Los Angeles Festival : ‘THE BARON IN THE TREES’: IT’S ALL A STATE OF MIND

On this gray California morning, the baron in the trees is the baron at the beach.

It’s all a state of mind for actor Tuck Milligan, who plays the title role in Italo Calvino’s “The Baron in the Trees” (at the Ensemble Studio Theatre through Sept. 27). Adapted and directed by Stephen Sachs, “Baron” tells of the adventures of a 12-year-old Italian count who rebels against his parents and society by climbing up into the backyard trees--and never coming down. With a cast of 13 (playing 75 roles), the story is physically and creatively airborne: A single, rudimentary set becomes many locations and ordinary objects, like benches and ropes, are transformed into an arboreal landscape.

“For what we’re doing, it works,” Milligan said of the staging. “We have to go so many places in a short amount of time; doing it realistically would be impossible.

“By using a story-theater format, you can incorporate the best kind of theater: theater of the mind. You don’t show people where you are--you just ask them to believe it. So we do a few suggestions with lights, planks, ladders.

“The audience does the rest.”

Which doesn’t, Milligan added, lessen the actors’ responsibility.

“I have to do a lot of homework,” he said. “Before the audience can see what’s going on in my mind, I have to put it there. I have to imagine the forest and trees. Instead of climbing up this ladder as a ladder, I’ve got to climb it as if it were a tree. Walking a plank is different than walking a branch. If you were doing it as a movie, you’d just put the guy in a tree. But we’re not doing that. We’re asking the audience to watch a story about a guy who lives in the trees--and there’s not a tree on the stage.”

As important as the fanciful telling, he feels, is the humanity of Cosimo’s story: “Finding his own way in life and demonstrating to people, without evangelizing, that they have that ability too. They can come up there, live a life in the trees. It’s a lesson for anybody who’s trying to maintain their ideals--especially in Hollywood.”

(Milligan himself appears immune from such art-and-commerce conflicts: “The fact is, I’m here to make money. But then there’s the Ensemble Studio Theatre, which is not about making money but maintaining oneself as an artist. I balance the two.”)

In the four years since he moved West, the Missouri-born actor has often appeared on stage: as Linda Purl’s suitor in “The Real Thing” (Taper Rep, 1986), as the self-absorbed songwriter in Craig Lucas’ “Blue Window” (South Coast Repertory and the New Mayfair, 1985) and as 14-year-old Huck Finn in the original 1984 La Jolla Playhouse staging of “Big River.”

“I felt so at home with that character,” said the actor (who coincidentally had two years of schooling near Hannibal, Mo.) “Age was never a problem.” That is, until it was decided to take the show to Broadway. “Suddenly I was too old. I’m 38, and I don’t look the way the industry wants people to think 38 looks. I’ve lost a lot of jobs over it, ‘Big River’ being one of them. When you play someone who’s 14, then, in the same season, play (an older person)--Oliver in ‘As You Like It’--well, it totally freaked (composer-lyricist) Roger Miller. It freaked the investors. They forgot what it was in me that they’d originally responded to.

“When money enters into any production, values change,” he said glumly. “But that’s the lot of any actor: You do the work and somebody else gets the glory. And what always amazes me is that someone thinks they can break up a chemistry, manipulate something that worked. . . . The show did change a great deal before it got to New York. We were really doing a play with music; that’s what I enjoyed about it. It could have been the ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ of the American stage--but that would’ve required more daring. The difference between English and American theater is that the English are willing to take a chance. It used to be that Americans did that.”

He smiled, dismissing any further dark thoughts. “I’m grateful for the four weeks I had in La Jolla; no one can take that away. And since I’ve been here, theater in Los Angeles has really grown. A lot of that has to do with people like me: out-of-work New York actors who have to climb trees--and stay up there.”