A decade ago, an American playwright had her lunch every day at a Copenhagen pizza parlor run by Kurdish refugees.

"It was such an odd world," recalled Deborah Brevoort, who drew from this world for her latest play, "The Poetry of Pizza," a Virginia Stage Company production opening Friday at the Wells Theatre.

One of the regulars was Ule, who lived across the street with his agoraphobic wife - meaning, she was afraid to leave her house.

Ule came in every Tuesday and Thursday, and he always asked the Kurds to play Andrea Bocelli's sentimental signature song, "Con Te Partiro" ("I Shall Leave With You").

"And they would play it over and over until everybody in the place was screaming, 'Stop it! No more!' "

Ule would take a table far from the window, eat his pizza and weep, Brevoort said.

"I always sat by the window. Ule would say, 'Look up, Deborah. Is my wife watching?' " She would stand by the window, watching, until he got home.

"It was so sad, so moving - and so ridiculous."

Brevoort was in Denmark to work on a drama set in Scotland called "The Women of Lockerbie," which became her best-known play.

When she got back to the States, she began composing a comedy that involved Ule and his house-bound spouse, plus the inventions of a nosy landlady, a flirty Danish professor and love between a romantic Kurdish pizza maker and a cerebral American poetry scholar.

She envisioned it as a screenplay because she thought a camera would be needed to show the Kurdish man's pizzas: As he falls in love, his pizzas grow more artistic, and they have names such as "Persian Kiss" and "Purple Passion." Then she decided to abandon script writing and shelved her "love and pizza" tale.

The story continued to haunt her, but she couldn't see how to make it a visual story for the stage.

Five years ago, on a day when she was upset by a bad review of a poor production of "Lockerbie," she picked up the script again - to divert her mind and cheer herself.

A solution came.

"I decided to let my words be the camera. I decided what I'm going to do is do poetic descriptions of the pizzas. Talk about ridiculous! But, actually, it was the bad idea that led to the great idea" - which was: the way to make an audience see something is to take it away.

"That is the foundation for all Asian theater," she said. "If you make a suggestion, the audience fills in the blanks."

Her revamped script calls for a bare stage, minimal props and a non-naturalistic performance style. To travel from America to Denmark, a character takes one step and, voila, she's there. Actors address the audience as well as each other.

Scenes in different places occur simultaneously, which is part of what makes the play funny. A woman might be screaming for her husband, who is right beside her, though he's depicted as being someplace else.

"American theater is really very stuck," Brevoort said. "We're really wedded to realism. To me, it's like the most boring form of theater there is.

"If you use an abstract form, you can do so much more. So I reached into my toolbox to liberate this play. Then I mixed it in with some farce," grounding it with the classic "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl in the end" story structure.

Chris Hanna, artistic director for Virginia Stage, directed the premiere of Brevoort's first play in 1990 at Alaska's Perseverance Theatre in Juneau.

She has become a well-established playwright with an impressive resume as an actor, director and writer in regional theaters. (Early workshop productions of "Lockerbie," which won the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award in 2001, took place in Staunton, Va. One production featured Norfolk actor Rick Hite.)

Hanna selected "Pizza" for this season partly because "it approaches some very difficult issues with open-heartedness. It's just hilarious - but wise and true. There's lots of madcap farce, all in the context of this goofy village with a lot of secondary characters running around trying to get their own needs met, tripping over each other."

Patrick Mullins, associate artistic director, is directing the play. "She really gets you laughing," he said of Brevoort's writing, "and in the middle of that, she sets her hooks. You see this ideal kind of love, this soul-mate love, that transcends culture and circumstances."

Brevoort pegged the theme as "the mysterious power of love" to "make everybody wake up and come into their true selves."

But there is more. She picked up the piece and began reworking it in April 2003, as U.S.-led forces invaded Baghdad.

"I think the way to speak politically is through comedy," she said. "What is the most radical thing I can do? I'm going to write a play where the audience falls in love with two Iraqi men. Those are the characters I worked hardest on.

"It's not going to change the world. It's my gesture."

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com