Old Globe Veteran Up for Emmy for ‘L.A. Law’ Role

Will veteran Old Globe actor Larry Drake win one of television’s Emmy Awards on Sunday night in Pasadena? Drake is being considered for his role as Benny Stulwicz, the retarded mail clerk on “L.A. Law.”

It’s not the first time that Drake has played the part of a retarded man; local audiences may remember him as Lenny in the 1985 Old Globe Theatre production of “Of Mice and Men.” (That was the show that closed early when Drake’s co-star, David Huffman, was stabbed to death after chasing down a man he saw burgle a recreational vehicle in Balboa Park.)

Local audiences may also remember Drake as any one of 28 characters in the 14 plays he did at the Globe from 1982 to 1986, including one of the stockbrokers in Stephen Metcalfe’s “Emily,” one of the gangsters singing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” in “Kiss Me Kate,” and the peasant playing a wall in the play within a play in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

That background is something an advocacy group for the mentally retarded was evidently not aware of when it called Drake’s agent to find out whether he was only acting retarded.

Drake has done three feature films, including “The Karate Kid”; small guest parts on a variety of television series, such as “Hunter” and “Hardcastle and McCormick,” and two television movies. All this, and he was out of work for a year before landing the part on “L.A. Law” that won him one of the eight acting nominations the show received. (Audience favorites Harry Hamlin and Dick Dysart were notably passed over, although the show won 19 nominations altogether.)

Drake needn’t worry about lack of work, as he has just made a television movie, “Leave Her to Heaven,” that will probably air before he returns in “L.A. Law’s” regular season on Nov. 3.

The apple won’t fall too far from the hit series, however. He may not play a mail clerk, but in the remake of the Cornel Wilde-Gene Tierney film, this time starring Patrick Duffy and Loni Anderson, Drake will play Duffy’s best friend--a lawyer.

Call it American theater’s version of car pooling. To meet mounting production costs and extend the life of a given production, more San Diego theaters are sharing productions with other regional theaters. The Old Globe Theatre will be sharing its season opener, Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Blood Wedding,” with the Great Lakes Theater Festival. The La Jolla Playhouse will be sharing Roger Downey’s adaptation of the recently closed “Lulu” with the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Sharon Ott, the artistic director of the Berkeley Rep, directed “Lulu” here.

Ott, a longtime believer in the virtues of sharing shows, will also be in San Diego this weekend to discuss ideas for the upcoming Max Roach musical that the Berkeley Rep will be co-producing with the San Diego Repertory Theatre in 1989-90.

Last year, Roach, a recent MacArthur grant award winner, wrote one jazz score for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the San Diego Rep and another for Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape” at the Berkeley Rep. This weekend, Ott and the San Diego Rep will be discussing five of Roach’s ideas for a new work, which Ott describes as ranging from the classical to “off-the-street modern.”

“The expense factor is one of the reasons for co-producing shows,” Ott said, over the phone from Berkeley. “Then, too, there is the ability to work on a project more than once. We’re so limited in a traditional four-week rehearsal period. If you’re interpreting a difficult classic like ‘Lulu,’ which has a difficult or erratic production history, you have to realize that you’re not going to get everything right.

“There were such wildly divergent opinions about it, it takes a while to sort out your own. That’s one of the reasons I decided not to do it again right away. I wanted to give myself time to think about what worked and what didn’t.”

Ott is saving “Lulu” for either a late slot this season or for the first one next season. She said she does intend to replace the La Jolla Playhouse cast with the Berkeley Rep’s own repertory company. But Elizabeth Berridge, who played the starring role here, will be featured in the Berkeley Rep’s upcoming production of Craig Lucas’ “Prelude to a Kiss,” in a part that was written for her.

Berridge, a friend of Lucas’, has trouble sleeping, and that was Lucas’ inspiration for his story of a girl who has the same problem, Ott said.

Lucas has reworked his play, which premiered at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Orange County without Berridge, paring the list of characters and condensing the three acts to two.

One opinion Ott said she will not be taking into account in her reworking of “Lulu” is that of critic John Simon, who called the show “a horror” in the Aug. 22 issue of New York magazine. In that same article, Simon said he had watched the Old Globe’s “Coriolanus” “with a horrible fascination.”

“I think he went out of his way to make New York feel like they have the hippest theater in the world, and that he’s some sort of cultural (judge) saying these two shows were popular on the West Coast and they’re not good,” Ott said. “You try to understand. You try not to be upset, but it’s upsetting.”