A Long Way Back to Odyssey : Theater: After winning a Tony and accumulating hundreds of acting credits, John Rubinstein is in ‘Sight Unseen,’ back at the theater where he wrote music for its opening production 25 years ago.

Actor John Rubinstein was at his Tarzana home reading the newspaper one morning when he came upon a review of Donald Margulies’ “Sight Unseen” at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles.

“It was very moving, very interesting and very original,” recalls Rubinstein, who had seen and admired the play in New York. “I started mumbling to myself that I wish I’d known it was coming here. . . . It’s the kind of play that you want to do.”

As it turned out, the Tony-winning actor got his chance the other day. His old college pal Ron Sossi, artistic director of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, was recasting that very show for an extended run and gave Rubinstein a call.

The timing was right. And, last weekend, Rubinstein began playing “Sight Unseen’s” Jonathan, a very successful painter who, looking for connection, visits his old girlfriend and her husband. He is rarely offstage, alternately aging and becoming young again, discussing everything from love and family to art and Judaism.

“John seemed perfect for the role,” says producer Sossi. “The play requires a character who is intellectual, an artist (and) can indulge in some self-examination.”

It’s a tough, demanding part, perfect for a man who clearly relishes challenges. He’s been acting, writing music and otherwise performing all his adult life, sometimes even commuting between the East and West coasts on a weekly basis.

Rubinstein moved back to Los Angeles, where he was born 47 years ago, in 1992. Here, in his sprawling ranch home, assorted photographs, scrapbooks, books and magazines reflect that rich professional life. His two children from an earlier marriage are off at college; asleep down the hall is 6-month-old son Peter, son of the actor and his dancer-actress wife, Jane Lanier. Jonathan is the sort of complicated guy Rubinstein loves to portray onstage. Speaking of his characters in such plays as Mark Medoff’s “Children of a Lesser God” and David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly,” Rubinstein says, “These are people who have a surface manner that is one kind of thing, and slowly, as the play unfolds, you see all these other sides.”

“Sight Unseen” began life at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa in 1991 and has since joined the ranks of regional theater’s most-produced plays. (Elizabeth Norment, who originated the role of former girlfriend Patricia at South Coast, is in the Odyssey production.)

“It’s a wonderful feeling to walk out on stage knowing you’re going to tell a great story,” Rubinstein says. “It’s like the wonder in a child’s eyes when you say, ‘Once upon a time,’ and you know where you’re going and they don’t.

“ ‘Sight Unseen’ begins as a strange sort of comedy of manners (when) this alien comes into a world that he doesn’t fit in,” continues Rubinstein enthusiastically. “Then it very quickly turns into a sad, nostalgic love story. Then, suddenly, it’s a very interesting and multifaceted discussion of art and the role of the artist in society. And it’s all of a piece. It’s not tacked on. It is what the play’s about.

“It becomes a play about breaking with one’s family and the weight of your family and the baggage they carry with them and pass on to you. And that is also true of art, be it painting, drama, sculpture, music or literature. We’re learning from and working out of the traditions of the past but also trying to break from them and create our art in and of itself.”

It’s the sort of play that hooked him into acting in the first place. The son of famed pianist Artur Rubinstein, the actor started piano lessons at age 4. But it became apparent very quickly, he says, “that I wasn’t virtuoso concert pianist material. I was musically adept, gifted and I had a very good ear (but) in my family, I knew what a great concert pianist was.”

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Essentially raised in New York, Rubinstein also knew what great theater was. “New York in those days, from the mid-’50s to mid-’60s, was such an explosively exciting time in the theater. I went to all the plays and it just lit me up on fire. I just couldn’t turn away from it.”

He went to UCLA to study theater and was acting during his three years there. He and Sossi were both in a 1965 UCLA production of “Threepenny Opera,” and, in 1966, Sossi directed Rubinstein’s first musical, “The Short and Turbulent Reign of Roger Ginzburg.” When Sossi chose Brecht’s “A Man’s a Man” to launch his new Odyssey Theatre in 1969, he asked Rubinstein to write the music and do piano accompaniment.

All of his careers sort of grew simultaneously, he explains. He won a Tony for “Children of a Lesser God,” which he originated at the Mark Taper Forum in 1979, and starred in a reworking of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” at La Jolla Playhouse in 1985.

He appeared in his first film, “Journey to Shiloh,” in 1966, playing a dying Confederate soldier. Then, he says, came “hundreds of rapists, murderers, drug addicts and bad hippies.” He sang barbershop quartet with Elvis in MGM’s “The Trouble With Girls,” then went on to appear in many films and, he says, on “virtually every television show.”

Those are just his acting credits for, as he says, “I’ve always kept music going.” The modern-day Renaissance man has written two more musicals, as well as theatrical incidental music. He has composed, orchestrated and conducted musical scores for five movies and more than 50 television films, plus weekly themes for TV’s “Family” and “China Beach.”

Rubinstein shows no signs of slowing down now either. He has a recurring role on TV’s “RoboCop,” and just recorded the audiotape of Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor.” Cast as “a Donald Trump wanna-be” in “919 Fifth Ave.,” the pilot for a new CBS show written by Dominick Dunne, Rubinstein is set to co-direct and star in a revival of Elmer Rice’s 1931 play “Counselor-at-Law” later this fall for North Hollywood’s Interact Theater Co.

* “Sight Unseen” plays Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. through Sept. 25. Tickets $17.50-$21.50 from the Odyssey box office, 2055 S. Sepulveda. Information: (310) 477-2055.