It’s No Accident When Bean Makes Work Easy : Stage: With world travel, many stage and TV performances and two marriages behind him, Bean finds fun in Fo’s political satire.

“I made a decision a few years back to never again do anything professionally that I didn’t want to do,” announced Orson Bean. “And I’ve stuck to that. I turned down a TV show (“MacGyver”) for a lot of dough ‘cause I wanted to do this play.”

“This play” is Dario Fo’s political satire, “Accidental Death of an Anarchist,” currently at the Odyssey Theatre under the direction of Ron Sossi. In it, Bean plays an enigmatic professional fraud, whose past “covers” have included a dentist and college professor. Now under arrest, he learns that there’s an internal police inquiry going on in the jail where he’s being held--and decides to impersonate the investigating judge.

“I’m having the time of my life,” grinned the actor, lean and dapper at 61. “I don’t want to go home when (the show) is over. Sure, it’s work--but it feels like fun. It was much harder 40 years ago. I used to get nervous then. Now, I’ve learned not to make things a problem. I mean, acting is so easy! I love it and I’m good at it. I’m better at it than I was when it was hard. That comes from being 61 years old, and from doing it a lot. Anything that’s done correctly is easy. Not just looks easy, is easy.”

The fact that Bean (whose past Odyssey appearances include “Symmes’ Hole” last May and “Hess” in 1984) isn’t making a lot of money doing stage work doesn’t faze him at all.

“It’s wrong to make a living off the theater,” he said firmly. “Theater should be supported, like redwood trees. You should make your living--whether you’re a writer or an actor or a director--in movies or commercials. But you do theater out of love. You can always make a living doing the other stuff. I make more than a handsome living doing voices for commercials; I hear myself all day on the tube. Lately, I’m selling Jeep Eagles and Diet 7-Up and Samsonite luggage and La-Z-Boy recliners . . . .

“Money is only a problem for those people who decide it’s a problem,” he insisted. “A couple of years ago, I was living in the Palisades, and there was a huge fire that came within three houses of us. When the firemen came to evacuate us, my kids were saying, ‘What about my TV set? What about my phonograph?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, I can spring for a new phonograph.’ ‘What if the house burns down?’ I said, ‘I don’t know--maybe we’ll pitch a tent on the beach and live there.’ They said, ‘Oooh, can we?’ ”

He smiled. “Once I understood it was all in the attitude, I stopped worrying about making a living. And the phone always rings--as it always has. I always get a job, as I always have. The only thing that’s left out is the worrying about it. And you know, indifference is a great aphrodisiac. If you’re not needy, you get. If you’re overly anxious to have a love relationship, the women stay away in droves . If you’re genuinely indifferent, they’ll follow you anywhere.”

As for him, after two marriages, the actor is currently--happily--without a mate. One of his four children lives with him full-time, another part-time at his Venice home. “Over a period of 25 years, I was daddy-husband-provider-protector,” he explained. “And when (the second marriage ended), it was agony. But little by little, I’ve come to see the joy of it: at 3 in the afternoon, being able to say, ‘I’m going to the movies’--and I don’t have to ask anybody.”

Bean’s independence from marital ties is a far cry from the late ‘60s, when he packed up his brood and went to Australia. “I turned 40 and ran away from home,” he said lightly. “I had a lot of money in the bank and I just spent it.” After 1 1/2 years, “I came back, pierced my ear, grew a beard, bought an old van, threw the kids in the back, and we lived like hippies for three years.” (This period also included experimentation with LSD, one of many darker adventures chronicled in his 1988 autobiography “Too Much Is Not Enough”).

Bean also was well known in the ‘70s for promoting psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich’s self-healing theories of the “orgone box” on talk shows and in a book. “As far as it goes, it’s wonderful,” said Bean. “(Reich) was an absolute genius, though absolutely bananas. I still hold him in high regard. I don’t practice, but I do things I learned in therapy, exercises to take anxiety and fear away. I did it for three years, and it’s over with.”

Born in Vermont and reared in Cambridge, Mass., Bean (ne Dallas Frederick Burrows) began as a magician, then a stand-up comedian, then an actor. In his 20 years on Broadway (“In the days when you could go from one show to another”), his starring vehicles included “Subways Are for Sleeping” and “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?”

“I enjoyed it,” Bean acknowledged of the success. “But I never took it seriously. I made up my mind I was going to walk that thin line between fame and oblivion. The only real benefit of being famous is being recognized by head waiters and getting good tables at restaurants. The rest is part ego trip and part inconvenience. But sure, I love going to Sardi’s and seeing if my picture’s still up--it is--or when people come up and say, ‘I saw you in such and such . . .’

“Of course, (adulation) is one of the reasons you start doing this. It’s why I stood up in grammar school, made faces and wrote filthy things on the blackboard. But once you get past that, the actual craft is there--and that becomes the fun. One day, I made a conscious decision to retire my ego: gave it a gold watch, thanked it for many years of service and told it I didn’t need it anymore. Oh, it still comes around once in awhile, looking to do something. I have to remind it that it doesn’t live here anymore.”