‘Immigrant’ Arrives at Westwood Playhouse : Stage: Playwright Mark Harelik’s story of a Russian Jewish man who settles in a small town in Texas is a success story that is close to his heart.

Instead of speaking his own lines, Mark Harelik has a chance to hear them in “The Immigrant: A Hamilton County Album” at the Westwood Playhouse.

Though the play has never been a succes d’estime , its familial glow has held a steady lure for audiences all over the country ever since it premiered at the Denver Center Theatre in 1985. The improbable success story of a penniless Russian Jewish immigrant (based on Harelik’s grandfather) who settles deep in the heart of xenophobic Texas has enjoyed more than 90 productions. It’s on the strength of a recent run at Fort Lauderdale’s Off-Broadway Theatre that the play, with the Florida cast intact, returns to Los Angeles.

The good fortunes of both play and 40-year-old actor-playwright have intertwined. Harelik moved to Los Angeles in 1987 with the CTG/Mark Taper Forum production of “Lost Highways: The Hank Williams Story,” which he co-authored with director Randall Myler, and he’s been able to pick and choose ever since, both as actor and writer. Recently he’s worked in “Search and Destroy” at the South Coast Repertory, “The Cherry Orchard” and “Elmer Gantry,” both at the La Jolla Playhouse. He’s adapted “The Immigrant” into a movie and he’s writing a pilot for NBC based on the life of his younger brother, a honky-tonk musician. In show biz’s slippery terrain, an old root has held him to a sense of place.

“I’ve been pretty lucky,” he said. “I prefer the theater, and I like to work here. I don’t like New York. It’s a sick, provincial city. California may not be the most desirable place in the world either, but at least I can leave my windows and doors open.”

That may seem a dubious sentiment for anyone who knows the city. However, as if for emphasis, he glanced at the open glass-paneled rear door of his ground-floor apartment, which offered a corner glimpse of a garden run happily riot. Though the apartment is a block away from the hectic corner of 3rd and Crescent Heights, it has the bright, breezy openness of a Mediterranean beach flat. And an amazing calm. A vintage 1350 cc Harley-Davidson with fat porcelain white fenders leans on its kickstand in the middle of his walkway.

Harelik is part of the last formidable generation of actors to come out of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre and Santa Maria/Solvang’s Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts, and includes Michael Winters, Barbara Dirickson, Daniel Davis, Byron Jennings and, not least, Annette Bening.

“When I lecture at UC San Diego, I notice how much more commercial young actors have become,” Harelik said. “Everybody wants to go into movies and TV and I don’t blame them. What are you gonna tell people, not to have possessions? I still tell them not to go into TV. They should try to stay dedicated to the stage. It’s not a dying form. A lot of people consider it different, and odd. And expensive. But there’s no place like it for intellectual and spiritual challenge. I still get a lump in my throat when I walk in to see a new play or production. If it’s bad, I can always leave. But if it’s good, it’s really life-enhancing.”

Harelik has dropped the 1990 bulk he carried in “Search and Destroy”--as though he needed some bloat then to play an eagerly corruptible character--and has trimmed to the tall, knobby sinuousness of a 10K runner or a rangy wide receiver. He’s inherited a classically handsome face, olive-toned and animated by alert, deep-set, dusky brown eyes.

Is an actor who writes ever tempted to stick his lines into other people’s business?

“It can be difficult,” he said. “I enjoyed every minute of ‘The Cherry Orchard’ because it’s so brilliantly written that I could completely trust the character and never change a word. When I did ‘Elmer Gantry,’ I had a lot of trouble because the script was in flux and I had nothing to guide me but instinct. In a situation like that, there’s a constant clash between the words I’m assigned and what I think I know about the character. At some point in any play the actor becomes the authority on his character. We’re not interpretive artists. We re-create.”

Though Harelik isn’t appearing in the Westwood production, he’s still close to the play. “I wasn’t certain about having another production in L.A. while working on the film (in addition to its 1986 staging at the Taper, ‘The Immigrant’ also played in La Mirada in 1989).

“I did want to be consulted about it, but I’ve let go of that concern. The longevity of this production has proven itself, and I didn’t want to be a Scrooge.”

Besides, it gives him a chance to talk once again about one of his all-time favorite characters, Haskell Harelik.

“He seemed to dip back into an ancient age,” Harelik said of his grandfather. “He was a noble, quiet, beloved man. I always thought that for a Jew to be loved by such a prickly people was amazing. Hamilton’s at the center of the state, north of Austin, south of Dallas. It’s got lots of trees, rivers, cattle, feedlots and dairy farms. Its population is 2,800 and aging. As a practice in daily living the people are kind and warm and hospitable and helpful to strangers, but they can also be viciously prejudiced, bigoted and isolationist. They actively live their religion in revivals, Bible studies, church camps. In some ways it’s still like the 1800s, when rural people felt beset by the progressive world, which to them promotes the devil’s values, like sexual freedom and government misuse of their tax money. The horizons are so narrow.”

This is the grudging landscape into which Haskell planted his stake in 1909, and as a dry goods merchant became part of the community. “There’s a Hebrew word, Lamed-vov , based on the Talmudic legend that at any time in history there are 36 people society rests on,” Harelik said. “Without them the social fabric and morality of the world is destroyed. Maybe it’s not 36. Maybe it’s 36,000. But through them, God, brotherhood and sisterhood endure. It frequently happens that no one recognizes them while they’re alive, and they don’t know it themselves.

“I think my grandfather was one of those who heard the future. He taught ecumenism in the town, and charity. As he began losing contact with his life (he died in 1988), I saw how he was losing his picture of how he existed in time and space. That’s why I had to write about him. Only in memory do we exist with meaning.”

Harelik has an impassioned response to those critics who have considered “The Immigrant” oversimplified. “It is idealized, but I would separate that from being sentimentalized. The thing that was important to me was the folk tale quality to the play, to make the characters simple people, but not simple-minded. Each of the characters has a heart-oriented purity. The people in the town will tell you it quite accurately reflects their lives, though some might think it lacks drama.

“I hear the question, ‘Didn’t your grandfather suffer?’ as though suffering is the only thing that makes his story worthwhile. But it didn’t happen. Is that what puts him in the front row of the human family? This is a story that shows a successful aspect of an American experience.

“Ironically, I wrote a sequel called ‘What the Jews Believe,’ which turned out to be bitter and bleak. It’s a dicey thing to try and answer people’s need for reassurance. We revere spirituality and hunger for it, but don’t know where to find it. We’ve learned to groom our cynicism so articulately. I wanted to show how love begets love. You can only warm yourself in front of a hearth.”