‘The Colonel’ Rises in Rank : Alexander Zale Has Come a Long Way Since ‘The Connection’

It’s the summer of 1959, 2 days before the death of Billie Holiday. Alexander Zale, born Jamil Zakkai in Baghdad and just out of the U.S. Navy, is about to make his professional debut at the Living Theater in New York.

The play is Jack Gelber’s “The Connection.” Junkies are wandering around a dimly lit stage. They stare at the audience. They shoot up and nod off in corners. Solly, the intellectual junkie, comes out and begins his monologue: “Hello there. I’m the 19th Century now producing the 20th.”

The play is billed as a “a world premiere,” but the cast outnumbers the audience.

“I was so green that when I auditioned I didn’t even know what a junkie was,” recalls Zale, currently appearing as the Colonel in “Morocco” at South Coast Repertory. “I just went down to the Living Theater because I’d seen an audition notice. I didn’t have an inkling of what I was getting into.”

Julian Beck and Judith Malina, founders of the legendary avant-garde troupe, told him the play “was about jazz and junkies,” Zale recounts. “I said, ‘Well, jazz is interesting enough, but what’s so interesting about people who collect scrap metal?’ They just fell over. They thought that was priceless. They said, ‘You’ve got to be in this.’ Everyone cracked up. I thought drugs were something you bought at the drugstore.”

The actor, now 50ish and graying and considerably more worldly, has long since starred in ground-breaking productions from Rome to Paris to London. In New York alone his major credits are too numerous to list. (To name a few: Andrei Serban’s “Medea,” Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” “Agamemnon,” “Faust, Part I”.)

But Zale relishes the memory of his naivete during the earliest days of his career. And he is especially amused by the unpredictable nature of theatrical history.

Sitting in SCR’s Second Stage theater on a recent afternoon, he recalls that the opening night reviews of “The Connection” were rotten. For about a month the audience barely showed up. Then the fabled Kenneth Tynan, on loan to The New Yorker, came to see the play and wrote a review that turned it into an instant hit. Soon the first-string newspaper critics, back from their summer vacations, began paying their respects.

When Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times wrote a rave, “we sold out for a year in advance,” Zale recounts. “The play put off-Broadway on the map. We became the toast of New York. Everybody came. We’d see celebrities like Lauren Bacall in this dingy lttle downtown theater watching us standing around scratching ourselves. I remember one afternoon going out there and Laurence Olivier was sitting in aisle six. My heart jumped into my mouth.”

The Living Theater was not only the touchstone to Zale’s early career, it introduced him to such lifelong friends as off-Broadway director Joe Chaikin and, though they haven’t been in close touch lately, Hollywood actor Martin Sheen.

“Believe it or not, Marty was in ‘The Connection,’ ” Zale recalls. “We had a scene together where I used to slap him. I’d always be worried. Every night I’d ask him, ‘Marty, am I hitting you too hard?’ He’d say, ‘Nah, nah, don’t worry about it.’ ”

The Living Theater was also Zale’s ticket to Europe, depositing him there on two much-heralded tours during the 1960s and putting him in touch with some of the great Italian directors of the era.

Vittorio Gassman invited him into his troupe, the Teatro Popolar in Rome. (“I stayed for 2 years. It was fabulous. I was young. I learned Italian. I lived on a dollar a day.”)

Michelangelo Antonioni screen-tested him for “Eclipse.” (“He thought I was older than I was. When I walked into his room, he said, ‘Oh. you’re a baby.’ He tested me anyway--twice.”)

Federico Fellini invited him to the set of “8 1/2.” (“I might have been in that movie, if I’d played my cards right. But that’s a whole story by itself.”)

Eventually Zale did make it into pictures. But just thinking about his biggest Hollywood role to date--a heavy-handed Bulgarian killer opposite Chuck Norris in “Invasion U.S.A.”--brings a grin to his face.

“I’m half the invasion,” he recalls. “I was very deadly.”