FANS OF THE ENTERTAINING MR.ORTON : ‘Sloane’ Fleshes Out Caulfield’s Image

Please don’t ask Maxwell Caulfield to take off his shirt.

Not that he’s shy: A bare chest was often required for his character, Miles, on ABC’s “The Colbys.” And everything came off for his sunbather role in “Salonika” at the New York Public Theatre (“a small theater and people were sitting right on top of me, talking about my body. It was weird”). Currently, he’s appearing sans pants--”very briefly”--as the likable but violently disposed Cockney naif Johnny Sloane in Joe Orton’s “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” (at the Taper through Aug. 22).

“I have been perceived as a pretty boy,” the British-born actor admitted. But he hopes to shake that label, and now that “The Colbys” has been canceled, he’s looking forward to spending a lot more time on stage. The pleasure is clearly doubled in “Sloane,” a role he played Off Broadway six years ago.

“There’s no question he’s an amoral person,” Caulfield said of his character, “but I try to bring out his attractive qualities: his forthrightness, his brazenness. I like his chameleon-like quality. I love playing the innocence of him. And Orton’s humor is just so outrageous. When material’s really strong, you can fly.”

And stomp. And tweak. “Yeah, poor Gwyllum (Evans, who plays his victim),” he said with a grin. “Last night, just before kicking his head in, I was twisting his ear and I got a little carried away.”

Along with his physical relish for the part, Caulfield (who also appears in the Taper’s companion piece, “Loot”) is very keen on Orton’s language: “He puts such wonderful words in these people’s mouths, gives his characters a higher intellect than they actually possess. And I love sounding witty--it’s a quality I’d love to magnify in my own personality.”

Professionally, though, he’d like to mix it up more. “I really enjoy playing a character,” he said earnestly. “I don’t like to just project myself in everything I do.” People have recently told him he’s really a character actor--which genuinely pleases him. “But Hollywood doesn’t see me that way; I tend to be pigeonholed. In New York, I’m taken seriously as an actor. Here, I’m not. Once you do a soap. . . . “

Yet Caulfield, 27, can also occasionally play the snob: “I saw Jack Coleman’s name on a list of performers doing ‘Once in a Lifetime’ (a recent radio broadcast by L.A. Classic Theatre Works) and I made the mistake of saying, ‘But he’s not an actor. He’s a soap-opera star.’ ” Coleman plays Steven Carrington on ABC’s “Dynasty,” out of which “The Colbys” was spun.

Caulfield is equally candid about his own work. An assessment of his first feature film, “Grease 2”: “It had a wonderful romantic quality, was very well shot, but didn’t deserve to make it because it was a blatant rip-off of ‘Grease.’ ” Of “The Colbys”: “The storylines tend to be rather repetitive; the characters are really two-dimensional. But it was a great opportunity to work with the camera--and it was a good career move. The series is huge in Europe right now. ABC will rue the day it canceled ‘The Colbys.’ ”

He’s confident another opportunity will come along; in fact, it was the promise of opportunity that brought him here. “In England, if you don’t know somebody, it’s near impossible to get into the theater. It’s really a closed shop. But America is the land of the free.”

Once here, he appeared in “Class Enemy,” then “The Elephant Man,” where he met his future wife, actress Juliet Mills: “It was love at first sight. Unquestionably. Across a crowded room.” Nowadays the pair occasionally act together (there was a lengthy love scene on a “Hotel” episode last season, which, he notes proudly, “we got in one take”). Meanwhile he’s developing a movie for the two of them.

“Hollywood has to get its priorities straight in terms of the movies it’s making,” he said firmly. “The old moguls may have been tyrants, but their hearts were in the right place--they made films that were romantic and funny. We’ve got to get back to those values. I don’t mean to sound puritanical; titillation is fine. But there’s this real obsession with sex and violence.”

He frowned. As an actor, Caulfield is no stranger to violence (in the 1986 film “The Boys Next Door” he played a “baby serial killer”)--but offscreen he’s resolutely peaceable. And spiritual.

“Something is occurring this month called the harmonic convergence,” he noted, “a 12-day period, leading up to the 16th/17th. You’ve got to be up at sunrise to be in tune with the Earth, try to create a field of resonance. America is obsessed with progress; that’s fine and dandy. But now the machines are out of control. Yet there is hope, we don’t have to throw in the towel. We just have to start thinking with our big minds instead of our little minds. And we have to be sensitive to the beauty of the world. As an artist, I want to reflect that.”

Even in the wicked “Sloane”? “It’s black comedy,” he conceded. “People are going to be shocked at what they laugh at. It’s a real assault on the senses. But there’s also a tremendous amount of truth in it. Joe Orton once said his plays were about people getting away with it--and Sloane does. I like that. They play by a lot of rules in this town, and I’m not necessarily a rule-breaker. But I also don’t want to be a total conformist either.”