‘IMMIGRANT’ AND A NATIVE SON

At 35, Mark Harelik looks more boyish and mischievous than he did at 27 when, as an earnest, very intense young acting student at Santa Maria’s Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts, he played the title role in Robert Patrick’s “Judas.”

Since then Harelik has loosened up a lot, played many roles, some at the Mark Taper Forum (“Wild Oats”), many at Santa Maria and Solvang, at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, San Diego’s Old Globe and the Denver Center Theatre Company. The eyes under the short jet-black hair have grown playful, the pursing mouth has learned to smile and he’s matured into a superior, easy-going performer who, in 1984, wrote his first play--almost by chance.

That play--”The Immigrant--A Hamilton County Album”--opens next Thursday at the Taper after two seasons at the Denver Center where it originated. It was written in a fast three weeks as a last-minute replacement for a show he and his director, Randall Myler, had developed in 1982, based on the life and music of Hank Williams.

When the music company pulled the rights before a planned 1985 restaging of the show in Denver, artistic director Donovan Marley offered to keep the slot open for any project Harelik and Myler might again dream up. “There’s this story I’ve always wanted to write. . . , “ said Harelik.

“The Immigrant” was it.

This intimate, partially imagined history of Haskell Harelik (Mark’s grandfather), a Russian immigrant and the first Jew to settle in tiny Hamilton, Tex., in the early 1900s, features the author as his own grandfather. For Harelik, this impersonation and the production’s gathering momentum have been a watershed experience.

“I don’t want to push this play anyplace,” he cautioned, relaxing in an empty dressing room at the Taper during a rehearsal break. “I want it to be invited in. It was invited here. It was invited there (Denver). It was invited to be told in the first place.”

The four-character play got mixed reviews in its first Denver outing, but audience response was another story. This rather traditional, touching tale of personal survival struck a nerve. Word of mouth brought people in--enough to warrant rescheduling “The Immigrant” in a larger space for Denver’s ‘85-’86 season.

Then theaters around the country began asking for the rights. Harelik, who’d been anxious to see how the play would fare in other hands, gave it to Chicago’s Wisdom Bridge, but found that production “a sticky, maudlin, shallow valentine to something rather vague.”

It’s a criticism that has been leveled at the play before, though in milder terms. Myler claims the version at the Taper is tougher.

“If we can toughen it some more, I would be even happier,” Harelik said. “Words are what people say. How and why lie behind the words. If you assume that characters must follow the path of greatest resistance, what seems to be hearts and flowers in a scene can actually be painful and heroic. The people I’m writing about are mild, and one of the difficult tasks is writing about undramatic, sometimes unimaginative people in a way that reveals who they are--preserving simplicity without manipulating events. I’ve manipulated plenty, anyway.”

He did invent a good deal of his story but, he said, “It doesn’t bother me. Garrison Keillor said that a writer should concern himself less with facts and more with trends. What is illuminated on the stage is the life and times of this little segment of the country--and the rhythms of these people.”

Harelik was born and grew up in Hamilton, a town of 3,200 people where his grandfather and later his father ran the dry goods store. He shared the same house with his grandparents during their older years (and his own junior high and high school years). Before that they had always been neighbors.

“There is no mall in Hamilton,” he said with a wry smile, “nor is there likely to be. Everything there has a human face. My grandparents’ home was my home. We had several meals together all through the week and Sundays we were always at their house. I had sort of an idyllic childhood. I loved my parents, but my relationship to my grandparents was . . . angelic.”

It took distance, however, to put it in focus. Said Harelik:

“The day I went off to college I stopped being a practicing Jew. There was no decision. I realized the only reason I had gone to shul was to commune with the family. I loved being in the synagogue sitting next to my grandparents. It was a religious experience, but when I went by myself, I knew that what had made it religious was not the ceremony but the presence of these people with their love and their belief in God. It warmed me like a heating element.

“Even more amazing is the thought that my grandfather was a kid once who looked a little like me. You begin to see the passage of a palpable spirit from one generation to the next. The play is an effort to put a finger on that continuity. There is something harmonious between that individual story and the movement of a nation.

“I’m a product of that,” he reflected. “I am my grandfather. It’s now my responsibility and if I let go of it, I can unmake history. I think this play is very sweet, but assuming it’s portrayed with intelligence, perhaps sweetness can be redefined. After all, it isn’t a repugnant word. This isn’t a fairy tale. It’s a folk tale, because it’s true.

“I always figured that my grandfather was heroic, without ever having been prompted about it, just because I knew he was from this other time and place that seemed somehow like the Middle Ages. And my grandparents had a good set of anecdotes from the old country that all sounded like stories out of Sholem Aleichem. In fact, my grandfather talked about seeing Sholem Aleichem come through his town.”

That town was Parici, south of Minsk, in Lithuania. His grandmother came from Bobruysk. Harelik hopes to visit there some day.

Harelik’s grandmother died in 1971. His grandfather Haskell is in a rest home and has not seen the play. He will be 98 on Rosh Hashanah (Oct. 4). “The Immigrant” will not be performed that night or on Yom Kippur (Oct. 13), the Jewish High Holy Days. Milton Perry, the banker who helped Haskell in his youth, has long been dead, but his wife, Ima, died only last summer, well into her hundreds, in a town south of Hamilton.

Harelik, who had never met her, was planning a visit when he read the obit in the Hamilton paper that he still receives every week.

“It was strange,” he said. “For me, she was just my character and my character had died. The lines of reality became very misty. . . . “

He insists he’s never been interested in the real facts of the Perrys’ lives (which differ substantially from those in the play): “For some reason, I’m just not motivated to find them out. I’m not even particularly motivated to explore my own family’s genealogy.”

Meanwhile, writing this play, he said, “has matured me. I started out just writing a personal history and slowly realized that I was writing about an American microcosm: How different cultures come together.” And it’s made Harelik aware of something else as well.

“I think I’d like to stop acting altogether and write,” he said, with detectable trepidation. “I used to crave standing center stage, under the lights, receiving applause and laughter. These days, it makes me feel ashamed. It’s still hideously nice, but I’d like step out of that arena, let my ego cool, get down to proper size, and then . . . do what I really would love to do.”