O. C. THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Ron Boussom: Typecast as a Chameleon in ‘Loot’

In Joe Orton’s “Loot,” a black farce now on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory, Inspector Truscott of Scotland Yard announces: “I conduct my cases under an assumed voice, and I’m a master of disguise.”

Pausing a beat, he then turns around and takes off his hat. “You see?” he says. “A complete transformation.”

For Ron Boussom, the virtuosic actor who plays Truscott and whose stock in trade is theatrical illusion, the detective’s claim is more than just funny.

“There’s absolutely no change at all in him,” he notes. “It’s such a ridiculous moment. I thought the lines were my own personal joke. They were meant for me.”

Anyone familiar with Boussom’s chameleonic performances at SCR over the years will appreciate the double irony of the joke. He is nearly unrecognizable from one role to the next and always has created deft characterizations of stunning variety.

Last season alone, he portrayed the pompous slave master Pozzo in “Waiting for Godot”; the belligerent household servant Master Jacques in “The Miser”; the giddy clown Banjo in “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” and, in a dual role, the shifty pickpocket Robert Sideway and the by-the-book naval officer Capt. Collins in “Our Country’s Good.”

“When I first got into the theater, I was taken with the whole idea of illusion and disguise,” Boussom (pronounced BOW-some) recalled earlier this week at SCR in Costa Mesa. “I thought, ‘What an amazing art form.’ You can affect an audience subliminally before you ever open your mouth.

“By a change of colors, textures, rhythms, postures and so forth, you can alter the perception of people who are looking right at you. You can convince them you’re somebody other than yourself, if it’s all properly arranged and integrated.

“It’s grand trickery, but it’s based on truth and honesty.”

Boussom, a Lynwood native who grew up in Compton and attended high schools in Gardena, Long Beach and Anaheim, is short in stature and compactly built. He has grown a mustache for his current role and had his hair clipped tight to his scalp for a no-nonsense look. When he speaks, he chooses his words carefully, his hands always in motion.

One of SCR’s six founding artists, Boussom has appeared in 76 of the troupe’s 290 productions, according to the theater. He was recruited for SCR in 1964 toward the end of its maiden season by David Emmes, SCR co-founder and producing artistic director.

At the time, Boussom was an 18-year-old drama student at Long Beach City College, where Emmes was on the faculty. He had come to Emmes’ attention in a beginning acting class.

“I’d never had any acting lessons before in my life,” Boussom said. “I come from a family that had no association with the arts at all. I didn’t know zip about culture.

“But the minute I took a seat in that empty college theater before the rest of the class arrived, I knew acting was what I was going to do. There was no guesswork about it. I just knew. And I threw myself into it.

“I slept in my car. I slept in the scene dock of the theater building. I was kicked out of my house because I was staying up late and ignoring my studies. My parents thought I must be out of my mind.”

Not long after joining SCR, Boussom said, he got his “first big role with the company” playing Christy Mahon, the rebellious young hero who comes to terms with his father in “Playboy of the Western World.”

During the years since, Boussom, who lives in Irvine, has taken three major breaks from SCR. The first was to train formally in mime from 1968-69 at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre and the second to work in that company from 1973-76.

The third break came when Boussom spent most of the time from 1987-90 trying his luck in Hollywood.

“I had an agent who said, ‘I think you can get a film career going because of your ability to change character,’ ” he said.

It turned out, however, that the many faces of Ron Boussom couldn’t catch the attention of anyone in movies or television.

“Hollywood really doesn’t have any place for physical transformation, which is what I do--not unless you’re a superstar. Then everybody discovers--Wow!--makeup really does make you look different.

“But if you’re in the middle range somewhere trying to climb up, they need to box you as one thing and sell you as one thing. Otherwise, the people in casting won’t know who you are.

“I tried out for a lot of stuff,” Boussom continued. “They didn’t know what to do with me. I worked five weeks in about three years. I had four jobs on ‘Night Court’ and one on ‘Cheers’ in all that time. Financially it was an absolute catastrophe.”

Though he also managed to land roles during that period in two successful stage productions--”How the Other Half Loves” at the Tiffany Theatre in Los Angeles and “So Long on Lonely Street” at the International City Theatre in Long Beach--Boussom was chastened by his Hollywood experience.

“I found out what it was like to want to work and not be able to,” he said. “It made me appreciate how much I had here. I was willing to carry a spear to get back on the stage (at SCR).”

Boussom, who has also appeared at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and the Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove, noted that his “major opportunities here probably would have gone to star names in some other theaters.” He cited such SCR roles as John Merrick in “The Elephant Man” and Alan Strang in “Equus,” for example, or Mozart in “Amadeus” and Aubrey Piper in “The Show-off.”

“That’s big stuff,” he said. “I truthfully don’t think that over the years, given who I was and what I looked like, I would have gotten the volume and quality of material that I did here.

“If I had gone out into the world to get those roles, I think the reaction would have been, ‘Who the hell is Ron Boussom?’ ”

It’s not surprising, therefore, to hear him wax rhapsodic about a theater company he cherishes as his artistic home.

“We all have dreams, of course,” he said, “but very few of us actually see them come to fruition. SCR is a dream that has. That it’s been in my life and in all of our lives for 30 years is a continuing amazement.

“To see it evolve as it has, and to have retained a resident corps of actors all this time, is especially unusual. When a lot of theaters make the transition to the Big Time, so to speak, they don’t maintain that spirit.”

Rolling on, Boussom turned nostalgic. If he’d been giving a performance, the stage would have darkened. A spotlight would have come up, focusing in on his naked face (strong chin, liquid brown eyes, straight nose). The diamond stud in his left earlobe would have glinted.

“We stuck around all those years when we didn’t have anything,” he said, “when we wondered if we were going to close the doors on the next show. We stuck around for reasons that had nothing to do with money or fame.

“Sure, we’re older now. We need creature comforts. Money is nice. But deep down inside all of our hearts the reason we do this has nothing to do with creature comforts or with sending a production off to Broadway so we might become famous all over.

“It has to do with a belief in our product, as it did in the beginning, and with a commitment to the literature we’re producing. That’s our core of integrity.”

Had he been giving a performance, the stage would then have gone black.

* “Loot” continues through Oct. 24 on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Show times: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. $23 to $33. (714) 957-4033.