Paton Gets Focused

“My mind got so stimulated!” says actress Angela Paton of creating four characters at once for “50/60 Vision,” 13 plays in repertory at The Mark Taper Forum. “I was constantly having to focus my mind in the right direction.”

Paton appears in “The American Dream” and “The Sandbox,” both by Edward Albee, and in Harold Pinter’s “A Slight Ache”; her off-stage voice pervades “Eh Joe” by Samuel Beckett.

“I’d be thinking of something from ‘Eh Joe,’ ” says the actress, “And I’d say, ‘No, no, no! I’m supposed to be thinking about ‘The Sandbox.’ So I’d think about ‘Sandbox’ and then a great idea would come in for ‘A Slight Ache’!”

Luckily, there are links between characters; between Flora and Mrs. Barker and the Voice and Mommy.

“Basically, all the characters are asking,” says Paton, “ ‘What does it all mean?’ That’s the question that’s pretty important to people.”

Paton, who was born in Brooklyn, has been an actress since she was 16 years old; she’s the mother of three children and a theater--she founded the Berkeley Stage Company in 1974 and ran it for 10 years.

Since relocating to Los Angeles four years ago, Paton has done Chekhov at the Los Angeles Theater Center, and Shakespeare at the South Coast Repertory. She’s featured with Winona Ryder in the upcoming film “Welcome Home, Roxie Carmichael.” And she’s done spots on TV series such as “The Wonder Years” and “thirtysomething.”

“I’m trying to get into the television-movie thing,” Paton says. “They tend to cast the known person, the name. It’s a hard cycle to break. I’m just beginning to now.”

In the meantime, Paton calls her run at the Taper “a dream.”

“These plays are really little classics. They’re little gems of genius. They’re mysterious. It’s like trying to discover the answer to being. You think you have the answer and then, it slips away.”