‘Voice of the Prairie’ Star : Actor Returns to Globe Where Career Began

When the phone rang in his Los Angeles apartment four days before Christmas, Sean Gregory Sullivan heard a voice from the Old Globe Theatre offer an utterly unexpected present: one of the three multiple roles in “The Voice of the Prairie,” John Olive’s dreamy play about a radio storyteller. (It continues at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage through March 20.)

Sullivan’s reaction was partly surprise. After all, he hadn’t even auditioned for the role. On the other hand, it was the sort of Global intervention that the slight, 30-year-old actor had come to expect from the theater that had started him off 18 years ago in “An Enemy of the People,” in the very same space in which he was now being asked to star.

The transition from child actor to adult actor was one Sullivan almost didn’t make. He had been brought up to be comfortable with the profession; his mother, Diane Sinor, acted at the Old Globe for years before she became director of education there, a post she still holds.

But during college, Sullivan became interested in mime. Today he speculates that he probably would never have returned to acting if Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe, hadn’t asked him to play one of the dinosaurs that expire in “The Skin of Our Teeth.”

In the show, later broadcast by PBS, he had to use his skill at movement to suggest character through a $5,000 latex dinosaur costume. O’Brien seemed sufficiently impressed with Sullivan’s forlorn way of portraying the coldness of the ice age to cast him in several more plays back to back. (The latex was also recast--as a giant squirrel in the Globe’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”)

Ultimately, the Globe gave Sullivan the opportunity to do a one-man show, “Baby Redboots’ Revenge,” financed by Danah Fayman and written by the late local playwright Philip Dimitri Galas. The play, about a former child star, allowed him to portray 25 characters in the space of an hour.

“He (O’Brien) had faith in me at a time when I was questioning myself as to whether I was doing it because I grew up with it or because there was a real hunger in me,” Sullivan said. “I’m very aware of being blessed by this theater and by Jack in particular.”

His performance in “Baby Redboots’ Revenge” led to movie and television work. That in turn prompted his move to Los Angeles. But there was a drawback to his role in “Redboots”: Casting agents so identified him with the spiked-hair character he played that most of the parts he got were similarly coiffed--from his small role in Madonna’s “Who’s That Girl?” to the NBC series “Roomies.”

The highlight of the “Roomies” experience--which was not wonderful, Sullivan confessed--was getting his hair done in the chair next to Vanna White.

“She never looked at me, though,” he said with a sigh. “I guess she was intimidated by the hair.”

Then, after two years without any stage work, Sullivan got the call for “The Voice of the Prairie.”

“It’s interesting how the Globe always shows up when I need to be re-energized by what it’s really all about. Film is really a . . . cinematographer’s medium. But on stage it’s yours--hit or miss. And every night you can look for things.”

“The Voice of the Prairie” has given Sullivan just what he was looking for. Like the actors in the excellent production of “Hard Times” at the San Diego Repertory Theatre last year, Sullivan gets to play several distinct parts--four, to be exact. As an added twist, his character is played partially by him and partially by another actor. He plays Davey Quinn as a young boy, and William Utay plays him as an adult.

There are occasions when Sullivan, as the boy, and Utay, as the boy grown into man, are on stage together. Sullivan said he has sometimes wondered which one was him.

“This show has definitely given me a lively dream state,” he said.

Sullivan also plays Leon Schwab, a Brooklyn-born huckster who gets the reluctant adult Davey to talk on the radio in the first place; an asthmatic Arkansas suitor for Frankie, the woman Davey loves; and a Kansas City jailer who drags the adult Davey and Frankie off to prison for freeing some chickens.

“One of the reasons I wanted to do this was the fact that I had never done anything like this before,” Sullivan said. “I can think of characters I’ve played that are similar to Davey the boy, and I can imagine the hustler mentality of Leon, but to be jumping between the two . . . it’s the exalted fear of jumping off into something that you don’t have any guideposts for. If I said no, I knew I’d regret it all my life. So I took a deep breath and said yes.”

Then the challenge commenced.

“The first run through of this play was a nightmare,” he said. “We looked at each other and said, ‘At least we get our paychecks this week.’ ”

But by the time he was in the third week of rehearsals, he and the other actors were seeing the virtues in the difficulties of moving from one seemingly opposite character to another.

“Leon and Davey are from two different worlds, but they’re brothers. They are both con men. In Hartford (during another production) they used six actors. You might get a stronger depiction, but something was really lost--those universal qualities . . . and seeing that these differences are not as big as they first seem.

“Tom Bullard (the director) had a great note that every scene is a love scene and that each of these characters has a great need for each other. It’s the love of a boy and a girl, the love of a man and a woman, and the love of friends who have nothing in common who become inseparable.”

It also seems to have led to a love of an actor for the characters he plays, even when he’s not playing them.

“I sit backstage and watch the scenes between (the adult) David and Frances (where the two are reunited) and get choked up nine times out of 10,” Sullivan said. “You often imagine what the future of characters will be. (Young) Davey’s last memory in this play is of Frankie being pulled away. I get to peek through the curtain and see what happens 30 years later. This is a very magical play.”