AN ACTOR-DIRECTOR AT HOME IN AND OUT OF THE SPOTLIGHT

Eight years ago, a relatively unknown young actor named Mark Lamos was hired out of the East to direct the inaugural season of the California Shakespearean Festival.

It happened in Visalia, a pit stop on the way to Sequoia National Park, a city about as uncelebrated as he was. The festival lasted two enchanted summers and offered two plays each and Lamos directed them all. Sublimely. His name was never unknown again.

Lamos was plucked from his successes in Visalia to become artistic director of the Hartford Stage Company in 1980, a job he still holds. His experience there has only strengthened the reputation he had begun to acquire in Visalia as a director with a special flair for the classics.

Tonight, Moliere’s “The School for Wives,” staged by Lamos, opens at the Warren Playhouse in La Jolla. It’s the first time in a number of years that Lamos is back directing in California. How does it feel?

“Great. Are you kidding?” he said, incredulous. “You’re talking to someone who just before he came (to the interview) was floating on a raft in a pool at a friend’s house in Valencia. I love California!”

At 41, the actor-turned-director looked trim and fit and, though he is known as a chain-smoker, he gave no signs of needing a nicotine fix while being squirreled away in a no-smoking private office at The Times. “I’m thinking of giving it up,” he said, unconvinced. “This reinforces the idea.” But his thoughts at the moment were focused on “School for Wives.”

“What impresses me about the play,” he said, “is its simplicity and the bourgeois quality of the characters, as opposed to characters living in a more courtly situation like ‘The Misanthrope.’ It takes place in a town square. Moliere even says a square in a provincial city, so my first thought was of very simple people. I happened to be watching a Chaplin retrospective on TV and noticed a look, a sense in the Chaplin of the simplicity of the Commedia form Moliere was building on. Chaplin could really do that.”

Lamos has set the play in a square in a provincial town sometime between World Wars I and II. As he explained it, “I wanted to get out of the period it was written in, because I felt it would distance an audience.

“What I’m really working on is the size--not the size, no, the amount of things Moliere allows to be in one of his plays. I don’t think it’s just a funny play. It’s very political. I have strong feelings about the obsessions of his characters. They’re dangerously close to tragedy or pathos and sometimes outrightly comic bathos. I don’t want the play to constrict what might be in it.”

One thing that’s in it is the personal history of the last 10 years of Moliere’s life. Moliere originated the role of Arnolphe, the much older husband about to be cuckolded by his young wife--a situation reflected in his life by the actions of his flirtatious wife, Armande Bejart, a woman half his age.

“I find a lot of pain in the play,” Lamos acknowledged. “I don’t mean that it’s not funny pain, but unless it’s explored realistically, we lose something. I don’t know French, but I believe translation is as much a barrier as it is a way to understanding. The 11-syllable line is an unnatural sound in English. (Richard) Wilbur has gone about as far as you can go in making it bearable, but the rhyme in English is much harsher than in the French Alexandrine. You lose subtlety: mercurial turning points, moments of sadness turning into great joy. . . .

“It seems this was the first play in which Moliere used the heroic form and because he used it for bourgeois people, he created a scandal. He was attacked by two courtiers who felt he was ridiculing them when, in fact, he was probably sending up his own case. We lose the tension of that in translation. There are times when the pomposity of the verse form itself is taken on by the actor as a kind of attempt to make something fit the size of what he’s feeling.” As Lamos became more animated, there was in the intensity of his gaze and skittishness of his movement the elegance of a race horse.

“I’d listened to translations of ‘Tartuffe’ and ‘Misanthrope,’ ” he continued, “and then I saw a ‘Tartuffe’ at the Comedie Francaise and was amazed by the subtlety of the language and how it wraps itself around the situation. In English, the language can become slightly deadly. Wilbur gives it great internal spring rhymes that keep it moving, but it’s a tremendous challenge to actors.”

For Lamos, the La Jolla gig is keeping faith with a missed commitment. In 1983, he had been asked to direct “Galileo” as the Playhouse’s inaugural show and couldn’t (“I was in the middle of an opera commitment”). He does little acting now. “I’m tired of the routine,” he said. But the reasons are more complicated. “Doing it and running a theater is very debilitating. As an actor, you need to focus your day on that performance at night in some way you can’t even imagine, whether you go to the zoo or play with the kids. . . . It’s a very long day to be in the office and perform Ibsen until 11 o’clock.”

Lamos played Dr. Rank in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” at his own Hartford Stage last December, “the hardest part of which,” he said, “was dredging everything up to play that role: a man facing death and being very much in love with that woman, the bitterness in him, as well as everything else. When I really touched it, which took me a while to do, I found it very, very upsetting. It ended none too soon. Nothing we’d done in the past caused such a visceral reaction in our audiences. The play still speaks to people on so many levels. I was amazed.”

And yet, he said: “It’s good for me to act occasionally because I get back in touch with the actors’ needs. It must be that I’m crawling towards death, as Lear says to his daughters, but I’m getting to where I wouldn’t mind seeing a 50-year-old Viola or even, I daresay--I probably could be shot for this--a Juliet and a Romeo. If I believed them: their conviction about the verse, about the feelings. Some of the best Shakespeare I’ve seen is when an actor breaks all the rules. Do it by the rules, and it’s like one of those dead Eastern European performances, where all the notes are in place--and it’s Muzak. Shakespearean Muzak.”

In September, Lamos embarks on his eighth season as artistic director of the Hartford Stage and is ambivalent about it.

“Everybody knows that about me. I sometimes feel constricted by it. At the same time I feel liberated because it gives me a chance to make the kind of theater I most like making and bring together the kinds of people I most like bringing together. I love the location. I love the fact that I can use the New York talent pool.”

Is it easy to pry artists out of New York?

“Relatively easy. One of the great tragedies we’re all facing now is the non-commitment of a great many American actors to doing theater. It’s severe. In the 10 years I’ve been directing, I’ve noted a big change. Part of this I lay at the feet of the schools that are training actors, because they get so overtrained that when they come out of there, the last thing they want to do is another Arthur Miller play or another Shakespeare. They want to make money. Visibility. Something has not been inculcated in them that says: ‘There’s something you’re going to get from theater.’ It’s certainly not money--the nonprofit theater is exactly that: Nonprofit. There is a growing resistance to getting out of New York or Los Angeles, away from a phone that might get you a job tomorrow. I must admit that if I were acting full-time now, I’m not sure I would either.”

Like many American children, Lamos became attracted to the theater when his parents took him to see “The Nutcracker.”

“I still find that experience of looking down from the fourth or fifth balcony of the Chicago Opera House at this little square of beauty, (surfacing) in my productions,” he said. “I’m still obsessed by the idea of proscenium, footlights, dance, moving furniture, a red curtain. I thought I wanted to be a scene designer, because I thought I could make pictures like that. And then I wanted to be a dancer, but all the time I was studying violin. I had a big musical childhood.”

Lamos went to Northwestern on a music scholarship but didn’t like the ambiance of the music world. He also couldn’t stay away from theater and went into it “immediately, professionally, the minute I graduated.”

Lamos spent three and a half years as an actor at the Guthrie in Minneapolis and has done several shows on Broadway. He got into directing, he said, “as a fluke. I came out here to do ‘Hamlet’ (the title role at the San Diego Old Globe in 1971), loved California, met some good people and wanted to hang out with them before going back to the ugly East. Meanwhile, Craig Noel (of the Globe) had scheduled a Shaw play (“Too True to Be Good”) that he didn’t have time to do and I asked him if I could please direct it. . . . “

Lamos did, successfully, “and suddenly, I began to get hired as a director. I acted a bit more in New York and at Stratford (Ont.). Then the Visalia thing came up.”

That was the biggest fluke of all. Festival founder David Fox Brenton had met Lamos at a mutual friend’s house in Evanston, Ill. (an encounter Lamos couldn’t remember at all). Brenton told Lamos what he was up to and that he wanted him involved.

“Suddenly I found myself in a room at the Theatre Development Fund with a bunch of people all turning to me--including my Guthrie mentor, director Michael Langham--saying, ‘We really think you should direct one of these two plays. . . . ‘

“It was like Alice walking into the tea party. Everyone was conspiring to have me do this. I was in ‘Man and Superman’ on Broadway at the time. I noticed that a lot of the actors in that were asking me for advice and that they would use the advice I gave. I thought, ‘Well maybe I have kind of a talent for this.’ So I came to Visalia and that was it. I haven’t stopped directing since.”