THEATER IN LAGUNA / THE OLD AND THE NEW : Playhouse’s Artistic Chief Bows Out of Part : Douglas Rowe wants to get in front of the camera. He closes his quarter-century tenure at the close-knit theater with a tale of personal gravity.

If he’d had his druthers, Douglas Rowe would have directed a production that employed a vast ensemble of actors for his swan song at Laguna Playhouse.

“I would have liked to have done a huge-cast show so I could have (worked with) all my friends one last time,” said the outgoing artistic director who will retire June 30 after a quarter-century’s association with the closely knit institution.

As it turned out, Rowe announced his retirement after his final directing project--which has a cast of three--was scheduled. “Painting Churches” by Tina Howe nonetheless strikes a personal chord, Rowe said in a recent interview.

A key player in Orange County theater during his Playhouse tenure, Rowe, 52, plans to pursue his professional acting career and play-writing. Gnawing on a plastic swizzle stick in his sunny, unimposing office, he discussed his impending departure, future plans and his approach to Howe’s drama, which opens today and runs through Feb. 10.

In the play, Mags, a thirtysomething artist, returns to her childhood home in Boston to paint a portrait of her aging parents.

Six years before his own father died, Rowe went to Florida to spend a week photographing him.

“He was a fisherman and I did lots of (shots) against the sun--sunrises and sunsets,” said Rowe, a warm, ingenuous man, dressed casually, as usual, in comfortable pants, sturdy shoes and a plaid flannel shirt. “The picture that finally came out is gorgeous and it really does epitomize my dad.”

The experience, he continued, helped him understand “the joys and frustrations” of Howe’s characters, her “poignant study of a parent-child relationship.”

“The play is about (Mags’) one last effort to straighten out any kinks that may have developed between them,” Rowe said, and about her effort to have her parents see her as she really is.

Mags’ father, Gardner, is a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet whose portrait already hangs in the National Gallery of Art. Her mother Fanny is a “wildly extravagant, kookie woman,” in stark contrast to her daughter, an only child who prefers the anonymity of the canvas and has “held in check her desires to be extroverted.”

But in the play, “we see Mags at an absolute turning point in her career. She has a wonderful (art exhibit) coming up in New York and she’s just put red highlights in her hair and I get the sense she’s on the springboard to fully realizing herself. I think she’d like to do that with her parents rather than as a result of their death,” Rowe said.

“The end is tremendously uplifting. If you work at a relationship, you can ultimately feel comfortable with it. I think the most important thing about our lives is how we interact with people.”

Some critics have said the quality of Howe’s writing in “Painting Churches” is spotty, and Rowe concedes the play is “stronger in some places than in others.”

“But wherever it counts, it’s wonderful. It’s quite poetic and put together with a great deal of craft,” he said.

Rowe cast his wife, Catherine, as Mags, both of whom are in their “early to mid-30s,” he said. She will alternate with Jacquie Moffett, a Playhouse veteran who is about 10 years older than the character she’ll portray, Rowe said. He doesn’t expect the age difference to be a problem.

“I don’t think it matters. You can go through the same confrontation when you’re 30 or whenever.”

Managing director of the 70-year-old Playhouse from 1964 to 1966 and artistic director since 1976, Rowe directed his first play at a Massachusetts high school where, fresh out of college, he was teaching English and drama.

In 1962, with his first community theater directing credit under his belt, he moved to Hollywood and soon began appearing regularly at the Playhouse, the county’s oldest and largest community theater. Not long after, the managing director post opened up.

“By that point, I had many good, good friends in Laguna Beach and always adored Laguna as a town,” Rowe said. “So I applied for the job and I must confess, I gave a much more grandiose resume in terms of (my) directing . . . but I got the job.”

In the ensuing years, Rowe directed live theater and acted on stage and television, here, in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. During the past 15 years, though, he said his acting has taken a back seat to his family as well as to the care and feeding of the growing Playhouse, to which he has seemed to be profoundly committed, emotionally and professionally.

Recently, however, he has spent more time in front of the camera (in part possible because he was relieved of some administrative duties with last year’s hiring of Richard A. Stein as executive director), inspired by the muse that finally persuaded him to leave the Playhouse.

“You invest so much of yourself for such a long time, that you start wondering, ‘Have I not been faithful to my own talent?’ . . . There’s something in me that’s always gnawed at me about my acting.”

Sounding deeply bittersweet about his departure, Rowe said he’ll most miss the family atmosphere of the largely volunteer-run organization.

“I’ve always felt this was a theater that attracted remarkably talented and tremendously loving people and they’ve for the most part immersed themselves in the theater. That’s why it’s lasted so long.”

Rowe plans to continue living in Laguna Beach, saying he’s prepared to commute to Hollywood. As for the work he’ll find there, he said he’s been cast in a substantial part in an NBC TV movie to begin shooting later this month and is up for a role in a film by Lawrence Kasdan (“The Big Chill”). He’s also scheduled to appear Wednesday in “Deadly Desire,” a television movie on the USA Network cable channel.

He volunteered a contingency plan should his new venture fail, seemingly content with the idea of returning to the sort of lifestyle he grew up with, filled with weekends spent fishing with his father.

“If it doesn’t work out, the family will probably move to Oregon or Washington and I’ll look for another teaching job. Southern California is a bloody desert and I’m a woods person. . . . I’ve got two boys, 5 and 7, and the last thing I want them doing is growing up in L.A.”

Though Playhouse officials had discussed giving Rowe a paid position as artistic director emeritus, he ruled out the idea.

His replacement, to be chosen from among 130 applicants, should be announced “within the next month,” he said, “and that person doesn’t need me sitting at his or her shoulder.”

A return as chief of the seaside theater is also out of the question.

“If (the new artistic director) has a career anything like mine and he or she is here for 30 years, I won’t be alive by the time he leaves,” Rowe said, laughing, then adding soberly: “I just hope they find someone who is willing to spend a portion of his life here.

“The theater can’t afford, every two or three years, to be replacing its leadership--financially or spiritually. If they do that, they’ll lose their volunteers, and if you’ve lost the volunteers, you’ve lost the heart and soul of the theater.”

The Laguna Playhouse production of Tina Howe’s “Painting Churches” runs today through Feb. 10 at the Moulton Theatre, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Show times: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; matinees at 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 27, Feb. 3 and 10. Tickets $13 to $18. Information: (714) 494-8021.