‘Desolato’s’ Gammell Takes Special Care of ‘Caretaker’

Depending on your point of view, watching a Pinter play can be disquieting or hilarious--but performing it, says Robin Gammell, is just plain hard.

“It’s a lovely, witty play--a classic,” noted the actor of “The Caretaker,” opening Friday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

“It’s wonderful to read it, it’s wonderful to rehearse it. But it is also a very vigorous piece. Intricate. It’s difficult to learn, difficult to move through, to make connections,” said “Largo Desolato’s” star.

“Pinter’s got a very peculiar, complicated sentence structure: a lot of multi-repetitions of common language, stops and starts. All of those stops and starts have to go the speed of lightning--and the thoughts have to be behind them. When it flies, it’s exhilarating. When there’s air in it, it’s deadly .”

“The Caretaker” (in which Gammell plays a street bum who’s alternately victim and victimizer to a pair of enigmatic brothers) follows an equally unsettling role as a “reluctant dissident” whose innocent writings have been labeled subversive--and rendered him the quaking object of real/imaginary inquisitors in Vaclav Havel’s Czechoslovakian drama, “Largo Desolato,” (Taper Too, 1987).

“That was a very odd, offbeat play,” nodded the actor, 52, looking suitably grizzled and disheveled for his “Caretaker” role.

“Some audiences thought, ‘What a terrible situation this man is in,’ and others thought it was one of the funniest plays they’d ever seen. Maybe it’s the Bud Abbott-Lou Costello thing: intellectually, people love seeing someone slip on banana peels--which this man does all the time.” Regardless of audience response, he loved playing the part: “It’s fascinating stuff to do, to get inside. It’s like . . . great sex.”

The experience also rewarded him with a Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award and some spectacular reviews, including one from Times critic Dan Sullivan that concluded, “ ‘Largo Desolato’ is a funny play that tells the truth, and Robin Gammell is a star.”

“I loved it,” the actor said gleefully. “Someone called that morning and told me to read it. Then my daughter (8-year-old Winslow) called and said, ‘The newspaper says my daddy’s a star.’ ” He shook his head. “I usually don’t read reviews because I discovered as a kid that that was what I really wanted. I wanted somebody to say, ‘He was wonderful.’ But what they were saying wasn’t enough. I’d do four months of work on something and they’d say, ‘He was fine’--and that’s a good review! So I started not reading them. Later I began to have realistic ideas about what a review was. It wasn’t my life; it wasn’t talking personally about me. It was just about the performance.”

He used to wish that it could be a more tangible accomplishment.

“I saw all my friends doing movies and said, ‘I want to do that. I want to have performances that will last. I want it on film, I want there to be a record of it.’ Like (Humphrey) Bogart: He’s dead but his stuff is there. The writer’s stuff is there. Mine is gone.” He shrugged. “I found out that when you give a good performance, there are always people coming up and saying, ‘I remember. . . .’ So it’s not gone. It may be gone after a generation--but at least while I’m around, it’s there. Reviews, films, clippings are there for history. But this is an ephemeral validation.”

Validation aside, Gammell’s principal lure is great roles. “You want the big ones,” he stressed. “You want to show your strength, you want the long line. You want to explore. It’s like having sex for a long period of time. If you can prolong it, it’s nicer. So yeah, it’s about the work, and the work is about showing off. I want the biggest number of people to see my work, I want it to be under the best possible conditions. I want to be in the best possible theater and I want the biggest audience I can get--because I think I’ve got something.”

Which is? “I’m me . And nobody plays Robin Gammell like Robin Gammell. Robin Gammell doing ‘Out of Africa,’ the Robert Redford role. Yeah. Sure. I can do that. I’ll even do Meryl’s part. Any part that comes along. Actually, I like playing women; I’ve played Cassandra and Electra in (Aeschylus’) ‘House of Atreus.’ I’d like to play Lady--we don’t say her name because it’s bad luck--er, the Scottish Lady.”

Gammell (whose films include “Project X,” “Star Chamber” and “Lipstick”) has been acting since his childhood in Ottawa, where he appeared in a succession of school plays and became hooked on the smell of a particular green room (“it was musty and sort of warm--I’ll never forget it”). It was his first visit to the Stratford (Canada) Shakespearean Festival “that nailed the coffin on my career. It was the most wonderful stage you could imagine. Like a big top, like magic. Permanent.”

Permanent? An actor’s habitat?

“You choose acting because that’s where the (emotional) security is,” said Gammell. And when he’s between jobs? “I think, ‘I will find someone, someone will come along.’ There is no choice . Sure, it can get depressing; it gets depressing for everybody. There’s pressure, (work) is inconsistent. But another career would not be emotionally stable. See, I’m the thing that’s sold, that does it, that’s there, that’s seen. What you do with it, how you use it, hire it, treat it, where you put it--that’s the variable. But I’m the constant, and I carry that around with me.”