For the Actors, It’s an Interesting Exercise : Media: ‘Holy Days’ cast members--who are re-creating their stage roles for the film--debate the merits of film and theater acting.

Actors love to talk about the differences between working in theater and film, but few get to compare the experiences so directly as the cast members of “Holy Days,” which is carrying roles they lived with and developed for weeks on stage through to the movie being made here.

Because all four actors, and director Martin Benson, knew the play intimately before shooting began, and since the changes for the film have been primarily visual, “the opportunity for refinement is incredible here,” producer and cinematographer Don Hamilton said of the performances.

But for SCR founding member Richard Doyle, who has done more film and television work than the other three cast members, the biggest difference between stage and screen is control.

“Strictly from an acting point of view, I prefer theater,” Doyle said. “In theater, you control the art; in film, the director and the cinematographer and the editor control it. On stage, I could control (his character’s) emotional development with a subtle progression. Here, we’re working with such small increments that (it’s) out of my hands. I just supply the raw material.”

On the other hand, he said, having “all the craft people around”--set designers, prop personnel, costume makers, etc.--contributes to “more of a sense of family than you get in theater, where the set people come in an build the set and they’re gone.”

There’s another reason he relishes this screen role, Doyle said: More often than not, when plays turn into major-studio films, stage performers are replaced by stars with built-in box-office appeal. (Doyle noted that in the coming movie version of Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer have been cast in the roles he and Karen Hensel played at SCR in 1989.

(“It will be interesting to see what those two will do,” Doyle said. “I’m not so sure in film that I would have been able to re-create what Karen and I had on stage. But,” he added with a laugh, “that’s not to say I wouldn’t have liked to take a shot at it.”)

Devon Raymond, who has appeared in three plays at SCR and in one major-studio film, “Singles,” said that working on the screen version of “Holy Days” was hardly “Warner Bros., (where they are) taking care of you every five seconds, but there’s a lot of freedom, and that’s even better.

“We had a scene the other night that had always worked on stage, but it suddenly came alive here,” she said. “That was because we were able to take our time and not worry about audience.”

John Linton said he is eager to see the way each character’s soliloquies come out on film. In the play, these monologues were simply delivered from the kitchen set directly to the audience. For the film, at playwright Sally Nemeth’s suggestion, they have been shot in a barley field to give them a more surrealistic tone.

“This will be more dreamlike than on stage; it should be an interesting contrast with the grimness of the dust-caked house,” Linton said.

Stage-to-screen issues also affect the technical crew. Set designer John Iacovelli, who has worked in television and film (he was production designer of “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”), recalls that “even when we were in the design process for the play, I said if we were to do a film of this, I wouldn’t have the stove next to the back door next to the sink.

“Here,” he said with a grin, “I had the luxury of making more sense.”