‘Better Days’ May Mean Gregg Henry’s Tough Times Are Over

Imagine you had a fruitful career acting in film and TV. You help start a theater company. You manage to get the company a building to play in regularly. Your shows even manage to get terrific reviews. At this point, everything you’ve heard about the fickle, fly-by-night L.A. theater scene is wrong.

Only it’s too good to be true. You lose your theater when rents skyrocket. Your company’s membership has exploded from one to five dozen, but where to take them? You wander from theater to theater, with a show here, a show there. Productivity drops; so does membership. Even the plays you want to do can’t be done, for endless reasons.

You might start thinking of that fruitful career in film and TV.

Or, you adapt.

Gregg Henry’s story is one of sweet adaptation. Sure, his L.A. Theatre Unit is a shell of its former glorious self. Yes, he’s still kicking around in tiny weather-beaten theaters, sweating to get a show on.

But, with his wife, Lisa James, directing, with the couple’s (and partner Linda Bernstein’s) Appian Way Productions as the money source, and with the Cast Theatre as a host and co-producer, Henry is getting his show on, the way he wants it.

Even sweeter, the play is one he has dearly wanted to do for years, but which until now was frustratingly out of reach: Richard Dresser’s macabre black comedy, “Better Days.”

Sweeter still, James received an outstanding direction award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle and Henry was nominated for outstanding featured performance in Appian Way’s staging of “Palladium Is Moving,” which was also nominated for outstanding production.

But when he thinks about the precarious merry-go-round he and his fellow theatrical nomads have endured, Henry slouches forward a little in a chair in the Cast’s lobby and rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, it’s rough.”

Not nearly as rough, though, as what Dresser’s people go through in “Better Days.” For those who know Dresser only from “The Downside,” his popular, lighter-than-air comedy staged in late 1989 at the Pasadena Playhouse, “Better Days” (written in 1985) is a rude shock to the system.

“This is a much tougher and, I think, funnier play,” says Henry, who retains the blond, boyish appearance that first made a public impact in 1976, when he starred as Nick Nolte’s son in the TV sequel series “Rich Man, Poor Man--Book II.”

“Dresser is looking at blue-collar factory workers in a dying mill town near Lowell, Mass. They’re out of work, searching for hope in their lives, and the guy I play, Ray, hears the voice of God. From this, he’s inspired to found the True Value Church.

“He’s got,” Henry adds, “a couple of screws wobblin’ around in his brain.”

But instead of being a play about religious frenzy, “Better Days” serves up a furiously anarchistic America being ripped apart by packs of wild dogs roaming the streets and shadowy arson syndicates torching cars, then buildings, then whole towns. It’s the worst case, to put it mildly, of what happens when an industrial community gets lost on the way to postindustrial life.

“When Rick wrote this in the mid-’80s, the play was prophetic. Now, it’s more, well, factual. At least as far as the havoc the Reagan years have brought upon a lot of towns out there.”

Consistent with so many other plays staged by L.A. Theatre Unit and Appian Way, “Better Days” suggests an outrageous, theatrically exaggerated version of the “real America,” a stage style perhaps closer to underground comics’ schismatic mood of humor and doom than anything like the Theater of the Absurd.

“To be honest,” notes the actor-producer, “I’m not really crazy about absurdist plays like those of Ionesco, which seem to me to be absurd for their own sake.” Henry adds that many of the younger playwrights his companies have staged--such as Daniel Therriault (“Battery,” “The White Death”) and Michael Wolk (“Femme Fatale,” “Heartstopper”) are, ironically, “more aware of the Absurdists than I am.

“If I have a philosophy as a producer, it’s that I like my theater to be bold and stylish. I have more of an amalgam of tastes, really, than coming from a certain school of thought. It’s often inexplicable what attracts me to a script. And if they have something to say, then all the better.”

For Henry, “Palladium Is Moving,” set in a “boiler room” where phone salesmen snare customers into phony precious metals deals, “spoke to the collapse of business values in this country. ‘The White Death,’ on the other hand, looked at what happens to the Hawaiian paradise when it’s invaded and oppressed by tourism.”

He’s willing to admit that finding a strong role for himself is also a factor when deciding on a play. “If the play is right, though, and there’s no part for me, we’ll still do the play. We have a few like those in our sights right now. (He won’t discuss titles.) If there is a role for me, hopefully it’s dramatically opposed to what I just did.”

“Gregg is a real chameleon,” says Joe Spano, who played opposite Henry in last year’s South Coast Repertory staging of David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow.” “He has the ability to combine menace and strength with comedy, which gives his comic approach a real intelligence.”

But Henry insists that a good deal of that intelligence is inspired by his wife. “For Lisa, the play has to be a real directing challenge. She really continues to amaze me. Just look at ‘Heartstopper’: She has to squeeze 17 New York City locales onto a small stage while still giving it a cinematic sweep with bold, comic strokes. And she does it not just well, but superbly,” he says.

Think of them as movies on stage (fittingly, “Palladium” has been optioned as a feature film). In fact, Henry the actor has been in more stage “movies” than actual movies you can remember (one memorable exception was his blood-curdling turn in Brian DePalma’s “Body Double”). TV has never offered him the kind of juicy, crazy-quilt characters that he has explored in such productions as “Speed-the-Plow.”

Yet, as the fitful fate of L.A. Theatre Unit suggests, maintaining continuity as a theater artist can verge on the quixotic. After the Unit left its original downtown home at the Embassy Hotel and set up shows at Theater/Theatre, 2nd Stage, the Eagle Theatre, the Wallenboyd Theatre and other spaces, only to see membership drop from 60 to 12, Henry, James and Bernstein saw the future on Appian Way. (Their company is named for Henry’s and James’ residential street.)

“The Unit still exists, and we use the artists in the group--such as most of the ‘Better Days’ cast. But--how do I put this gently?--the constraints of working with so many people in the Unit became really difficult after a while.

“A membership company like L.A.T.U. is tough, since everyone wants to run it as a democracy. Yet you need to do what you can to get the work on. Everyone understandably wants to be in the show, but that’s impossible.”

Maybe, as Henry describes it, theater people today aren’t that removed from the wanderlust players in commedia dell’arte , the tradition Henry was so drawn to as a learning actor with Seattle’s Empty Space in the early 1970s.

“Being with any group is like a band: It’s nice for a while, then priorities change, and people feel they have to go their own ways.”

“Better Days” plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays at the Cast Theatre, 804 N. El Centro Ave., in Hollywood, through April 21. Tickets: $15. Information: (213) 462-0265.