Going for the Gold : Theater: Veteran film and TV actor Hal Holbrook is working overtime these days to play roles in the manner he loves best--on stage. Beginning Friday, he portrays Shylock in the Old Globe’s ‘The Merchant of Venice.’

Hal Holbrook seems to be making up for lost time in what could be called his Classical Year.

He recently played King Lear at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival, in a production that transferred to New York’s Roundabout Theatre, and he’s slated to return to Great Lakes later this year for the title role in the festival’s “Uncle Vanya.” Holbrook is filling the gap between those two major roles with a third, a modern-dress Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” opening tomorrow night at the Old Globe Theatre.

Holbrook is perhaps best known for his perennial one-man show “Mark Twain Tonight!” Since he began playing Twain as part of a two-person show with his first wife, Ruby, just after World War II, he and Twain have become close friends.

The actor soloed as Twain for the first time in 1954, and played the role off-Broadway in 1959. Twain and Holbrook landed on Broadway in 1966 and walked off with a Tony Award. He still takes Twain on the road 20 to 25 times a year, but never gets tired of the relationship. “I don’t have to do Mark Twain now,” he said. “I choose to do him because it seems to me rather stupid to give up doing something that’s been successful for so long, and which is so much fun to do.”

The Twain show has punctuated a career that includes television--including guest appearances on “Designing Women” with wife Dixie Carter--as well as films and sometimes Broadway.

Holbrook freely admits that a film and television career kept him from realizing a young actor’s goals of playing the plum roles in the classical repertoire, roles like Hamlet, Richard II and Richard III.

“I’ve just gotten to the point in my life,” said the 65-year-old actor, “when I realize I’ve passed up a lot of opportunities in the theater that I wish I hadn’t. I had a lot of dreams when I was young of doing some wonderful roles, but I haven’t done them. I’m too old to play probably even Macbeth. I’m too old to play a lot of roles in Chekhov I would have liked to have played. There are a lot of roles I’ve missed. Before I get too old for the rest of the opportunities, I’m trying to pick up on some of them.

“In the ‘70s,” he continued, “I could have played a lot of roles in the theater, and I had some opportunities. I passed them up to do some more financially lucrative stuff in California.” Lucrative it was, but it wasn’t as satisfying to this man of the theater as being on stage.

“As far as film is concerned, I’ve never had that much of a film career, just playing supporting roles here and there once in a while. Not terribly exciting. In television, I had some very exciting things going.”

There was his Emmy Award-winning series , “The Senator,” during the 1970-71 season, the landmark 1972 television movie “That Certain Summer,” about a homosexual father, for which he was also Emmy-nominated. He won an Emmy for “Pueblo,” and a third Emmy for his monumental “Sandburg’s Lincoln” miniseries and was nominated again for “Our Town” in 1977. The list of achievements is impressive, but lingering behind it all was that yearning for the stage, the live audience.

“After it was too late,” he admits, “I began to realize I’d given up something that I’d dreamed of when I was young. I’d given up opportunities that would have paid me less, but probably would have given me a bigger sense of self-worth. The difference between acting on the stage and acting in films is enormous. You can use your whole self on stage. Some actors are suited for the stage. I am a man who was suited for the stage; I always was. I’m more effective, in my own feeling, on the stage.

“I mean, nobody’s going to cast me for Shylock in the movies, I don’t look it. Here I can spend a couple of hours disguising myself, and, if I’m good enough as an actor, you won’t know who the hell I am on stage.”

Of course, there’s more to the disguise than just makeup. There’s also the hard hours building the character, and the extensive research required for the fulfillment of a role of this stature.

The one thing Holbrook isn’t interested in is joining in the age-old debate over the character of Shylock himself and the complaint of anti-Semitism. “All I’m interested in doing is finding out what play Mr. Shakespeare wrote, and to try to do it as truthfully and as well as we can. The fact of the matter is that the play is not about Shylock, it’s about other people, too. Shylock is not at the center of the play, and the play is not about race prejudice. It’s about money and family and love, and giving and taking. It is not a play about a Jew.”

Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien agrees, but as the director of this production of “The Merchant of Venice” he has to address the issue on a broader, public relations basis. “I’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind,” O’Brien states emphatically, “not to be sensitive to it. I do understand why Jewish patrons are nervous about it, and why they often don’t relish seeing it. One can’t apologize for the fact that this is a very tough character, but one also doesn’t apologize for the fact that it’s one of the greatest characterizations ever written. It ranks with Richard III, and any of the great, complicated darker characters, and they’re much more fascinating than, say, Brutus in ‘Julius Caesar,’ which is one hell of a dull part, no matter what his religious proclivity may be.”

Before beginning production on the play, O’Brien met with local Jewish leaders and members of the Jewish Defense League, “to assure them that we had no hidden agenda, that we’re not blindly or irresponsibly going forward with this, that we’ve given it all due consideration. I don’t mean that the character of Shylock can be made cozy to a Jewish audience, but at least it cannot be overly demeaning to them”

O’Brien’s modern dress staging, he feels, allows “the whole bigotry-racial thing to take a back seat to the pervasive decadence of the entire society.” And that is also what makes “Merchant” so pertinent to today, “as if Shylock were a Rothschild. And that puts the play’s whole banter into a far more distastefully bitchy tenor, rather than vicious. It’s like terribly, terribly sophisticated cocktail talk of the worst kind.”

O’Brien laughs at a suggestion that the merchant Antonio and the moneylender Shylock might suddenly sound like a Standard Oil executive discussing a deal with an oil magnate.

“Our lives are very much surrounded by these kinds of icons,” O’Brien continues, “and, frankly, this kind of deal negotiating. So it has an inescapable relevance for our audience. Moving it to today doesn’t take away from the incredible intensity and, if anything, it illuminates it. The play is incredibly sophisticated, and these people are very powerful people. These are images that we deal with every day of our lives, they’re not fairy tale images at all.”

Finally, it’s what’s inside the play that fascinates both director and actor, and what the play can teach us about our own time. Neither one has the time to worry much about Shylock’s reputation, particularly Holbrook.

“The outlines of Shylock’s character,” Holbrook says, “are crudely drawn. But the insides of the character are very human and very complex, and that’s the excitement about trying to play this part. I couldn’t sit down and try to do this part worrying about whether people were going to come at me with brickbats. I don’t care. It requires courage to do any one of these great Shakespearean roles, and I have the courage to do it, and that’s what I’m going to do.

“You have to have your juices flowing, and your tensions winding up to do theater. You’re required to have an active mind to do this kind of material. Most of the stuff you do in Hollywood doesn’t require that much mental gymnastics, but to deal with major literature like this you’ve got to really use your head.”

* “The Merchant of Venice” plays at the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre at the Old Globe in Balboa Park, Friday through Aug. 11. For information and reservations, call 239-2255.