Inspiring Direction for Benedict : Stage: The actor is directing A.R. Gurney’s latest play, ‘The Old Boy,’ opening at the Old Globe Theatre on Saturday.

As an actor, Paul Benedict has built a career portraying major loony tunes in films such as “The Addams Family,” “The Freshman” and “The Man With Two Brains,” as well as on the television series “The Jeffersons.”

Benedict also played the wacked-out director in “The Goodbye Girl,” the fellow who made Richard Dreyfuss play Richard III as a screeching queen.

Benedict is also a New York-based theater director--a thoughtful, serious man who can take a new work or a work in progress and labor with a playwright to infuse it with intelligence, sympathy and warmth--and, of course, humor.

His breakthrough show was “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” closely followed by “The Kathy & Mo Show: Parallel Lives,” both of them two-person sleepers that became major off-Broadway hits.

Now he is directing “The Old Boy,” A.R. Gurney’s latest play, at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

The show tells the story of a sometime Congressman who goes back to give a speech at his old prep school, only to be confronted by flashbacks about the lives he ruined by naively urging a schoolmate who was gay to stay in the closet.

“The Old Boy,” which had its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in New York last May, will have its West Coast premiere at the Globe on Saturday. Benedict has worked closely with Gurney on the playwright’s extensive rewrite of the work.

Exactly one week before opening night, the writing was finished, the performances had taken shape and the painstaking lighting and sound detailing of “tech week” was about to begin.

Benedict, 53, sat back in a theater seat, his eyes drifting to the stage, looking tired but inspired.

“I love this play because it’s about personal responsibility. It’s about a central character who is in politics, who is on a weekend trip back to his secondary school, where he begins to have to face his past and learn about responsibility.

“That appeals to me enormously.”

What also appeals to him is working closely with a writer crafting new work.

“I like doing any play. But new plays--when the writer is still actually inventing and changes can be made--is a very creative process. When we started ‘Frankie and Johnny,’ I remember Terrence (McNally, the playwright) said, ‘Who knows if people are going to go listen to two people alone in a room for two hours?’ The challenge is great when you find something you like and you push for it.

“I’m very good at seeing a play and seeing what’s in it. I seem to work well with writers in getting them to rewrite.

“Terrence gave me ‘Frankie and Johnny’ when it was unfinished. When we went into rehearsal, he was still writing it. But I could tell right away that it was going to do very well.”

Benedict had the same kind of feeling when he saw the New York production of “The Old Boy” at its final performance at Playwrights Horizons.

“I went to see it just by chance and I liked it very much. But the play didn’t quite work there. Several months later I got a call saying he had rewritten it, and would I be interested in directing it. He knew he was going to do it here. I was delighted because I like him very much, and I’ve always wanted to work at the Old Globe.”

Benedict was born in Boston and wanted to be an actor since he was a small boy, but fought the impulse as long as he could.

“When I was 5 years old, from the first time I went to the movies, I knew I wanted to be an actor, but I put it on the back burner. I majored in English, minored in journalism, intending to be a journalist. Then I went downtown and saw a job as a janitor in a theater. It paid $15 a week, and I took it.”

Soon Benedict was building sets and running the box office. Later he and some friends started a theater. And in 1963, when a man named David Wheeler came to town and started the Theater Company of Boston, Benedict jumped on board and stayed six years.

That company provided the opportunity that changed his life.

Benedict met Gurney there (Benedict was a fledgling actor of about 22, and Gurney was an English professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who got his first works done at the Theater Company of Boston at Monday night staged readings). And he got a chance to work with some then-unknowns “who couldn’t get arrested in New York,” as Benedict puts it: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Jon Voigt, Al Pacino.

He even directed Blythe Danner and Stockard Channing in their first professional plays.

Unlike the flamboyant parts he plays, Benedict, who has never married, comes across as contained, serious, and reluctant to talk about his personal life.

In talking about the moment in “The Old Boy” where Sam, the main character, has flashbacks after going back to his old school, Benedict mentioned that he, too, has a passion for revisiting places he has lived and calling up old memories.

“I’ve always been interested in going back to places where I grew up. I’ve done that for years. I would go to schools I have been to, and it’s been quite shocking. Those are incredibly formative times for us when we’re in grade school. It’s wonderful to go back and walk the same patch of grass and sit in the same seat. The same smells and sights will bring back the rest even if it was unimportant.”

Benedict said he grew up in a series of foster homes after his father left his mother, and his mother could no longer afford to raise the children on her own.

“I had a Dickensian early life. My family broke up when I was in first grade, and we all got back together with my mother when I was in high school and the older girls were working.”

He rejects any sympathy.

“Some of it was nice. You get to meet a lot of people, and life was varied--from farms I’d lived on or houses I’d lived in.”

And then he dismissed what he had said as “not very interesting,” changing the subject as quickly as possible.

He sees no conflict between his acting and directing lives. The high-paying acting career helps pay for his directing habit. Although with requests to do “Frankie and Johnny” from Brussels (which he did, in French) to Antwerp (with Flemish speaking actors--an offer he’s still considering), directing is turning out to have its profitable side too.

But ultimately, for him, directing is acting.

“Part of what you’re doing as a director is a more intense form of acting. When the scenes are on stage, I’m acting each part. It’s exhilarating, but I can’t imagine anything more exhausting than acting four or five parts--including female--in my head and my heart and my gut.”

But while the actor in him is still happy tackling the bizarrely funny, he does continue to look for something just a tad more profound in his directing career.

“If the writer has written people--using human speech and not just ideas--in a situation that’s going to reveal them to us, we’ll learn from that. That excites me, getting the whole human condition revealed. That’s all you need. That’s all I look for.”

Performances of “The Old Boy,” which begin Saturday, are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 7 p.m. Sundays, with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2. Through Feb. 10. Tickets are $17-$29.50. At the Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Balboa Park, 239-2255.