STAGE : Don Quixote Meets the Addams Family : Whether playing Gomez Addams, starring in ‘Man of La Mancha’ or crusading against world hunger, Raul Julia is living his dreams

When Raul Julia sings “The Impossible Dream” in the new, Broadway-bound production of “Man of La Mancha,” he seems ready to seize the mantle of idealist of the 1990s.

This is, after all, the man who can also be seen as the ghoulish but indefatigable Gomez in the just-released movie “The Addams Family,” and who played the noble but naive Othello in this summer’s New York Shakespeare Festival.

And when Julia speaks of the Hunger Project, which the Puerto Rican actor has been involved with for the past 14 years, his trademark brown, gleaming eyes practically burst out of their sockets.

“We have everything that’s needed to end hunger on the planet by the year 2000,” Julia, his voice hoarse from a November cold, says in his backstage dressing room at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre, where “Man of La Mancha” opened before going to Los Angeles’ Pantages Theatre. (Previews begin Tuesday, and opening night is Dec. 5.)

“We have to wake up and end this--otherwise we’re going to go down in history as the generation of schmucks, the most unconscious generation in the history of the world.”

Julia, 47, is not always wearing the crusader’s cap, but his level of commitment and intensity projected from the stage, screen and in person is consistent. In a profession that encourages pigeonholing, Julia seems to be everywhere doing everything. Perhaps you can expect no less diversity from someone who cites Joseph Papp, Werner Erhard and Orson Bean as major influences.

His encounter with Bean, a stage actor who became most widely known for his appearance on television game shows, occurred when Julia was still a college student. “Orson Bean was on vacation in Puerto Rico, and I was doing a variety show,” says Julia, his 6-foot-2 frame relaxed in an armchair. “He saw me and liked my performance and invited me to have a drink. I told him that once I graduated, I wanted to make it a career, and I was going to go to Europe. He said, ‘I think you should come visit me in New York first. I think New York will be better for you than Europe.’ ”

Julia visited New York for a week and scuttled his plans to move to Italy. “I saw plays on Broadway, I saw the theaters, and I said, ‘My God, you can actually make a living,’ ” he recalls. “I just immediately started fantasizing about going every day to one of those theaters in New York and doing my play and going home. For the rest of my life, I would have been happy doing that.”

At age 20, after returning home to finish college, Julia moved to New York, where Bean introduced him to noted acting teacher Wynn Handman. More than 25 years later, Julia has compiled a New York stage resume that seems endless.

The name that pops up most often is Joseph Papp, the innovative producer-director and New York Shakespeare Festival founder who died Oct. 31. Julia first hooked up with Papp more than 20 years ago to play Macduff in a Spanish-language production of “Macbeth” that traveled from neighborhood to neighborhood in a truck.

“The great thing about (Papp) was he believed in free theater,” Julia says. “People thought he was crazy, but he kept pushing and pushing. He was bringing theater to people who had never seen theater in their lives. That’s one of his many incredible contributions, his openness to experimentation and not being afraid to fail.

“I admired that in Joe Papp, and I emulate that,” he adds. “That inspires me to choose work in that way, not play it safe.”

Julia’s credits back up his convictions. He has received four Tony nominations for his stage work in “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “The Threepenny Opera,” “Where’s Charley?” and “Nine.” And in the last two years he has starred in “Macbeth” and “Othello” for the New York Shakespeare Festival.

His film career began slowly, with parts in “The Organization Man” and “The Panic in Needle Park” (both 1971), but picked up in the 1980s with featured roles in Paul Mazursky’s “Tempest” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “One from the Heart” (both 1982), and his breakthrough portrayal of a Marxist revolutionary in Hector Babenco’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1985).

Since then the roles have come nonstop, including “Tequila Sunrise,” “Moon Over Parador,” “Presumed Innocent” and “Havana.” Luis Puenzo’s film version of Albert Camus’ “The Plague,” starring Julia as Cottard, is awaiting release.

Not all of his films have been critical or box-office successes, but Julia doesn’t consider any of them failures. “Sometimes I make a movie that I see possibilities in, and the script might not be perfect,” he said. “If I waited for a perfect script, I would hardly ever work. Like ‘The Addams Family,’ for example. It wasn’t a perfect script when I read it, but through rehearsal we improved it.”

Although he admits that many casting directors and producers remain resistant to placing a Latino actor in a non-Latino role, Julia credits producers such as Papp, Ted Mann of New York’s Circle in the Square and Robert Whitehead (who cast him as an Englishman in Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal”) for helping him avoid narrow categorizations.

“Thank God I haven’t been stereotyped much,” he says. “They saw me as an actor that could interpret these roles even though the roles were foreign to me, roles that people wouldn’t generally see me in.

“I know for myself--and there are a lot of actors who feel the same way--I don’t want to be myself when I’m acting. I want to be somebody else. I’m myself in real life, and that’s plenty, believe me.”

Back in Julia’s early New York days, he went to see “Man of La Mancha,” which opened on Broadway in 1965. Unfortunately, the star, Richard Kiley, was sick that day, so Julia saw the understudy.

Nevertheless, he became an immediate fan of the show and hoped one day to become a part of it. “I used to dream the impossible dream,” he laughs, “that somebody would ask me to do Don Quixote in ‘Man of La Mancha.’ I used to sing the songs for my relatives. I had an uncle who, every time I used to visit him, he’d say, ‘Come on, sing ‘The Impossible Dream.’

“In my culture, of course, Cervantes, the author of ‘Don Quixote,’ is to Spanish-speaking people like Shakespeare is to English-speaking people,” Julia adds. “So I knew Don Quixote, I grew up with Don Quixote, and I always wanted to try to interpret that character.”

Julia says he wanted to do another musical anyway--his last was “Nine” in 1982--so he was elated when the “La Mancha” producers approached him.

Julia is under contract through the end of June, at which point the production will have moved from Los Angeles to Costa Mesa (Dec. 23-Jan. 5), San Francisco, Washington, Pittsburgh, Boston and New York in time for an April Broadway opening. This eight-month commitment will mark Julia’s longest time away from film in many years.

“I just wanted to do ‘Man of La Mancha’--that’s it,” he says. “I didn’t consciously say, ‘Well, I’m going to take a break from film.’ ”

Nevertheless, he appreciates the change of pace. “I really like to be able to go from theater to movies and intermingle that. That is the ideal situation.”

Those vying for his services, however, must play the waiting game. “La Mancha” director Albert Marre, who also staged the original production, says the process of signing Julia lasted a year and a half. “He got involved with one picture and then another and then another,” Marre says. “He expressed an interest in doing it when we first brought it up; it just became a matter of when.”

But the director adds that the wait was worthwhile. “He brings a new attitude to the role,” Marre says. “When somebody has created a role almost as definitively as Richard Kiley, most of the people who played it subsequently do basically a kind of imitation of Dick’s original performance. Raul doesn’t do that. He comes at it with more of a classical Spanish point of view.”

Still, both Julia and Marre consider this “La Mancha” interpretation, which co-stars pop singer Sheena Easton, to be relatively straightforward and timeless. “We’re doing ‘Man of La Mancha,’ ” Julia says simply. “We’re not going to set it on Venus or the Moon or someplace. It’s Don Quixote, and you can’t change him too much.

“Maybe what it would say to the ‘90s that it doesn’t say to the ‘60s is, ‘Keep being open for the impossible to be possible,’ ” he adds. “It was impossible to bring down the Berlin Wall; it came down. It was impossible to bring down communist dictatorships; it became possible. In the ‘60s, it was impossible to put a man on the moon, and we put a man on the moon.”

Julia notes that any similarity between his own hopefulness and that of Quixote, or Gomez in “The Addams Family,” is purely coincidental.

“I didn’t choose the roles for that reason; they just happened that way,” he says. “What I look for in a role is the challenge, a character that I’ve never performed before, whether it’s a character with a positive outlook or a negative outlook.”

Julia professes having thoroughly enjoyed the lengthy “Addams Family” shoot despite a well-documented series of pitfalls. The cinematographer was hospitalized for a sinus infection, director Barry Sonnenfeld had to fly to New York for his own family health emergency, and even Julia had a mishap that delayed filming.

“I scratched my eyeball, and it got all red, so I couldn’t shoot because, all of a sudden Gomez (had) a red eye,” he says. “I mean, it would be apropos, but then you have to put it in the story.”

At one point, Julia got so carried away in a sword fight with Dan Hedaya (playing Gomez’s lawyer) that he caused another near-disaster. “I hit him in the hand around the thumb, and that hurts, man, because those are real swords,” Julia says. “They were built especially for us in England. Of course, they’re not sharp for (safety) reasons.”

Sonnenfeld says from the start he wanted to cast Julia as the dashing leading man. “I really believe Raul Julia was born to play Gomez,” the director says. “The reason is he has a great love of life, as does Gomez. He loves his wife, he loves his children, he loves the craft of acting, he loves eating dinner, he loves waking up in the morning, and it’s basically the same description for Gomez Addams.

“The other reason I was attracted to Raul was his theatrical background,” Sonnenfeld adds. “Normally when you do a stage performance in a movie, it comes across as too big or too broad. It’s a very difficult acting style to be theatrical and real at the same time, but it’s exactly what the role required, and no one could have done it better.”

The filmmakers also took advantage of Julia’s song-and-dance abilities by hiring the Tony-winning songwriting team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green to write a Russian dance-style production number called “Mamushka.”

“It was just fun,” Julia says, “like going to a costume ball and doing a lot of things that I always wanted to do.”

Julia lives in Manhattan’s Upper West Side with his wife and two boys. For many years he has followed the teachings of Werner Erhard, who founded est and its spinoff, the Forum.

“I participate whenever I can,” he says. “People that haven’t done it tend to make it a very airy-fairy kind of thing. They tend to collapse it and put it together with cults and things, and it’s very practical. It’s set up particularly to help you work on yourself, to take a look at where you’re at, where you want to go.”

Those goals, he adds, have changed little since he was a budding actor arriving from Puerto Rico. “Personally, I want to accomplish the same thing I always wanted to accomplish, if anything, even more so now: just to grow as an actor, to just become a better actor. And whatever I can do out there to make a difference.”