OLD GLOBE SPARKED ROMANCE

Balboa Park has good karma for Deborah May and George Deloy. They met at the Old Globe in late 1981, in rehearsals for “As You Like It.” That’s the play that inaugurated the new Old Globe--and a new beginning for May and Deloy.

They’re now married, have a 9-month-old daughter, and are starring in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Marry Me a Little,” which opens tonight at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

Deloy is a 33-year-old native of Uruguay who moved to Utah as a child and learned to sing after one acting coach after another told him his voice was exemplary. May won’t say her age--”I’m a few years older than George”--but does confess she’s a former Miss Indiana who won Miss Congeniality in the same pageant that crowned Phyllis George Miss America.

May had a thorough background as a singer--until her teachers told her she could act as well, and act well. She’s appeared in soap operas and numerous plays, as has Deloy. Both have acted in other Old Globe productions: Deloy in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “London Assurance,” May in “Richard III” and “Fallen Angels.”

Last year, they both appeared in 12 episodes of the NBC series “St. Elsewhere.” They were a couple trying to have a child through in-vitro fertilization. The doctor on the TV show told them, “You’re pregnant”--about the time that their own physician said the same thing.

“Deborah had a certain independence I hadn’t known in a woman before,” Deloy said of the woman who would bear his child. “Not that I’d been with weak women before, but Deborah was different.”

“I was hysterical, obnoxious, big-mouthed,” May said with a laugh.

“She knows who she is,” Deloy said. “She has an extremely outgoing personality. You soon realize she puts the focus completely outside herself. She cares about others more than anyone I’ve ever known.”

She could say the same about him and does. In the Los Angeles area, which he and his wife call home, he works with critically ill hospice patients. He does it, he said, to feel tied to a larger community. He sees it as an extension of faith--as part of the “obligation of being human.”

May said that after she became infatuated with Deloy and what she called his “human qualities,” she panicked at the thought of not seeing him more.

At the end of the run for “As You Like It,” May signed up for a new round of appearances in the CBS soap opera, “The Guiding Light.”

Being away from Deloy made her realize how much she missed him. During an appearance together in San Francisco, Deloy asked her to marry him. Following an 18-month courtship, they were married in August, 1983.

Both are articulate about staying married, and in love, when so many about them can’t seem to do either. They talk candidly about the task of keeping their love alive while working in the same profession. They talk of the need of doing projects together while making raising a child their highest calling.

Both are religious and talk of a shared spirituality in meeting the obstacles of life in the ‘80s. They would love to do a TV series together, not just for the fun but for the ease in mutual scheduling.

They talk of sharing the same fears.

“There are certain things only another actor will understand,” Deloy said. “Your mother, your father--no one can understand. Tell another actor; they’ll know.”

“Katharine Hepburn said you have to go out there and sell yourself,” May said. “You have certain wares to sell. Sometimes, you walk off and say, ‘They didn’t want me, they didn’t like me.’ You continually set yourself up for this petit mal rejection. Only another actor can understand that. It makes it nice when you’re married to that actor.”

Both talk of the thrill of meeting someone in a play and falling in love, as they did, and of the complications of being in love in the world of make-believe.

“On many plays, people want to fall in love,” Deloy said, explaining that many marriages in stage and film begin just as theirs did.

“Why does it happen?” May asked. “Well, often you find yourself wanting to transfer those feelings, those qualities called for in the character, to the other person. It makes things easier, more intriguing, more fruitful. It can also go in the opposite direction.

“But it’s a wonderful feeling when you love somebody and can share those feelings professionally as well as personally--as I do with George in this play. That’s terrific.”

The songs in “Marry Me a Little” are from earlier Sondheim compositions, ones that never made it to final scores. They are sung by two New York singles who find themselves, in their apartments, facing the prospect of a Saturday night alone. Such songs are hardly saccharine sweetness, Deloy said, noting that many evoke heartache and pain.

“The odd thing about the piece,” he said, “is that many are bittersweet, sad, lonely, troubling . . . The couple who sing these find themselves asking, ‘How can you marry someone a little?’ You marry someone completely, totally--a lot. Or else, you haven’t married them at all.”