SECOR LIVES A DREAM BECAUSE OF AN ‘ANGEL’ : ‘ANGEL’ MAKES ACTOR’S FOND DREAM COME TRUE

What happens when a relative unknown lands a big part in a big play at a big theater? Ask Kyle Secor, who will play the leading role of Eugene in Ketti Frings’ “Look Homeward, Angel” (opening Saturday at the Pasadena Playhouse).

“I was very uncool when it happened,” Secor said recently. “At the first audition, (director Jessica Myerson) said, ‘Thank you.’ I thought, ‘OK, that’s it.’ I went home, tore up my notes, put the script away. Then I got a callback.”

But again, Myerson dismissed his reading with a less-than-enthusiastic “Thank you very much.”

Then came a second callback.

“By that point, I’d done some reading on Thomas Wolfe (on whose novel Frings based “Angel”), and I found he had a lot of things to say about the human spirit. It really touched me. That time I was acting with Shaun (Cassidy, who’s playing his ailing brother), and Jessica said, ‘I want you and Shaun to simply read this. No acting.’ So Shaun and I just hooked up and talked--and it happened, it worked. It was brothers. That’s when she said I got it.

“It was such a dream for me, to finally do big theater,” he said. “I think I passed out. Then I was hugging and kissing people. They asked, ‘Do you want to phone your parents?’ So I called up said, ‘Ma, I got a part and you’ve got to come down and see it. Have you heard of the Pasadena Playhouse?’ ”

Since that euphoric moment, Secor (who has just left the cast of “And a Nightingale Sang” at the Santa Monica Playhouse) has had little time to ponder his good fortune.

“We’ve got only 2 1/2 weeks of rehearsal before our first preview,” he said. “I’m not used to that. But Jessica works very quickly. You’re doing the blocking, learning lines and she’s giving you character details--right there.”

Helping with the assimilation, he claims, are the easily felt universals of a teen-age boy trying to break from a tense family situation: a money-grubbing, overprotective mother (Joyce Van Patten) and a drunkard father (John Astin.)

“For me, the whole thing is about a son leaving home and falling in love for the first time,” Secor said. “Falling in love and not having that background of how hurt you can be going in with wide eyes.

“And that’s why in the play he (Eugene) can say, ‘My darling, my sweet, you’re my life’--because he doesn’t know; he hasn’t been destroyed yet. And there’s something else that’s universal: searching for the unknown, beyond the walls of your house, the town you live in.”

At the heart of the play, however, is Eugene’s struggle for independence from his mother.

“Eugene is really Thomas Wolfe,” the actor said. “He slept in his mother’s bed until he was 9 or 10 years old. She kept him in long curls; he cut them off. She couldn’t let go. So he was constantly shedding, pulling on that umbilical cord.

“I don’t want to make these correlations between me and my life,” he said hesitantly, “but . . . well, you know, in a family, you cover things up. You put yourself aside so you can make the family better, make things smooth. You take care of your mother.”

Secor comes to Los Angeles via Federal Way (“a little town between Seattle and Tacoma”), graduating from a childhood of filching Beechnut Lifesavers from the garage stockpile (his father worked for the company) and being “the best manager Shakey’s Pizza Parlor ever had” before “deciding I wanted to be a sports hero.

“First it was football, then basketball. I still think about going back to college and playing basketball.” (Like Tommy Tune, whom he resembles closely, Secor has very long legs.) “Another romantic thing was that I wanted to join the Army,” he said, “but it was only because I loved the uniforms.”

Only after attending a performance of “Hello, Dolly!” did it occur to him: “I could do that. “ He headed up to Green River Community College in Auburn, Wash. (“where they taught me everything I eventually had to unlearn”), before venturing to Los Angeles, where he trained with the Groundlings company and Salome Jens (“the biggest influence on me--acting and personally”).

Yet, there were times when acting wouldn’t pay the bills.

“All of my commercials (for Sure deodorant, Mattel, McDonald’s) had stopped running. So, two years ago, I started teaching yoga privately. You know, yoga is sort of like acting, because it’s something you don’t really know about--how it happens, why it works. You just do the poses and you get the benefits. I like sharing that. And I think I have a talent for touching people, getting them in tune with their bodies.”

At times, he’s even considered leaving acting for the “body work.”

“I came pretty close to quitting, sure,” he said. “Last year, I must have moved four times; the year before, 10 or 11 times. It was having all my possessions in the car, not having any money, not having an agent who believed in me. Those are the horrible downside aspects of it (acting).

“The funny thing,” he continued, “is that we get used to things not being the way they’re supposed to be. Then all of a sudden, something like this happens: You love what you’re doing, you’re involved in a great play and you’re being paid for it--and you think, ‘It can really be like this. I forgot.’ ”

Secor smiled broadly.

“I had a feeling ’86 would be a good year.”