Can-Do Director Savors the Derring-Do of Actors

“I like smart and brave actors,” said director Jack Hofsiss, seated outside USC’s Stop Gap Theatre, where he is preparing the world premiere of David Stevens’ “The Sum of Us” (opening tonight). “But ultimately--when it’s time to perform--actors have to leave their smartness at the stage door, and carry their bravery on stage.”

Hofsiss was referring particularly to the actor’s intuitive art (“Thinking is fatal during performance”). But as often happens when one talks of others, Hofsiss, 36, was indirectly talking about himself.

He was “smart” enough to graduate from Georgetown University with a double major in English and Fine Art, immediately land a job out of school in 1973 with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, and, six years later, direct the Off-Broadway and Broadway productions of “The Elephant Man,” for which he won a Tony for direction.

He was brave enough to rebound from a nearly fatal accident, which left him partially paralyzed from the upper chest down, and maintain a demanding work pace.

“All my friends in the theater wanted me to come back,” he recalled. Sitting in his wheelchair under a shady tree next to the USC theater, Hofsiss was utterly relaxed and upbeat. “The accident made me savor life. It happened in the summer of ’85. I dove into the deep end of a back-yard pool of a house I was renting. Not a high dive, either.” His head crashed into the pool floor, fracturing his spine.

“I was slightly conscious as I was being taken out of the pool, but not for long. That was a blessing, really. I can’t go into too much detail because we’re in the midst of a lawsuit--hopefully it’ll be settled in or out of court by year’s end.”

From near-death, Hofsiss recovered, only to endure eight months of arduous physical therapy. “I had a great fear that I wouldn’t direct again,” he admitted. “When I came back, my friends said they knew all along I would. I told them, ‘Sure glad you did, ‘cause I didn’t.’

“During the darker days, I drew upon the spirit of John Merrick,” Hofsiss added, noting the powerful, life-affirming stance taken by “The Elephant Man.” Merrick’s enormous physical deformities had demanded a humanistic response from those around him--a response which Hofsiss received as well.

“The biggest inspiration was when Josephine Abady, artistic director of the Berkshire Theatre Festival, invited me to direct Tad Mosel’s ‘All the Way Home’ for their 1986 summer season. Just being invited sped my recovery. Too, I felt very close to that play, since it was based on James Agee’s ‘A Death in the Family,’ about how a family copes with their father’s death. Death . . . that was something I knew about.”

Hofsiss began rehearsals a year to the day after the accident.

Since then, and after an initially encouraging treatment with acupuncture stateside, he ventured to China for three months (“to find the grand masters of acupuncture, whom I never found”). Last year, he directed “No Way to Treat a Lady” at the Hudson Guild Theatre and a new musical by L.A.-based writers Craig Safan and Mark Mueller, “Butterfly,” for the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut.

The director denied that he felt any serious limitations working from a wheelchair. “I can’t pace,” he added wryly, “which was the way I worked off nervous energy. Now I work it off internally, with mind control.”

But why “The Sum of Us,” a new play at a theater that’s off the well-trod theater circuit?

“This is a good, safe place to nurture it. (Producer) Dorothy Lyman secured the world premiere rights to it, even though David wrote it in and about his native Australia. (Stevens co-wrote the film, “Breaker Morant.”) She sent it to me, and it met my test, which is that the story has to grip me, and I have to feel intoxicated reading it. Although the play’s fundamentally about a working-class father and his gay son (played by Kenneth Mars and David Packer), and how they support each other--yes, he’s definitely an unusual father--it’s also a prismatic look at all kinds of love. David mixes naturalism with a theatrical presentational style, which makes it a real play.”

Though Hofsiss is first a theater man, he has dabbled in the movies (“I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can”) and made a second home in television. Yet it’s as if he’s brought the theater into those media: “Dancing” was scripted by playwright David Rabe, and Hofsiss’ TV work has focused on play adaptations, notably “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” with Jessica Lange, “The Oldest Living Graduate,” with Henry Fonda, and that Hofsiss perennial, “The Elephant Man,” with David Bowie.

“Bowie,” explained Hofsiss, “played Merrick quite differently from Philip Anglim (who starred in Hofsiss’ New York and Los Angeles stagings). Philip was distant, observing, not at all the victim; David was wary, street-wise.

“I allow that kind of elasticity from my actors. This was the first real acting David had ever done outside of playing with Lindsay Camp’s London mime company. He had just come back from Berlin (where Bowie took a long break from the pop music grind), and he wanted to do a different kind of performing. I wish I had funny stories to tell you about him, but he was a very ordinary, hard-working actor--the best kind.”