Berkoff’s ‘Rambo’ Afterlife: A Docu-Play : Stage: The playwright-actor-director’s ‘Acapulco’ is based on his experiences filming ‘Rambo II.’ It opens today at the Odyssey.

Walking through the airy lobby of the Odyssey Theatre, Steven Berkoff looks like he is ready for a fight. Short-statured and athletic, wearing garish warm-up pants popular with bodybuilders and a sleeveless black jacket, Berkoff suggests an urban warrior looking for turf violators.

Yet as he lopes toward the theater space where his new play, “Acapulco,” opens today, the British writer-director-actor is softly solicitous of a friend who has just finished watching a rehearsal. He asks him, with a tinge of self-doubt, about the work. The friend thinks Berkoff’s staging of the play, set at an Acapulco bar and involving actors on location for “Rambo II,” is going nicely.

“I always have doubts whether or not I can pull off a show,” he says, “because I don’t work out a linear concept like other directors. As I go along, I develop the mise en scene , which is as important for me as the play. Whatever results, it won’t be like any play anyone has ever seen before.”

If theater is a battle with long odds, short engagements and small budgets, Berkoff has been a feisty, sublime combatant. Critic Jack Kroll has called him “a one-man avant-garde.” He is known as a writer of fluid, brilliant and fiery wordflows erupting lava-like out of his characters’ mouths. He also has a reputation as a director who can lend those words extreme and precise physicality. And as an actor he has been cited for his unpredictable effects and demonic force.

All of which sets him apart from other stage artists in Britain. And in America, for that matter, where he has been going through a strange, triple existence.

He considers the Los Angeles stage his American base. With good reason. “Greek” at the Matrix in 1982 was universally acclaimed. He subsequently put his own stamp on Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” at the Mark Taper Forum, Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” during the Olympic Arts Festival and “Decadence” at the old Pilot Theatre.

“Kvetch’s” engagement at the Odyssey is four years and counting. This year, “East” came to--where else?--the Odyssey (Berkoff calls it “my lab”), directed by longtime collaborator Barry Phillips.

By contrast, his New York adventures have been more precipitous: applause for his 1988 New York Shakespeare Festival version of “Coriolanus” and a “Metamorphosis” with Mikhail Baryshnikov, boos from New York critics for “Greek” and “Kvetch.”

Last, and least in Berkoff’s mind, is his Hollywood work, which he has used for his own ends in “Acapulco.” Remember the Soviet sadist who hot-wired Sylvester Stallone in “Rambo II”? Or Eddie Murphy’s art dealer nemesis in “Beverly Hills Cop”? Or the operatic portrayal of Hitler in “War and Remembrance”? All of them were Berkoff as nasty as he wants to be--or as much as movies and TV will let him be.

“The movies are very useful, for they’re my subsidies. Instead of getting money from an arts council, the film company says, ‘Here’s some money. Do a little bit and you can sit in your trailer and write your heart out.’ ” He wrote “Kvetch,” for example, in his “Beverly Hills Cop” trailer.

Berkoff calls “Acapulco” a chronicle, part-diary, part-reportage, of a time and place. It represents a new turn for a writer who has specialized in plays without sets or fixed locales, in which characters purge their souls through language.

“Whereas ‘Kvetch’ is more an interior investigation of myself,” he explains, “ ‘Acapulco’ was written as if it were a painted study of people’s moods and spirits. This is the first time I’ve based a play upon a living experience.”

Berkoff, portraying the Soviet lieutenant in “Rambo II,” went on location on Mexico’s tropical Pacific coast near Acapulco as a stand-in for Vietnam. Most of the cast stayed at the Acapulco Plaza Hotel, and communed at the hotel bar after a day’s shooting.

“I felt like a creature from another planet. In the bar area, all these people talked about nothing but discos and food and the day’s work and sex. Everything was based on primal, basic needs and emotions. I found them fascinating, charming, and I was envying their sensual needs and greeds, even though I’m more interested in concepts, in seeing Montezuma’s tomb in Mexico City. . . .”

Explains this native of London’s tough East End: “I tend to relate more to underdogs, not the stars . . . . I could have hung out with Stallone and the guys at his house watching tapes of Laker games, but I didn’t. It was more interesting to hear how these ‘ordinary folk,’ with their peers, were able to fully express themselves.”

Mentally recording the conversation, Berkoff would rush back to his hotel room and jot it down. As a play took shape, an outsider character emerged--Berkoff himself: “Because I couldn’t romanticize my own dialogue, I lifted passages from the journal I kept during my stay. Like all the dialogue in the play, nothing is invented.”

This journal has also appeared in England as a book, “Steven Berkoff’s America,” but it’s not the only preview of “Acapulco” in print. The play was published by Grove Press (with “Kvetch”) in 1987, when the Odyssey and Berkoff first tried to produce it. Each year since, “Acapulco” was announced, then canceled.

“It’s always been a long time between the writing and putting them on the stage. I wrote ‘West’ in 1979, but didn’t stage it until 1983. With ‘Acapulco,’ it was always scheduling conflicts.” The strange effect of reading a play long before its world premiere is made stranger, since, with Berkoff’s textual changes, the play in print won’t always resemble the play on stage.

Despite “Acapulco’s” attempt at what Berkoff calls “documentary theater,” he hasn’t left behind his turbulent past work. “Fifteen years ago, I wrote a short-story collection about sexuality called ‘Gross Intrusions.’ It hits on the extremes of sex, coming from an impulse to write whatever came to me. It will be reprinted, though I had wondered if it should be.

“But I realized that it should, since writing and sex have always been linked for me--sex as a metaphor of rebellion. To describe the indescribable, the stuff you couldn’t tell your best friend or loved one, but could to strangers in the theater: that was my mandate as a writer.”