BILL TALEN’S BACKYARD WORLD VIEW

“I don’t write under the burden of having to be funny,” said author/actor Bill Talen, whose one-man show “Cooking Harry” opens Sunday at the Cast Theatre.

Harry is Talen’s Uncle Harry, and the cooking refers not only to the actor’s metaphoric roasting of his relative, but the Iowa backyard barbecue where much of it is set.

“It’s a true story,” Talen, 36, explained, “expressing some of the disenchantment with the gentrification of a man who’d meant a great deal to me.” How exactly does a human being gentrify?

“He becomes boutique-y, middle class. That’s what happened to Harry. He was, when I was growing up, sort of my vision mentor. We did things together, traveled together, there were rites of passage that my uncle (only eight years Talen’s senior) made possible. Then, as in the case of so many of our friends, he adopted an income, a backyard, kids, a pool--and a barbecue, the icon of this piece.”

The actor, who claims to have resolved the old resentments (“mostly through writing this piece”), believes that the solo voice is one of today’s most important forms of artistic expression.

“Look at Eric Bogosian and Jackie Mason and Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg and Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray and Dick Shawn,” he rattled on. “And from another angle is the person who tells stories by way of film: Jim Jarmusch and Susan Seidelman, David Byrne and Laurie Anderson--people who produce films that are such personal visions, it’s almost like storytelling.

“One of the most important things about solo performance, and why it’s rising as its own form,” he emphasized, “is that the person on stage is the source of the material. It’s his life, and he wrote it.

“But in this media era, most of our stories are told to us by film and TV--which are big collective enterprises, involving millions of dollars and countless people. You don’t know what the point of view is. The actor may disagree with the words coming out of his or her mouth. We don’t know if it’s the director, actor, producer, agent or playwright: We don’t know who it’s coming from.”

Talen believes his best asset is in “conceiving and writing stories.”

His weakness? “I think it’d be pretty foolish of me to try to do jokes, stand-up comedy. That’s a rhythm, an attitude, a voice that does not come easily to me.”

What has come easily is the self-expression: “At some point, you make the jump from pleasing a certain number of your friends with descriptions of the world to arranging footlights around yourself and leaping on the stage.”

In the case of Talen (who’s written from an early age but detoured earlier as a rock singer and dancer), the “jump” into performance was encouraged by monologuist Spalding Gray (whose autobiographical “Swimming to Cambodia” played at Taper, Too in 1985), under whom he studied at San Francisco’s Intersection Theatre. And it’s been an ongoing relationship: Gray’s latest show opened this fall at Talen’s new Bay Area facility, On the Water.

“It’s a regional description,” he said of the theater’s name. “There’s an idea that the hills of San Francisco are like bleachers overlooking the bay--and it’s like a stage, with things moving across. . . . Actually, we got the name off a sign advertising condos.”

The 6,000-square-foot space, designed by architect Minoru Takeyama (who’s housed stages in such uncommon venues as a hospital and a Pepsi-Cola canning plant), offers a “flexible” floor plan for its 250-seat theater, which this season will play host to an eclectic combination of performance artists, traveling theaters and tap dancers.

As one of the theater’s four producers, Talen is responsible for seeking out much of that talent--and it’s one of the reasons for his “every 10th week” trip to New York. But travel has long been in his blood: Born in Rochester, Minn., Talen (who attended the University of Wisconsin and San Francisco State) has at one time or another lived in New Orleans, Montana, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Iowa, New York and Los Angeles.

Does an interesting theatrical perspective depend on such broad-based global knowledge?

“Oh, no. I think artists can talk authoritatively about the world from just about any vantage point.” Even an Iowa backyard barbecue.