Just outside Bookshop Santa Cruz, the man in the bowler sits frozen in time and space, his hands stilled as he plays a saw. Marghe McMahon’s 1978 sculpture of local legend Tom Scribner is a landmark of Pacific Avenue.

It’s also the inspiration for Richard Bennett’s “The Saw Player,” one of the 10-minute plays being performed as part of Actors’ Theatre’s 8 Tens @ Eight through February 14.

The play takes the form of an imagined conversation between a sculptress, Lee played by Anna Hinde, and her subject, Sam played by Rick Kuhn. The two connect through the process of creating an artwork.

“Works of art are not just an artist’s in isolation,” said Bennett, a visual artist who also created all of the pieces seen onstage during the play. “There’s an interaction between an artist and his model, an artist and his subject, his landscape.”

In the play, Sam reassesses what will happen after he is gone and ponders the nature and immortality of art. “Each explains to the other what they are and who they are,” the playwright said.

Both characters are based on their real life counterparts. Scribner, who died in 1982, had a colorful history. The saw player was a logger, a labor organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (a.k.a. Wobblies) and a journalist. He edited The Redwood Ripsaw in the 1960s, played saw with George Harrison and Leon Russell and founded the annual Musical Saw Festival. In the 1970s, he could be found busking on the Pacific Garden Mall.

Bennett never met Scribner, but knew McMahon from his student days at UC Santa Cruz. Besides being a talented artist, she also danced in those days. Though not reflected in the play, McMahon went on to have a career in special effects, creating models for such films as Return of the Jedi, The Abyss and Death Becomes Her. Bennett said he has not been in recent contact with her.

“In a sense, the play is like the sculpture,” said director Davis Banta. “It’s inspired by [Scribner], but it’s its own thing.”

The play stood out to Banta while the Actors’ Theatre board member was helping to whittle down the plays from 16 to eight for the 8 Tens @ Eight festival. A local, Banta grew up walking past the sculpture downtown. “The Saw Player” piqued his curiosity and though he normally does comedy, the play grabbed him with a moment in which Sam ruminates on his mortality.

“He says ‘that statue is going be there forever and here I am bones and skin turning into a skeleton’ and it really kind of hits home when he’s looking at this small version of himself that’s going to be around forever and the real version of himself is going to be gone at some point,” Banta said.

Finding the arc and tension in such a short theater work was a challenge for the director, who calls it a character piece. He credits his actors, Kuhn and Hinde, with making the play shine.

“I can’t think of anyone else for the role of Sam. He really brought it to life,” Banta said. “And Anna Hinde grounds the character very well as the scuptress.”

This is the second play Bennett has gotten into 8 Tens @ Eight. “The Rain are Fallin’,” about an opera singer on the verge of retirement, was performed several years ago. While Bennett — the husband of retired local theater critic Anne Bennett — has written longer works, he said he finds writing a 10 minute play to be more challenging because it’s easier to expand a story than shorten it.

“I guess you’d compare it to a short story rather than a novel. You have pretty much all of the elements, the complete story, but you have to express it in a rather abbreviated form,” said Bennett, who writes things longhand before typing them into a computer. “You have to bring the light on it in a very limited space of time.”

Banta puts it another way. “You don’t have a second to spare in a ten minute play.”

8 Tens @ Eight 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 3 p.m. Sundays through February 14. Actors’ Theatre, 1001 Center Street, Santa Cruz. $15 – $18. (831) 425-7529.