E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dating game Actor and playwright dish Mr. Wrong BY SALLY CRAGIN

One redeeming feature of going on a very bad date is the pleasure that comes from later describing it to a buddy. When they both lived in Los Angeles, actor/single mom Julie White used to regale her friend Theresa Rebeck, a writer whose plays include Spike Heels and Omnium Gatherum, with tales of her romantic misadventures. Bad Dates, Rebeck’s one-woman show starring White (who plays Mitzi Dalton Huntley on HBO’s Six Feet Under), was directly inspired by these stories; it opens at the Huntington next Friday.

White plays Haley Walker, a guileless young woman from Texas raising her precocious daughter in New York. She manages a hot new restaurant, and for the most part, she’s ambivalent about dating. Even so, she can’t help going on date after date, each one more disastrous than the last. Despite the theme, this isn’t chick lit come to life. Rebeck, an accomplished crime writer for the small screen (her credits include LA Law, NYPD Blue, Law and Order), has embedded plot twists galore in the 90-minute monologue, including a box of money under Haley’s bed. She wants her heroine to be seen as a "buoyant survivor. She’s so resilient. She’s so not a whiner. I took great pleasure spending time with her in the writing."

The original idea that emerged from the two friends’ conversations was a cable show to be called Bad Dates. Rebeck and White would co-host and invite a different woman every week to describe her latest bad date. "Then we’d do dramatic re-creations," says Rebeck. Both White (who had a recurring role on Grace Under Fire) and Rebeck "had enough clout in the system to have taken a bunch of meetings and set the thing up." But that project never got off the ground, Rebeck admits, because the prospect of "going into people’s offices and explaining how this would be funny was very sad."

So Rebeck decided to write a solo show for her friend to perform. "I said to her at one point, ‘What’s the worst date you’ve ever had?’ And she said the worst date she ever had started out as the best date she ever had. She fell for this guy who was completely charming and seemingly in love with her who turned out to be a big liar." Intrigued, Rebeck began drafting the character of Haley. Before long, another friend, actor John Benjamin Hickey, declared his eagerness to direct. Last summer, Bad Dates, with Hickey at the helm, premiered Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. It received admiring notices, even from notoriously crusty and disdainful New York magazine critic John Simon, who found it "charming."

For White, who’s now happily married and can recall her single years with mixed emotions, playing an earlier version of herself isn’t strange so much as "flattering." She laughs and adds, "And I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility not to screw it up." The performer’s fusion with the character is so complete that she even contributed some of her own clothes and shoes for the production, and the pictures of Haley’s daughter on the set are actually of White’s own daughter, Alex. "When we went to costume it, I said, ‘We can’t get anything the character can’t afford.’ When I was on my own — just me and my daughter, Alex — there was a real sense of fear. Will I make it? What will happen to us?" Haley faces many of the same challenges; what she doesn’t know, White says, is that "she’s already complete. She knows there’s something missing, and you think it’s a guy or a relationship, but it’s really that she has to come clean with herself."

Bad Dates is presented by the Huntington Theatre Company January 2 through February 1 at the Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue in Boston. Tickets are $14 to $64; call the Huntington box office at (617) 266-0800 or Ticketmaster at (617) 931-2787.