O.C. THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Dandy SCR Actor Goes Uptown Without Going Over the Top

Midway in the second act of “The Man Who Came to Dinner” at South Coast Repertory, Nicholas Hormann puts on an urbane display of comic charm not often seen in the theater these days.

As the globe-trotting Beverly Carlton, famous British playwright and notorious sybarite, he arrives in a flurry of words perfectly tuned to a clipped English accent and delivers a cameo of dazzling sophistication for a grand total of nine minutes.

Then he departs with a toss of confetti from his pocket.

And every night on Hormann’s exit the audience erupts in spontaneous applause, virtually stopping the show with its appreciation for a performance that is itself pure confetti.

“I seem to have developed a specialty in these Kaufman-and-Hart cameos,” the tall, trim, sandy-haired actor remarked over coffee recently at the theater.

He recalled, for example, being cast several seasons ago in the La Jolla Playhouse’s “Once in a Lifetime.” He played Lawrence Vail, a writer who comes to Hollywood and has a nervous breakdown, abbreviating not only his screenwriting career but his time on stage.

“Beverly Carlton is the kind of high comedy Gerald du Maurier and Noel Coward and, later, Rex Harrison used to do,” Hormann added. “It’s something very energized but still with an offhand manner. That’s a style I very much admire, making it look easy while the engine’s running. I flatter myself, of course, to compare myself with them.”

Maybe so. But Du Maurier didn’t sing. Hormann does. And though Coward and Harrison also sang, only Coward was capable of accompanying himself in performance at the piano--as Hormann is called upon to do in “Dinner.” What’s more, Hormann plays his own arrangement of “What Am I To Do,” the song that Cole Porter wrote for the role as a favor to Kaufman and Hart.

The playwrights modeled Beverly Carlton on Coward, in fact, and the song serves as the role’s piece de resistance. The lyrics are an adroit caricature of something Coward might have written: “What am I to do toward / Ending this madness / This sadness / That’s rending me through?”

But the real challenge for Hormann is not the singing or the playing. It’s keeping himself in check “so I don’t go over the top,” he said. That’s not an easy thing to do when portraying a dandyish figure of supremely entertaining flippancy, effervescence and self-absorption.

There are, after all, few entrances with more opportunity to go over the top than Beverly Carlton’s.

“Don’t tell me how you are, Sherry dear,” Carlton greets his old friend, Sheridan Whiteside, who is laid up in a wheelchair. “I want none of the tiresome details. I have only a little time, so the conversation shall be entirely about me , and I shall love it. Shall I tell you how I glittered through the South Seas like a silver scimitar, or would you rather hear how I frolicked through Zambesia, raping the major general’s daughter and finishing a three-act play at the same time?”

As for his stylish exit, Hormann said he cooked up the idea of tossing confetti over his shoulder “not to ask for applause--which I appreciate, of course--but as a ‘button’ to get Beverly out the door. In a scene that short you need something. It gives me a sense of completion.”

SCR playgoers have now seen the handsome 47-year-old actor in three consecutive Mainstage productions. Last season he appeared in Barbara Field’s “Boundary Waters” as Spindlequick, a Midwesterner who defends his privacy with all the accouterments of fine living; and he followed up in Alan Ayckbourn’s “Woman in Mind” as Andy, an elegant fantasy husband in white flannels whose fleeting presence is imagined by the protagonist as an antidote to reality.

“I get to play the skinny guys, the uptown guys as opposed to the downtown guys,” Hormann said, acknowledging that his continental looks tend to type him. “You can bet I’m not going to be cast as Stanley Kowalski and probably not as Falstaff.”

He takes his actor’s credo, perhaps not surprisingly for a trained pianist, from something Mozart is reported to have said to his musicians: “Please play the notes just as I wrote them, but as though you had just discovered them--and, please, with a little feeling.” Hormann simply substitutes “say the words” for “play the notes.”

Born and raised in Honolulu, he never considered acting professionally until he spent two years on a fellowship teaching in Taiwan, following his graduation from Oberlin College in 1966. He’d majored in Asian history (his father taught sociology and race relations at the University of Hawaii) and he was interested in foreign diplomacy, he said.

But the domestic turmoil of the late ‘60s, particularly the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, drew his attention increasingly toward home, he said. He also began reading about the Yale Drama School and “political expression through theater” at Yale Repertory. Intrigued, he applied to the school on his return to Honolulu and was granted a regional audition in San Francisco.

“I did the St. Crispin’s Day speech from ‘Henry V,’ ” Hormann recalled. “I had very little acting experience--really scarcely any. But I’d flown all the way from Hawaii, so I guess they had to take me.”

In the years he attended Yale (1970-73), excitement at the drama school ran to a feverish pitch. Among an unusually rich pool of students were such talented standouts as Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang. During his final year there, Hormann won a spot in a prestigious audition to showcase the top graduates from the nation’s acting conservatories.

The audition, held in Chicago, landed him an invitation to join New York’s Phoenix Repertory Co. The troupe, formed the year before he joined, played on Broadway and included Rachel Roberts, John Glover and John McMartin. “Although I had expected to go into residence somewhere at a regional theater, I instantly became a New York actor,” he said.

Hormann’s stage credits since have included such Broadway productions as “Execution of Justice,” “Saint Joan” and “The Visit” and off-Broadway appearances in new plays at the Public Theatre, Playwrights Horizons and the Manhattan Theater Club. He also has worked extensively on the East Coast, from Washington’s Kennedy Center to the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.

By 1980, though, his attention shifted to Southern California. He was drawn by the prospect of a career in film and television, which has so far proved disappointing.

“I came out as a contract player for Universal Studios,” Hormann said. “I was probably one of the last contract players. The following year, in 1981, (Universal) terminated the contract program because it had outlived its usefulness. I thought it would give me a lot of experience working with cameras, which it did. . . . “I’ve done TV pilots. I’ve done movies. I’ve done time on soap operas and a lot of episodics. I was even submitted for one of those (Emmy) awards. But none of the work has ever led to something else. It’s all hit or miss. I’m very disenchanted with Hollywood.”

As a result, Hormann, who lives in Pasadena with his wife and their 8-year-old son, continues to look to the theater for artistic fulfillment as well as his bread and butter. Through the ‘80s, he has worked at the Pasadena Playhouse, the Mark Taper Forum and the La Jolla Playhouse.

He still goes back East for theater work. Two seasons ago he was cast opposite Anthony Quinn in what was to be a national tour of “A Walk in the Woods,” Lee Blessing’s two-character drama. “We spent four weeks rehearsing together,” Hormann said. “But he finally had to excuse himself from the project because of ill health. We never went on tour.”

More recently, Hormann played in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. And he made his professional debut as a director last season, staging A.R. Gurney’s “The Cocktail Hour” at Indiana Repertory in Indianapolis, where he is an associate artist.

But he has nothing lined up after “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” which closes in two weeks. “If you hear of anything,” he quipped, “please call. I’m available.”

He’ll bring the confetti.

* “The Man Who Came to Dinner” continues through Oct. 11 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Performances Tuesdays to Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $25 to $34. (714) 957-4033.