CHAPEL HILL - At an early rehearsal of the Free Association Theatre Ensemble's upcoming play "Oh Baby!" several cast members made a point to introduce themselves to the playwright, Deborah Barrett, who was watching from just offstage.

Barrett was all but speechless.

"They all came up to me and told me they were so grateful that I was allowing them to do this," she said. "I had to pinch myself. I thought, 'The joke's on you! You're treating this thing I wrote like a real play!'"

Barrett has a hard time thinking of herself and the word "playwright" in the same sentence. She's a clinical social worker and associate professor in the UNC School of Social Work, at least by day.

But no matter what you do with the rest of your time, if you write plays, you're a playwright. And for someone who has only been at it for two years, Barrett has put together a pretty remarkable string of successes.

Her very first play was a finalist for a popular festival of short plays at The ArtsCenter in Carrboro. Her second one not only made it to the stage at another ArtsCenter festival - it won.

And now her first feature length play is being produced by FATE, a company based in Cary.

So, regardles of whether Barrett still feels like something of an imposter in the theater, FATE founder and director Julya Mirro has news for her: She's not just a playwright - she's a very good one.

"It's a brilliant idea for a 90-minute play," Mirro said of "Oh Baby!," which consists of eight short interlocking vignettes, all dealing with various aspects of fertility and childbearing. "I hope people will walk away from it talking about the ideas it raises.

"Debbie's stories are told in such a way that they make you think about your own story, and that's an amazing and difficult thing to do. I think she hit it out of the park."

Barrett's budding career writing for the stage grew out of her love of watching the stage. She had a special fondness for The ArtsCenter's annual Ten by Ten festival, which presents 10 plays, each 10 minutes long.

"Two years ago I happened to see their call for submissions, and I thought, 'Hmm, if were to write a play, what would I write about?'" she said.

Her experiences as a social worker gave her the answer. She imagined an interaction between two women in a waiting room: one is pregnant and doesn't want to be, and the other yearns to be a mother but is having a miscarriage.

"I thought about how something that is a gift for one person can be a tragedy for someone else," she said. "I thought about it for a while and sat down at the keyboard. An hour later I had a play."

She submitted "Inside Stories" to Ten by Ten. To her astonishment, her play reached the final round of selections.

"I was blown away," she said. "I thought, 'Oh my god, I might be a part of Ten by Ten! I finally decided that if I don't get in, I'll just keep writing."

Which is exactly what happened. That play didn't make the final cut.

But the next one did. "Conception," a humorous exchange between a husband and wife about how best to go about conceiving the perfect baby, was accepted into the 2009 Play Slam, in which the audience determines the winner - and won.

Mirro, who founded FATE in 2007, liked "Conception."

"I liked the conversational tone of it," she said. "Not a lot of scripts really sound the way people talk. They're written to be read. Debbie's sounded very honest, very real. I suggested she could write a full-length play."

Barrett did that - sort of. Writing a full-length play was a daunting prospect, so she broke the job down into smaller parts. She wound up with eight related acts, or playlets - including "Inside Stories" and "Conception" - woven together to form a whole. They all deal, in various ways, with issues of fertility and parenting.

"I didn't really set out to write about fertility," said Barrett, who has two children. "But my first two plays happened to be about that, and in a way those characters just took me there. When you become a parent, or are considering becoming a parent, it's such a pivotal moment. There's so much hope, so much apprehension, so many powerful emotions."

Mirro said the "Oh Baby!" hits a lot of those.

"This play has touched all of us in the ensemble in different ways, relative to our own experiences," she said. "How does fertility and parenting define you? What does it say about what kind of person you are? It raises a lot of important questions."

For Barrett, the process of watching "Oh Baby!" come to life has been extraordinary.

"I can't tell you how exciting this is for me," she said. "This is my baby."