Founder of Theater Returns to San Diego : Stage: Bowery Theatre founder Kim McCallum is back in San Diego after being forced out as head of a New Mexico theater group.

Kim McCallum, an intense, scrappy, red-headed legend in San Diego theater, passed through the city like an electric shock from 1982-1985.

Much has changed for McCallum and for San Diego theater since this brilliant young actor-director left seven years ago. The 77-seat Bowery Theatre, which he built with backbreaking labor out of the basement of the New Palace Hotel at 480 Elm St. in 1982, was evicted in 1988 to make way for a renovation project. Now a 78-seat theater at 1055 1st Ave. under the direction of artistic director Ralph Elias, the Bowery was renamed Blackfriars Theatre in 1991.

Since he left, McCallum has gone from the heights to the depths--although he does not characterize it that way. His phenomenal success at the Bowery led him to the position of artistic director at the American Southwest Theatre Company in New Mexico. After six years there, he was, in his words, “forced out” last August by the managing director he had hired himself for the position.

He has lived since the fall with his wife and 8-year-old twin daughters in Ashland, Ore., where his father, Sandy McCallum, is an actor and director. And now Kim McCallum, 39, is taking on his first acting job since he left Las Cruces. In the new translation of Carlo Goldoni’s “Mirandolina” opening Wednesday at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, he will play what is for him an uncharacteristically comic role--the lovesick Captain.

Sitting at an outside table in Horton Plaza, a clean-cut McCallum laughs easily and smiles often as he talks about his life and work.

“I wouldn’t call it a crossroads,” he said with a grin when asked if he was at that point in life. “My life continues to be wonderful. Decisions have to be made and you keep waiting for something to happen. But I almost feel like it’s a renurturing time.

“This has proven to be as challenging and interesting a play as I thought. And Doug (Jacobs, the artistic director of the Rep who is directing the show) couldn’t be better. He’s one of the few directors in a long time that I not only like but I trust.”

It’s a very different part from the ones McCallum is used to taking.

McCallum plays an American naval captain in a setting updated to 1949. His character, a stuffy type, doesn’t need or want any women in his life and makes the mistake of letting a lovely, clever innkeeper named Mirandolina know it. In revenge, Mirandolina decides to change his mind, but soon succeeds more impressively than she intended. The Captain becomes a persistent, though unwanted, suitor.

“To work on a comedy again is lovely,” McCallum said, though comedy is not how McCallum made his reputation in this town.

McCallum is known for his uncanny ability to portray intense individuals teetering on the edge of sanity: Lewis Keseberg, the Donner party member tried for cannibalism, at the Marquis Public Theatre; the dying McLachlen in “The Hasty Heart” at the Bowery.

But his most famous part was his terrifying Teddy in Mark Medoff’s “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?” It attracted a rave notice from visiting UPI arts editor Glenne Currie, whose comprehensive review of San Diego theater circulated nationally in 1983. Soon afterward, then-Mayor Roger Hedgecock declared “Bowery Theatre Week” on the company’s first anniversary. This at a time when San Diego was just beginning to become well-known for its high-quality regional theater.

McCallum’s precocious success ultimately made it inevitable he would move on. In 1984, he concluded a Medoff festival with “The Wager,” which he starred and directed in, and Medoff himself traveled from his Las Cruces, N.M. home to see what the local critics were raving about.

Medoff was impressed--so much so that a year and a half later, he offered McCallum a job that led to replacing Medoff as artistic director of American Southwest Theatre Company in New Mexico.

Now McCallum is back in San Diego, in part because he asked his old friend Doug Jacobs “to find something for me to do.”

Jacobs sent him the script of “Mirandolina,” a new translation by Melissa Cooper that opened to rave reviews at the Portland Stage Company in March. McCallum auditioned and got the part.

McCallum insists that there are no bitter feelings over his parting with the American Southwest Theatre Company. His time there gave his wife, Nancy, an opportunity to finish her undergraduate and graduate degrees--she is a painter.

It gave his daughters, Amanda and Caitlin opportunities to make their acting debuts (they alternated as Ismene in a produciton of “Oedipus”).

And it allowed him to do many shows--one he cites with particular pride is Joshua Sobol’s “Ghetto,” which he directed and played a Nazi officer.

“It was time to go. I could have stayed and said, ‘OK, you’re making a whole lot of money.’ To find peace with that, I would have had to have done things I couldn’t do.”

McCallum still likes the idea of running a theater. He says he is even glad that the Bowery changed its name: Now, he said with a smile, he can use the name “Bowery” again, if the opportunity presents itself.

“I absolutely would like to start a theater again. I love San Diego.”

McCallum dates his theatrical beginnings to San Diego--because just as he launched the Bowery, the Bowery launched him.

“It was really the beginning of my life and my career,” McCallum said.

He was born with a strong acting lineage, far from here, in Whitehorse in Canada’s Yukon Territory. His grandparents on both sides were performers, and his father gave up broadcasting to become an actor at the urging of stage director Tyrone Guthrie.

Sandy McCallum moved his family to Minneapolis in 1964 to join the Guthrie Theatre, where he supported his family on $125 a week.

“We were poor and I didn’t know it,” Kim McCallum said, shaking his head. “I thought we were rich. I still feel rich. I have a wonderful life, a wonderful family. I’m grateful I don’t want for food. The world can be an ugly place. And I’ve certainly had my share of disappointment and heartache.”

McCallum’s first role was in a Minneapolis children’s theater, and he later played small parts at the Guthrie. At 15, he left home to work in multiple roles in the theater, then to leave the field for construction, cabbie and dishwashing jobs, and ultimately to return--at one point touring 13 Southern states with the Vagabond Marionettes as a professional puppeteer.

He never went to college or had professional training other than the acting he learned from his father.

Although he didn’t go to school to study acting, he studied acting all the time from other actors. He describes himself as “the last apprentice.”

“Just like out of an Elizabethan story, I was the kid who would do the kid roles, a juvenile who would do the juvenile roles. I did props and sets and worked on lights. You did it because that was what you wanted to do and that’s what you had to do.”

McCallum talks of his life choice with simplicity: “I have to act.”

Which doesn’t mean that he’s never questioned it. “You never go through a play when you don’t say, ‘What am I doing? I should do something real like bake bread or be a player and make a lot of money or do something meaningful like work with the homeless.”

But it never takes long for him to remind himself that acting is meaningful too--whether he is playing a Nazi or, in the case of “Mirandolina,” a love-sick buffoon.

“It’s about the willingness to touch certain parts of the human species. To be a Nazi and blow someone’s brains out, you go, ‘I don’t want to touch it, it’s so scary, it’s a scary place to go.’ But there’s part of me that understands how these things go through people’s minds. And to do a play like ‘Mirandolina,’ which is about love and laughter, is part of our experience too.

“I believe in what I’m doing.”

And that, McCallum said, is more important than knowing what he’ll be doing next.