The Art of Not Growing Old Gracefully

For 90 minutes in the one-man play “Siberia,” Alan Mandell is on stage playing an unlikable old man who is slowly losing control of his life.

The theater in Hollywood is packed with people who are there for the thrill of watching this actor’s actor portray a character that Mandell freely acknowledges is “a pain in the ass.”

As the survivor of a World War II POW camp who is trapped in a nursing home, Mandell rages at and reasons with a series of invisible guests on a stage, with only a hospital bed as scenery.

“For me to do this part I had to find something to like about him, and I found it in his fierce independence,” said Mandell, 65. “What he’s done has been on his own. And now he is in this undignified situation where he’s been kicked out of the house he bought by his own son to wait for death in a nursing home.”

As the play makes clear, “The indifferent regard the rebellious only as a nuisance,” Mandell said. It is hardly a cheerful theme; in fact, he said, he tried to dissuade a friend who is 92 from coming to see the play. “But she said, ‘It’s not anything I’m unfamiliar with--I’m coming.’ ”

Mandell lives in a spacious Westside house with the kind of ceilings that allow his resonant voice its proper space. He has always worked as an actor. He says his career actually started when his first-grade teacher asked him to recite poetry. Even then, his voice could capture an audience. And he says he strengthened his vocal cords when he sold newspapers on the streets in his native Toronto.

“I knew simply I had to go into the theater. I had to do it. It never occurred to me I’d do anything else. My father would have loved to see me in any profession except acting. I lived in an office behind a theater furnished with a cot and a refrigerator. . . . When my father saw me perform he was not impressed.”

But his father was impressed years later when Mandell served as actor, director and general manager for both the San Francisco’s Actor’s Workshop and the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York.

In “Siberia,” written by Austrian playwright Felix Mitterer, Mandell challenges the audience to find a little compassion for him. In real life, though, Mandell’s compassion is not an act.

While living in San Francisco in the 1950s, for example, he co-founded the Barbed Wire Theatre at San Quentin, later to be known as the San Quentin Drama Workshop. It started when he was invited by a prison official to bring a play to entertain the inmates--with the constraint that no women could appear.

“The only play we had (with no women) was Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’--a play written for 20,000 intellectuals,” Mandell said. “It was a huge success. Prisoners understand waiting.”

An inmate named Rick Cluchey who saw that play made up his mind that he would also go into the theater, and he and Mandell created the prison theater group together. Mandell went to the prison one night a week and taught acting, directing, writing, set design. He called his friend Harold Pinter and others to lecture and teach. No one turned him down. “For the prisoners, it was the first time anyone ever applauded them,” Mandell said. “They had value. “

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Mandell has a continuing interest in finding ways to provide forums for new writers. From 1986 to 1991, he was a consulting director at the Los Angeles Theater Center, and he produced the LATC’s acclaimed Poetry/Literary Series. Writers, he says, need the experience of having their work performed in front of an audience.

Soon after “Siberia” closes--the final performance is Sunday-- Mandell and his wife, Elizabeth, will leave for Paris, where he will star in another play, “The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice.”

He has other irons in the fire too. He’s considering staging a production dealing with his lifelong relationship with Beckett. And when he has some time he wants to learn how to tap dance. “People say ‘Tap dancing? Now? At your age?’ I say it’s a perfect time.”

* ‘SIBERIA’: The play will be performed tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Complex, 6468 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. $15. (213) 466-1767.