FREEDOM, STRUGGLE IMPORTANT TO PLAYWRIGHT : RICE FIRES ‘ROUNDS’ AT SOCIAL ILLS

“Where is the promised land?” actor-playwright Sean Michael Rice asked disgustedly. “I want to have hope--I’m as hopeful as the next person. But it’s hard when it’s 20 years after Martin Luther King, and all of this is still going on. It’s just not right.”

Rice is not your typical social crusader, but he feels things deeply. He felt Vietnam (where he served two years) and was part of the resulting anti-war theater piece, “Tracers,” which played locally and worldwide in 1985-86. He felt a friend’s suicide--and wrote about that. There was the breakup of a 15-year relationship--and he wrote about that. Now comes “Rounds” (opening tonight at Cast-at-the-Circle), a drama about four working-class black men.

“It started in ‘83,” he said. “I have this friend, Pops, and he took me to a boxing match at this guy’s house in the Crenshaw district. I was the only white face there. That’s cool; I’ve dealt with it before. But just being there struck me as such a good situation: to have the violence come out of a televised fight, all the aggression, frustration about work. So I decided to write about these four guys--and have a white guy come into it. Then I thought, ‘I don’t want to do that. I want to deal with four black guys.’

“I’ve got to watch my step here,” he noted with a shrug. “Some black people might resent my doing this--say ‘Hey, this guy has no right (to write about black men).’ Well, better for me to do it than no one.” Early signals would indicate he has nothing to worry about:

“After the first reading, one guy came up to me and said, ‘Were you brought up by a black family?’ At another reading, a girl came up, rubbed my hand and said, ‘You black underneath there?’ ”

Rice smiled. “It’s not about being black or white; it’s dealing with humanity. We all bleed the same blood. This play is about oppression. What’s my oppression, you ask. My oppression is--as an actor and playwright--being beaten down, told to stay down. So I’m not presuming that I know the black experience. Just oppression.”

The Pennsylvania-born Rice, 39, acknowledged that such hard themes are at the heart of most of his works--beginning with “Illustration,” a drama about two killers (first produced in 1972 and revived many times since--most recently last year at the Deja Vu).

“I just think people deserve so much--and they’re given so little,” he said of his emotional motivation. “It’s not even a question of giving: they work for it. But there’s that fat cat, man, he’s got the big house, big car. He’ll take your job back, take his business overseas. He doesn’t give a damn about you . . .

“I have it better than a lot of people. If you’re an actor, you’ve got to sit at home and wait for the phone to ring. As a writer, I can get up in the morning, have a couple of hot cups and hit the keyboard, just jazz out some words. I can do anything I want. It may be disposable, in the can, but I can get it out of my system. And I think, in my own little way, that I’m helping.”

He’s also quick to point out those who’ve been of help to him.

“Richard Dysart, Lonnie Chapman, Dana Elcar--they’re people who care, who go to the trouble. See, I always used to write plays for myself. Off Off Broadway (where he started in 1968), if you wanted to work, that’s what you did. But Dana was my main man, he was cool. He told me, ‘Look outside yourself. Write a play about other people.’ So I did. I wrote about two old men, an old woman and a young girl.” He laughed. The characters might not have seemed like him, “but they did have my experience.”

In spite of those support channels, Rice is still big on loneliness as a factor in his work--and life.

“It’s true,” he nodded. “My play, ‘Dixie, the Lone Ranger’ is all about loneliness; the Lone Ranger is this guy’s whole world. Me--I don’t mind being by myself. I was brought up (without a father) as an only child, and I always played by myself, did things alone. It’s embedded in me. So freedom is really important. Freedom and struggle.

“Henry Miller said, ‘It’s not difficult to be alone if you’re poor and a failure: an artist is always alone.’ He also said, ‘Failure fans the spirit’--and it does. Out of poverty, disease, death, love affairs, something happens. If I can communicate that and touch somebody, that’s cool. That’s tip-top rockin’ .”