IN THE USUALLY calm audience at the Loeb Drama Center suddenly forgets itself and yells "Author! Author!" after a performance of The Hemingway Play it's easy to imagine Frederic Hunter taking off out the back door. He is an unassuming man, humble about himself and his work. He'd rather write than talk about it. He is tall, thin, soft-spoken and wears tennis shoes. He has large hands and holds doors open for people in public places. He doesn't look like a Californian but he is.

Early in 1961, Hunter saw a production in Los Angeles of a play written by a man named A.E. Hotchner, a television writer and close personal friend of Ernest Hemingway's Hotchner's play attempted to string together several Hemingway short stories to dramatize the life of the Nobel prize winning author. Despite the help of Rod Steiger in the lead role, the play did not succeed and Hunter came away from the performance feeling the fault was in the "bio play" format of the work. Hunter explains. "Such plays follow the chronology line of a person's life and present the essence of the main character as his of her reaction to a succession of events." For Hunter this format was limiting.

Sometime later, the seeds of his alternative concept were sown when he saw a production of Peter Ustinov's Photo Finish in which the main character confronts himself as separate characters. It too failed, but in the dramatic structure Ustinov employed, Hunter saw great potential.

The form of The Hemingway Play allows four Hemingways to appear onstage at once. Four separate personalities, each from a different phase of Hemingway's life, meet one another in a Madrid cafe. The complexity of the man is revealed through characters who share common memories but cannot sort out the truth from the self-perpetuated myth. There's a showdown: the legendary man against himself, depicted so clearly by Hunter that the viewer is made aware of elements of the hell Hemingway must have been going through just prior to the taking of his own life.

Why did Hemingway commit suicide?

Silence, Hunter is leaning forward in his chair, elbows on knees, hands folded, fingers interlaced, staring at the carpeted floor. He always pauses before he responds to a question. Forms his answers pensively.

That must be a tough question, maybe unfair or impossible to...

"Well," ...he shifts in his seat, not really a grimace but almost. He answers without looking up, his eyes scanning the air for words or something. "You'll have to see the play, it's too complex to sum up in a sentence or two."

Frederic Hunter has never taken a course in playwriting. The first full-length play he ever wrote was about two people living in a museum. It was produced at UCLA and enjoyed moderate success. In 1968, when he completed, after several years, the manuscript of the second play he ever wrote, The Hemingway Play, he locked it away in a private drawer. Writing is a slow, careful process for Hunter. Even if he had actively sought one, a production would have been difficult to arrange. He was, after all, a young free-lance writer without theater connections, about to leave the country to become a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.

Did you write this play to purge yourself of his influence?

"In a way, I wrote the play for a variety of reasons. Hemingway has played an important role in shaping the consciousness of our times...As a young writer I was intrigued by his style and found myself unconsciously trying to copy it...Eventually I became fascinated with the man himself, his internal contradictions as a man and artist...His failure to overcome the personal problems that led to his death...I was also interested in the possibility that--at least for theatrical purposes--past, present, and future could all occur simultaneously. This possibility merged with my musings about Hemingway and the form of the play resulted."

The manuscript might have rotted in that locked drawer if it wasn't for Hunter's twin brother. While Fred was in Africa for the Monitor, Paul Hunter, (who is also a playwright and has four one-acts opening in Connecticut the weekend of his brother's opening here) re-discovered it and mailed it off to Arthur Ballit, head of the office for Advanced Drama Research at the University of Minnesota. Ballit was impressed and went to work at his specialty: exploring production possibilities for promising new plays. He submitted it to several contests and organizations. Eventually he connected. The next time Frederic Hunter had a chance to re-work his play was during the month following the staged reading it received as the winner of the 1973 National Playwrights Conference Award at the Eugene O'Neill Center in Waterford, Connecticut.

Are you anything like Hemingway?

A smile in the pause this time.

"Not at all. Our temperaments are very different."

Well, you're both journalists, both have Africa in your background...

"My approach to Africa was very different from his."

How's that? Never went on a safari, never hunted big...

"I have no need to cut a figure or gain a reputation as a fighter or a lover. I think killing animals is a desecration. In Hemingway's time Africa was a continent without political self-consciousness. Today men rise to power overnight and often fall just as quickly. There is much drama in this natural cycle too, if you understand that each of these men has an individual life story...Everybody's story is a play, really."