Writer and Star of ‘The Scoundrel’ Is Himself a Ben Jonson Figure

Gregory Mortensen, the playwright, cast a pitying eye on Gregory Mortensen, the actor. He had just agreed to take over the lead in “The Scoundrel”--his adaptation of Ben Jonson’s “The Alchemist”--with just seven days to rehearse for tonight’s premiere at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove.

“The irony is that when I was writing the thing,” he said, “I kept thinking, ‘Some poor bastard is going to have to memorize all these lines.’ Well, now it’s me, and it feels like I’m about to give birth.”

Mortensen, sitting in the theater’s VIP room last week on the day of his first rehearsal, actually looked more comfortable than he felt. His big, athletic frame was folded neatly into a high-backed chair, and he spoke with brisk energy. If anything, he seemed eager “to get down to cases,” wasting little real sympathy on himself and none at all on the New York actor he had been asked to replace because of a casting miscalculation.

“The Scoundrel” is an updated burlesque of Jonson’s 1610 satire on avarice, which revolved around a charlatan who dupes the gullible into believing that he has the power to transform other metals into gold. More to the point, he exploits their egregious cupidity with a practiced eye for overweening phonies.

“What Jonson focused on, and what I’ve kept,” Mortensen said, “is that greed is universal. It does not change. Only the names and the faces and the places change.”

Set in 1852 in San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush, “The Scoundrel” centers on an itinerant theatrical troupe led by Dr. Aladice T. Smooth, who claims to have rediscovered the ancient alchemist’s art.

Smooth teams up to fleece the town with the unregenerate con artist Lucien Marmott and Cassie Spooner, a prostitute who owes as much to “Gunsmoke’s” Miss Kitty as to “The Alchemist’s” Doll Common.

“If Jonson were to rise from the dead and sit in the house, he’d recognize a good 40% of the play,” Mortensen said. “The doctor’s hook, if you will, is this: Rather than risk life and limb in the dangerous gold camps of the upper Sierra, you can get rich right here.”

Because Jonson’s Elizabethan caricatures of dupes and frauds do not travel easily across the centuries--unlike Shakespeare’s realistic characters--Mortensen has transformed them into familiar types of the Reagan ‘80s: dishonest lawyers, dubious businessmen, unscrupulous evangelists, compulsive gamblers. All of them are skewered for various deadly sins, he said, “but the common denominator is greed.”

“There’s also a lot of direct address to the house and a lot of asides,” Mortensen added. “Jonson was a big fan of the aside, much more than Shakespeare. I want a light bulb to go on in people’s heads. This is a play that may make people laugh. But afterward they may go, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Was that addressed to me?’ ”

It is not the first time somebody has rewritten Jonson. Larry Gelbart did it in 1976 when he based “Sly Fox”--a Broadway comedy that Mortensen saw and loved--on the 1606 “Volpone.” In fact, the actor-writer’s adoration of anything Jonsonian makes him sound like a latter-day member of the “sons of Ben,” a coterie of 17th-Century poets who lionized the self-made Elizabethan dramatist in his bibulous, old age.

“Here’s a bricklayer’s stepson who didn’t want to be a bricklayer for the rest of his life, so he got himself educated,” Mortensen said. “He decided to be a soldier of fortune. Went to the Netherlands. Fought the Spaniards. Said ‘The hell with it.’ Walked out on the battlefield in front of both armies waving a white rag. Said ‘C’mon, I’ll take on any one of you Spaniards.’ Killed him. Stripped him of his armor. Said,’ ‘Bye, I’m leaving.’

“Then he went back to England. Got his degree in letters. Set up a theater company. Killed one of his actors in a duel. An argument over a play. Was put on trial for murder and pleaded clemency by right of clergy. Said, ‘I’m an educated man’ and got off. He was his own attorney. All they did was brand him on his thumb.

“This guy was the John Huston of his day. A real roustabout bohemian.”

Mortensen’s background also has a certain flair. Raised in Los Gatos near San Jose, he is a fourth-generation Californian whose father “rode with the Hells Angels as an undercover narcotics detective” and made sure to send him to a school run by Jesuit priests.

“I didn’t last,” recalled Mortensen, 34. “They said question everything, but just don’t question us. So one day they asked us to write about absolutes. I wrote that the only absolutes were Zen and physics. That got their attention. They eventually gave me the option to leave, which I took.”

After high school, where he was “a drama jock,” he went to San Jose State University, joined the California Actors Theater as an apprentice and appeared in some Shakespeare at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

“What I found out were my professional limitations,” he recalled.

He auditioned for the Juilliard School Drama Division in New York, which accepted him in a two-year advanced program “to my surprise.” Then he put in stints on and off Broadway, followed in 1983 by a year as a contract player at the Denver Theatre Center.

Mortensen, who is married to a casting director, now makes his base in Hollywood, where he has landed a steady flow of guest shots on TV shows such as “Remington Steele,” “The Deliberate Stranger” (the miniseries about killer Ted Bundy), “General Hospital” (the soap), the upcoming series “Hard Time on Planet Earth” and a movie role in “Hollywood Chaos” (out about Christmas).

Since 1986, Mortensen has also become a regular at the Grove Shakespeare Festival, playing Prince Hal in “Henry IV (Part I),” Marc Antony in “Julius Caesar,” Bolingbroke in “Richard II” and Edgar in “King Lear.”

In the meantime, he has kept up a writing career. His first play--”How It All Began”--was written with Des McAnuff, artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, about the German Baader/Meinhoff terrorists of the ‘70s. Joseph Papp produced it in 1981 at the Public Theater in New York.

Mortensen is collaborating with New Yorker Byam Stevens on “A Nation’s Trial,” a Civil War trilogy based on a trove of daguerreotype photos taken at the Battle of Antietam. The middle segment, entitled “Hold Outs,” was staged in 1987 at the Company of Angeles one-act play festival. They also have two screenplays in the works: “Seeing Red,” about espionage in Silicon Valley, and an untitled project about outlaw John Wesley Harding.

Yet Mortensen would drop everything “to do what I really want if I had the money,” he said, “and that is to set up a nice troupe of actors in, say, Capitola or Monterey.

“I equate a lot of what goes on in ‘The Scoundrel’ with what goes on in Los Angeles,” he added. “Everybody is hoping to hit that vein and strike it rich. But so much of this business is baloney.

“The best piece of advice I ever got came from an old actor who told me, ‘Listen, kid, if you ever become a star, just remember one thing: A star is nothing but a burning ball of gas.’ ”

Jonson, he noted, would have agreed.

The Grove Shakespeare Festival presents “The Scoundrel” by Gregory Mortensen through Nov. 4 at the Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Curtain: 8 p.m. today and Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday; 8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday. Tickets: $16 to $20. Information: (714) 636-7213.