Growing in Place: 5 Who Stayed at SCR

More than 200 regional theaters were born amid the idealism of the 1960s, and since then countless actors have drifted away from them, lured by Hollywood or simply burnt out by the business. At South Coast Repertory, five have stuck it out.

Art Koustik, Don Took, Ron Boussom, Richard Doyle and Hal Landon Jr., who all were founding members of the 23-year-old company, have worked, played, fought and laughed (a lot) together and have endured to see middle age in a grueling profession. They’re together again in SCR’s current production, David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

Arthur Bartow, associate director in New York City of a national service for regional theaters, says “It is exceptional to have five actors still working together at the theater where they began.”

“I think the reason we’ve been able to stay with it all these years,” Richard Doyle explained, “is that it’s much more than an artistic endeavor for us. It’s a human endeavor. For me, it’s an internal conquest. I have learned to realize that you don’t have to be acting on Broadway or wherever. It’s not where you do it, but how well you do it, that matters.”

During breaks from a rehearsal for “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the five actors veered from raucous anecdotes to warm memories of SCR’s path, from the Newport Beach garage where founders David Emmes and Martin Benson built an 80-seat theater in 1964 to the 500-seat, two-theater complex in Costa Mesa today.

These days, they earn about $600 a week to perform at SCR; in the beginning, the reward was purely artistic. “Hal and Don and I worked together at the UC Irvine bookstore to make a living in the early days,” Boussom said. “We worked at the theater seven days a week and we’d work at our other jobs six days a week. Hal and I literally slept in the theater. I would sleep on the costume floor, underneath the costumes.”

“The audience used the same restroom we used,” Took continued, “which was embarrassing because you’d be putting on your makeup and somebody would be coming in. . . .”

The men, whose ages range from 41 (Boussom) to 51 (Koustik), come from backgrounds that include the blue-collar upbringing of a Chicago tavern owner’s son (Koustik), the inspiration of an actor father (Landon), and a stint in Vietnam (Doyle). Koustik stumbled into the business by accident, reluctantly taking a college friend’s suggestion; Doyle has been singing and dancing since he was eight. All five knew Emmes and Benson from school, as fellow students or as their teachers.

Once, some played leading man roles. But youth has receded and, as Landon said while running a hand back through his balding head, “We’re all character actors now.”

Each has a face with a thousand possibilities; as they spoke, they shifted in and out of shticks and routines from old SCR plays--so quickly that it was like being with 50 people, not five.

“We’re all different physical types and different temperaments,” Took said. “There’s Landon, who is bald, he’s the most easygoing of us all; there’s Koustik the heavy, who tends to play the grumbling malcontent; Boussom, who tends to do the nervous, neurotic kind of roles. Doyle still does everything from seedy Cockneys to English lords.

“I’m getting thinner as I get older,” Took added. “I’m doing a lot of farmer roles.”

Such type-casting is a curse for most actors, and it limits the men when they audition for television parts. But not at SCR. There, ambition and imagination have pushed back any limits that physical appearance might otherwise impose.

Boussom estimated that he has performed in at least 60 plays at SCR: “I was a Vietnam dogface in ‘The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel’; the psychiatric patient in ‘Equus,’; Gethin Price, a comedian, in ‘Comedians’; Mozart in ‘Amadeus. . . .’ ” The others offered similarly diverse lists.

Many SCR productions have included at least two of these actors, who say the years have taught them to trust each other’s skills completely. That general sense of trust--the ability to let down all emotional defenses with another actor--is one of the hardest things to achieve on stage, they agreed.

They feel “Glengarry Glen Ross” especially has benefited from their long experience together: To handle the quick rhythms of Mamet’s dialogue, actors often nudge scenes forward with tiny pauses or a barely articulate stutter. “Having worked together so long,” said Bousson, “allows a greater opportunity for subtlety.”

Offstage, the five engage in exchanges that sometimes have that same rapid-fire quality.

Took and Doyle, for instance, were discussing some of the other actors who had helped form SCR (there were 15 in all):

Took: “Everybody’s got to hear their own drummer, everybody has to do what makes you tick, what makes you happy. Richard Rekow went off to become a priest.”

Doyle: “That’s a form of acting.”

Took: “He loved that stuff.”

Doyle: “It’s better than ‘Murder in the Cathedral.’ He’s a star in his own vestry.”

Took: “You remember John Davis when he did Willy Loman. There was a really fine actor who just burnt out. He was dead behind the eyes.”

The men all nodded.

And what is the secret to avoiding burn-out in such an intense profession?

“It depends on the person,” Koustik said. “I’ve always been working too hard to think about burn-out.”

“The fun has to stay there,” Took said. “You really have to enjoy getting up there every night and making faces. You have to need it. The people who last have a personal need to do it.”

Only Mamet could do full justice to some of the actors’ more ribald behind-the-scenes stories.

“We did a play called ‘Good,’ a very very serious play about the Holocaust,” Took said. “The entire cast stays on stage for the entire play and this makes it very tedious. And we had to look off in the wings at the end to see this Holocaust fire burning in the distance. But when we looked off stage, there was this very cute little stagehand, this little blonde, doing a striptease. It was awful. First there was full frontal nudity, and then there was rear nudity.

“The audience was looking up at this cast that it thought was wide-eyed in horror at this fire and what we were actually seeing was this nude stagehand.”

Whatever such anecdotes might suggest, the five actors said, the story of SCR is mainly one of creative discipline.

“Theater is not a democracy,” Took declared. “You have to have an artistic vision. The artistic vision here is dictated by David and Martin.

“Now the artistic vision is changing. It’s becoming more of a playwrights’ theater. And it is our job to take new roles and pump life into them.”

The five spoke with pride at having fulfilled a dream they cultivated as young men: They feel as if they’ve helped develop a serious theater audience in Orange County.

“If somebody had asked me 20 years ago what I wanted to have in 20 years,” Took said, “I would describe exactly what I have now. There are no regrets.”

David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” continues through Dec. 3 on the South Coast Repertory’s Mainstage, 655 Town Center Dr ive , Costa Mesa. Performances are Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $12 to $25. Information: 957-4033.