya on Melrose. Pasdar says this not in celebration but in relief, as a man with a family holding down two high-pressure (albeit well-paying) jobs and telling himself every day that things are going to work out, some way, somehow. He has grown close to the cast and crew of "Heroes," but he is also trying to direct the world premiere of a Civil War musical he's co-written (with Nashville songwriter Marcus Hummon; it opens Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse). An athletic and energetic man of 42, Pasdar nevertheless would be within the bounds of reason to say, "Do not try this at home -- or in Hollywood."

He does not say this, but under the circumstances he did enlist Geffen artistic director Randall Arney to co-direct the show. Still, he wants to be there as much as possible. "Because I wrote it," Pasdar says at lunch. "There's some subtlety and nuance to the characters. Though it's very simple and very straightforward -- which is what I appreciate in theater -- it can be interpreted in different ways, and would prefer that it be interpreted my way."

The "Atlanta" cast of seven is headed by Broadway veterans Ken Barnett ("Wonderful Town"), who plays a Yankee soldier passing for a rebel behind enemy lines, and Merle Dandridge ("Tarzan," "Rent"), cast as a slave and thespian serving to entertain a Shakespeare-loving Confederate colonel played by former NEA-non-approved performance artist John Fleck. Fellow "Heroes" ensemble member Leonard Roberts plays another member of the colonel's traveling slave troupe.

Pasdar, who grew up in Philadelphia, the son of an Iranian-born heart surgeon and a nurse, got the idea for "Atlanta" seven years ago, based on the notion of a soldier finding a love letter inside the coat of an enemy he has killed and becoming obsessed with the object of his enemy's affection. He happened to mention this at a dinner party in Texas attended by Hummon, who had written songs for the Dixie Chicks -- whose lead singer is Natalie Maines, Pasdar's wife.