Answering the Call : Actor Sees Himself as Perfect Choice for ‘Elmer Gantry’

It may seem incongruous for a Jewish actor from the small town of Hamilton, Tex., to be playing a big-time evangelist preacher, but Mark Harelik, who stars in “Elmer Gantry,” produced by the La Jolla Playhouse, thinks the casting is perfect.

Gantry, he points out, is selling God. If Gantry conveys deep feeling for what he sells, it is because his feeling for God is inseparable from his nostalgia for his childhood--a nostalgia Harelik shares.

“I grew up in a Southern Baptist community, and, although I didn’t go to church three days a week, I feel like I did because that was the world of my friends. Sinclair Lewis has Elmer coming from Kansas, but there are a lot of common denominators in small, rural, Christian-oriented Bible Belt communities. Elmer could have come from the town I did.”

“My feeling for the religion is articulate but superficial, and I think that’s perfect for Elmer. If I were a zealous Christian, I’m not sure I could play this role. Maybe Elmer should be played by someone Jewish,” he said with a laugh.

Still, Harelik, who delivers a magnetic, powerful performance at the Mandell Weiss Theatre, where the musical plays through Nov. 24, does seem like Gantry’s opposite.

Unlike the slick, dapper preacher, Harelik, 40, drove to an interview on a motorcycle, dressed in torn jeans, with a red bandanna wrapped around his head (and no helmet). More soft-spoken and thoughtful than forceful, this onetime anti-Vietnam War demonstrator just shrugs when asked if he has talked with anyone in San Diego about producing the two plays he has written: “The Immigrant” and “Lost Highway: The Music and Legend of Hank Williams,” which he co-wrote with Randall Myler.

“I’m not a salesman despite the part I play. I don’t push myself even as an actor,” he said.

But he does acknowledge that the first time he heard that the Playhouse was going to produce Gantry, he wanted the part even before he saw the script.

Part of the attraction was the chance to return to the Playhouse, where he starred last year with Lynn Redgrave in an acclaimed production of “The Cherry Orchard.” Another draw was Des McAnuff, artistic director of the Playhouse, who is directing “Gantry.” Then there was the book itself.

“When they announced (Elmer Gantry) in the season quite some time ago, I called them and told them I was interested. I was strongly affected by the novel. It’s a major indictment of the people we choose as our moral leaders. It’s a picture of what some will do to get to the peak of political moral leadership.

“These men don’t reach positions of great power--a following of hundreds of thousands and major fund-raising organizations and the close camaraderie of presidents and congressmen--without having driving ambition. And ambition is not a spiritual quality. Sinclair Lewis was demonstrating how, on ambition alone, with an empty heart, a person can achieve a role of spiritual leadership.”

And yet, he said, he likes the guy.

“The character is irresistible. I think Elmer is a universal person. If anyone can look at Elmer and say I have never experienced those feelings, they are lying idiots. He feels he is worth more than where he is and what he is, and no one is fighting for him, he is fighting for himself. He feels he’s alone so there’s no one he can communicate with. He knows what his talents are, and he uses them to help himself up. His scruples are nonexistent, and he gladly manipulates and uses other people. I can’t say that I like that, but I understand it very well. I have sympathy for that kind of man.”

Harelik doesn’t consider himself a writer, despite his two plays, but he does care deeply about good writing. The only criticism he expresses about this production is that it is not more like the book. In focusing on the love story between Gantry and evangelist Sharon Scruggs, it is more like “a short story from the novel,” he said.

And, although he may not see himself as a writer, he is working on a pilot for NBC about a contemporary family of Texas Jews in a fictitious town not unlike his hometown. Hamilton is also the setting for “The Immigrant,” his play based on the life of his grandfather, Haskell Harelik, a Russian immigrant and the first Jew to settle in tiny Hamilton in 1909.

The actor’s grandfather died just four years ago, and he remembers him as an extremely humble man who would have been bewildered at anyone being interested in his life story. Yet, the young Harelik admired him as a man “who started a family against immeasurable odds.”

Harelik used real names, real places and his family’s own photo album in his intimate portrait of one man’s vision and his struggle to survive as a peddler, a stranger in a strange land. Harelik played his own grandfather in the work’s debut at the Denver Theatre Center in 1985 and again at the Mark Taper Forum in 1986.

Harelik moved to California in 1973 to pursue an acting career at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria and has since worked at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, Denver Center Theatre Company (the company that first staged his plays and that he credits for his development as a writer), and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, which also staged both his plays.

But he has always kept up on news of Hamilton: He still receives the Hamilton Herald-News every Thursday.

His upbringing as a member of the only Jewish family in town prepared him for a life in the theater, he said.

“I was always bearing the status of an observer and not necessarily a participant or an observing participant. It was like the Jewish world and the Christian world were college classes that I was constantly auditing. I never got credits toward a degree. But I gained a lot of knowledge and experience, deep emotional attachments and an interesting kind of pantheistic appreciation of both worlds.”

Hamilton also gave him insight into the source of Gantry’s power over the masses.

“Texas is sometimes referred to as the buckle of the Bible Belt. The church life and church social orientation is the predominant fabric of life there. There’s no skepticism. One of the popular bumper stickers is ‘God said it, I believe it and that settles it.’ And that makes life easy for an evangelist. The simpler and more trusting the faith, the more manipulative they can be.”

Harelik confesses that the sermons he has to give are so powerful that sometimes even he is swept up by their power.

“There is an emotional impact to challenging these people to admit when was the last time they told their children they loved them and an emotional import to exhorting them to remember that Christ came all the way down from glory so they can be reconciled to God.

“It’s one of the things that makes these people so dangerous--they’re toying with the truth. There is an emotional impact that transcends religious affiliation. That’s Elmer’s trick and the evangelists’ trick. They bypass the intellect and any true spirituality and go straight for the emotions to give you the impression that they’re feeling something.

“It’s like atomic weapons falling into the wrong hands. The message of love and brotherhood and salvation are undeniable truths that are fostered with Christianity, and Elmer Gantry uses that message to place himself in a position of power.”

Performances of the La Jolla Playhouse production of “Elmer Gantry” are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 through Nov. 24. At the Mandell Weiss Theatre, at UC San Diego, La Jolla, 534-3960.