THEATER : An Actress Named Desire : Kandis Chappell is ‘one of the best-kept secrets’ in town. Now she’s taking on ‘Streetcar’s’ Blanche DuBois

When actress Kandis Chappell went for her first fitting as Blanche DuBois, costume designer Walker Hicklin told her to make sure the clothes were comfortable. She was, he explained, taking on the “King Lear” of women’s roles.

It was time. Tennessee Williams’ doomed heroine in “A Streetcar Named Desire” is one of few leading ladies that Chappell hasn’t played on major local stages recently. The actress opens Friday in “Streetcar” at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, taking on her ninth leading role at that theater alone the past four years.

In a business where most actors spend more time waiting tables than performing onstage, Chappell has theaters planning long in advance to hire her. “I have to book her 10 months ahead,” says Jack O’ Brien, artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, “and she’s an associate artist here.”

South Coast keeps pretty busy all by itself, offering her such roles in the last few years as the eccentric Lettice of “Lettice and Lovage,” the crazed “Woman in Mind,” the flamboyant Judith Bliss of “Hay Fever,” and poet Joy Davidman Gresham in “Shadowlands.” Last summer, she was at the Old Globe playing the “The Merchant of Venice’s” Portia and daughter Regan in “King Lear.”

“She gives something to a performance that’s mesmerizing,” says Hal Holbrook, who played the Globe’s Lear and was Shylock to Chappell’s Portia. “She’s one of the finest actresses I ever worked with. I don’t know anybody around who’s any better.”

Chappell ranks among the biggest fish in Southern California’s theatrical pond. She is the only actress who has won three Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards for featured performances --for “The Crucible,” “Woman in Mind” and “Shadowlands.”

She is, by her own admission, “an anachronism,” an actress dedicated to the non-commercial stage. Aside from her work in Neil Simon’s “Rumors” on Broadway and on tour a few years ago, Chappell has worked almost exclusively in regional theater, mostly locally. And now in her 40s, she is an unlikely candidate for TV or film stardom.

“If you work in regional theater, you know who Kandis Chappell is,” says casting director Elisa Goodman. “She’s always doing a play, and it just didn’t occur to her to have a film or television career. She’s one of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood.”

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Few heads turn as Chappell shows up for lunch at a Costa Mesa restaurant near the theater. She wears little make-up, a simple hairstyle and nondescript clothes that don’t much flatter her. But tall and confident, she comes across as both attractive and theatrical.

“For ‘Woman in Mind,’ she had on a really frumpy dress, a bobby pin in her hair and no makeup,” comments “Streetcar” stage manager Bonnie Lorenger. “Some actors wouldn’t be caught dead looking like (that), and that doesn’t bother her. She wants to look the way the character looks.”

This time out, of course, the character has to look very, very good. Blanche DuBois may be a faded beauty, but she is also an accomplished seductress. From Jessica Tandy who won a Tony for her performance in the show’s Broadway debut in 1947, to Vivien Leigh’s who starred in the 1951 film portrayal to Jessica Lange who reprised the role on Broadway in 1992, an impressive roster of actresses have taken on Williams’ deluded Southern belle.

“Streetcar” is generally considered one of the greatest American plays, and Blanche among the stage’s juiciest roles. (Everyone knows what playing Stanley Kowalski did for young Marlon Brando.) There must be electricity between her and her brother-in-law Stanley, caring between her and her sister Stella, tension between her and her memories.

Chappell admits she was intimidated at first. “All my life I wanted to play Blanche and always thought I would,” says Chappell, “but when I reread the play, I said, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t know who she is.’ ”

She read the play twice more, then rented the film. “When I read the play, I could hear Vivien Leigh’s voice. After watching the movie (in which Leigh played DuBois), it was even more in my head. That’s a definitive performance. I had to force myself not to use her inflections.”

But reading the play and watching the film are about all Chappell did by way of preparation, she admits. “I’m not bragging. Often, I think more should be done. Some people work by intellect, but I work by instinct. I will read a line a certain way, and often the director says, ‘What is she thinking? What is she after?’ and I’ll say, ‘I don’t know. It just seems right.’ ”

Most of her work happens in the rehearsal process, Chappell explains, something which becomes abundantly clear during a visit to the basement rehearsal rooms at South Coast Rep where she and her colleagues are shaping “Streetcar.” There, Chappell works off her script as she meticulously asks--and generally answers--question after question about how her character gets from the dressing table to her trunk and back again.

The actress asks Jeff Meek, who plays Stanley, not to move at one point while she is speaking, saying: “I just want that line to land.” She also suggests Meek grab her hand, not the perfume atomizer she is holding, then calls out to director Martin Benson, asking: “How does that look?” (Benson liked it.)

Meek describes Chappell as “sort of a blocking maven,” and “Streetcar’s” assistant stage manager Julie Haber says some of the crew affectionately refer to Chappell as Dame Bossy. “Within two days of rehearsal, people who don’t know me ask, ‘Have you ever thought of directing?’ ” quips Chappell, “because I just tell everyone what to do.”

Chappell says she doesn’t resort to “arm wrestling” for all her staging ideas, but colleagues contend she’s generally on target, particularly about her own characters and particularly when it comes to deciding where she should be at any given time. And director Benson volunteers that the actress has a “genius for blocking.”

“She just has an instinct for the stage, the way a tennis player has for the dimensions of the tennis court,” says Benson, who is also South Coast’s artistic director. “She seems to know where to be, and she knows which foot to move first.”

Chappell is the first to admit she builds each performance on a solid technical base. “I always compare myself to a pointillist painter,” she says. “I work in tiny little dots. The way I pick up a glass, the way I walk, what I wear--everything is a dot for me.

“Sometimes when I’m in the middle of it, I can’t see the picture. And sometimes the people I work with can’t see the picture. They say, ‘Who cares if the glass is here or there?’ Well, for me the glass is a dot. When you get back to where the audience is sitting, I hope there is a portrait of a very real person and a very full person.”

She says all of this in a soft, almost self-effacing voice, drawing imaginary dots on the restaurant table as she speaks.

“She couldn’t be further from a diva,” Elizabeth Dennehy, playing Stella Kowalski, observes later. “Sometimes people just want to take care of themselves and how they look. Kandis is most interested in serving the play and the playwright and not just a star turn.”

Everyone talks about her like that, including her dressers and stage managers. They tell how she bakes cookies (ginger snaps) for the cast, organizes parties and party games, is amenable to scheduling complexities. “I’m afraid to say too much about her,” stage manager Haber says at one point, “because we’ll lose her. I wish her a wonderful career, but I want it to be here.”

Chappell lives in San Diego, where she grew up and where she was a prop girl at the Old Globe when she was 16. She has a degree in theater from San Diego State University where former classmate Elisa Goodman recalls Chappell “was the Meryl Streep of San Diego State. She was the lead in everything. She was just a legend there.”

The actress did summer stock in Bemidji, Minn., then graduated from San Diego State in 1975. She did her first show at the Old Globe that same year, got her Actors’ Equity card in 1978, and a year later, moved to the Bay Area to work with California Actors’ Theatre.

Over the years, Chappell worked at such places as San Jose Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Seattle’s Intiman Theatre. It wasn’t until 1986, she says, that she saw her first play at South Coast Rep and--before fate intervened--decided to audition there.

“I thought it was a place I should work,” Chappell says, “so I asked a close friend to introduce me to Martin (Benson). We met at a dinner party. We both just looked at each other and were interested immediately, and instead of my coming to audition for him, we started dating.

“Within a month, an audition came up for a show he was directing, but we felt it too soon to work together. Nothing really came up again until ‘The Crucible,’ which was nearly 2 1/2 years after we started going together. He didn’t want it to look like he was bringing his girlfriend in, and neither did I. I knew I was a good actress, and that I could establish myself here on my own credentials.”

She did exactly that in “The Crucible,” which in 1988 won her her first L.A. Drama Critics Circle award, then soon headed off to New York with “Rumors.” It wasn’t until three years later that she was back at South Coast working with Benson on “Heartbreak House,” and by that time, the two had separated.

Both acknowledge the difficulty of doing “Heartbreak House” just months after they’d separated, but both also speak of themselves as close friends who work well together. “It’s all behind us now,” Benson says. “We can say anything to each other because we have a history and closeness and know each other so well.”

That’s good, because work is everything to Chappell. She says she has little life offstage these days--no significant other, no family. “My life style is dictated by my career,” she says, “and I lead a life in the theater. I don’t even get to live at home very often, traveling from theater to theater, doing these parts.”

When she was performing “Shadowlands” last year at South Coast, for instance, she was also rehearsing “King Lear” at the Old Globe. For two weeks, maybe more, she was rehearsing for five hours, performing for three, and traveling another two or three hours each day.

Chappell spent a couple years on the road in “Rumors,” taking over for Christine Baranski on Broadway, then touring (including a stop at Hollywood’s Doolittle Theatre). She had originally come in as the reader for West Coast auditions, explains New York-based casting director Jay Binder, but she was so good that after five days of auditions, playwright Simon and director Gene Saks insisted she stay with the show as an understudy.

“She’s a classic old-fashioned breathtakingly talented actress,” Binder says. “I think if she lived in New York, she’d be playing major roles at Lincoln Center or the Manhattan Theatre Club. But there’s a comfort playing great roles at South Coast and the Old Globe.”

Chappell appears to agree. “I sometimes think of going to New York,” she says. “What stops me from going is time. I am now, I think, in my prime, and I am playing great, great parts. If I go to New York, I would have to spend two years knocking on doors, and that is two years of time that I wouldn’t be playing great parts.”

Despite playing the Doolittle during the “Rumors” tour, she says she has never been called to audition at either the Mark Taper Forum or the La Jolla Playhouse. She doesn’t know why, she says, but admits she’s never called them either. She doesn’t want to do a “cattle call” audition, she says, “and I almost always have a job. So I don’t need to do that.”

She seems to feel likewise about film and TV. She’s appeared in just one film--”Another You” in 1991--and two TV episodes. While she keeps an apartment in Los Angeles and has spent time here on and off dutifully seeking TV or film work, she sums up her efforts saying, “Nothing’s clicked.”

Part of her problem is her versatility, offers O’Brien. “She has so many facets that people who want to merchandise her don’t know who she is. Stockard Channing and Marsha Mason were like that in their early work. If you’re not able or willing to merchandise yourself in a special mode, TV and film both are bored with you. They want to know what flavor of Chiclet you are, quick. They need consistency, not chameleons.”

They won’t get it in the future either. Coming up soon for Chappell, for instance, is her portrayal of the actress in Molnar’s 1910 comedy, “The Guardsman,” for Boston’s Huntington Theatre. Next June, she will play the aristocratic Madame Ranevskaya in Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at South Coast Rep.

When asked, Chappell responds that she’s “on the verge of directing. It’s just a matter of the timing--the right project and the right moment.” And, also when asked, she says she doesn’t regret where she is now.

But she admits to some regrets. “I was working with a director who went to Juilliard (in New York), and she said, ‘If you had gone to a school like Juilliard, you’d be a Broadway star now.’ I said I didn’t know about a place like Juilliard. I was a very naive kid in San Diego; I went to my local school.

“I wish I had gone to to Juilliard or Yale or something because that opens doors. I feel that I’m at a very exciting place professionally, on a par with people who went to those places, but it could have happened 12 years ago instead of just a few years ago. I very much took the back route--the long, hard road.”

“A Streetcar Named Desire” plays Friday through Oct. 9 at 8 pm. Performances Tues.-Sat ., . 8 p.m. , Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday -Sunday, 2 :30 pm. Tickets are $30 - $36. Previews continue through Thursday, priced from $20 . Tickets can be purchased at South Coast Repertory box office, (714) 957-4033.