Jesse Borrego Feasts on Avant-Garde Parts : Stage: The actor ‘belongs in the great roles,’ his ‘Woyzeck’ director exclaims.

For Jesse Borrego, the path to success as an actor did not require that one big break.

It required two.

Borrego, then a student at CalArts, had gone to a casting call for producers of the TV series “Fame,” who were looking to fill new roles in the series about kids at New York’s High School of Performing Arts. Borrego thought he had done pretty well at the audition, but wasn’t particularly shocked when he got no callback.

Until one afternoon two weeks later, when a friend walked up to him with an odd report. “He said, ‘Hey, I saw you on TV,’ ” Borrego recalled. “I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘The people at “Fame” want you.’ ”

The people at “Fame,” it turned out, had lost Borrego’s resume, but still had his picture. They had gotten a local TV station to flash it on the air in hopes someone who knew Borrego would have him contact the producers. Someone did. As a result, for three years he ended up playing Jesse Velasquez, a Mexican national enrolled at the school that “Fame” made famous.

“It really allowed me to economically settle myself,” said Borrego, who currently plays the title character in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s new production of “Woyzeck,” directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, the festival’s artistic director. “And it allowed me to find out about the business without having to rough it.”

“Woyzeck,” a play about oppression and murder written in 1836 by German playwright Georg Buchner, is about as dark as “Fame” is buoyant. But it is a work in which Borrego, a 30-year-old native of San Antonio, feels completely in his element. That is because Borrego has played other antiheroes in Buchner’s abbreviated canon--and has worked repeatedly with Akalaitis, a director whose visually arresting work makes excellent use of Borrego’s dark, expressive features and lithe, compact frame.

“He belongs in the great roles,” said Akalaitis, who found Borrego in an audition for “Green Card,” which she directed in 1986 at the Mark Taper Forum. She has also directed him in “Leon and Lena,” an adaptation of Buchner, and “The Screens” at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “He is not afraid to go to those emotions that are painful.”

“Woyzeck” tells in a fragmentary way--the text fills only 22 pages--the story of a common man, a soldier, who, driven by obsessive jealousy, brutally murders his wife. With its depiction of class conflict and the interior life of an ordinary man, the play is considered one of the first modern dramas, and Borrego believes that the tale of Woyzeck’s deterioration into violence is still relevant for modern audiences.

“He sees it all go against him--his superiors, his work. And all the outside stimuli gets warped,” Borrego said as he sat in a drafty hallway at the Public Theater, devouring an apple. “Which is what I think happens to people who commit violent crime: The outside stimuli gets all screwed up.”

The reviews have been good. Newsday’s Jan Stuart said Borrego makes a “wrenchingly fine Woyzeck.” Meanwhile, two New York Times critics gave the actor high marks: Mel Gussow said Borrego “grasps the tortured essence of Woyzeck,” while David Richards said he is “sensational.”

Borrego, who grew up in a musical family--his father, Jesse Sr., is a professional accordionist in San Antonio--says that despite his grounding in television, he feels at home Off Broadway. In TV and movies, he’s usually offered roles that amount to Latino stereotypes--”I did two ‘Miami Vices’ playing Colombian drug dealers,” he said. And he’s in two upcoming gang-related films: Allison Anders’ “Mi Vida Loca” and Taylor Hackford’s “Blood In, Blood Out.”

But on stage, he’s done everything from “ ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” to “Hamlet.”

In fact, immediately after leaving “Fame,” Borrego’s future was sealed. He was cast in the Akalaitis production at the Taper.

“Some people do dinner theater after television. The first thing I did was an ensemble, avant-garde piece,” Borrego said. “When I did it, I thought, ‘Yeah, this is where I’m from. This is it, baby.’ ”