THEATER : Dukes at Peace in ‘Wars’ : TV and film roles are bread and butter for the veteran Broadway star, but the theater is where his heart is--no matter how small the stage.

If going from a major Broadway stage to a 99-seat theater in West Hollywood seems like an odd career trajectory, it makes a certain sense to veteran actor David Dukes.

“I’m doing what’s possible at the moment and that means (small) theater,” he says, over lunch in a restaurant near his afternoon rehearsal. “Because I need to take (film and TV) jobs, I can’t commit to a three-month run anywhere, but I can do these plays. That’s why I’m here.”

The big stage’s loss is certainly small theater’s gain. Currently performing in “Ad Wars” at the Court Theatre, Dukes is also in rehearsal for another play, “Rage in Tenure,” which will open at Theatre Geo June 3.

With 25 years of Broadway roles under his belt--including such shows as “M. Butterfly,” “Amadeus” and “Bent,” for which he received Tony and Drama Desk nominations--Dukes’ most recent turn was as one of the three principals (alongside Amy Irving and Ron Rifkin) in Arthur Miller’s 1994 “Broken Glass” on Broadway. He also has a long list of credits in film and TV, including, in recent seasons, “The Mommies” and “Sisters.”

But the stage is his sustenance. “Theater is where my career has come from,” the affable Dukes says. “Every time I come back and touch it, it changes me. Emotionally, that’s where the work comes from for me.

“When I’m away from (the stage) for a long time--or if I stay in film work for too long--(my performance skills) get fuzzy because there’s no feedback from an audience,” Dukes continues. “I learned to make easy choices (on TV) and now I go back to theater and I recognize that.”

And that artistic rejuvenation, more than anything else, is why Dukes continues to return to the medium that he considers his permanent creative home. “This is why I was born, to be able to do repertory, performing one show at night and rehearsing another during the day,” he says. “As long as I can stand up and memorize lines, I’ll never stop going back to the theater.”

In person, Dukes couldn’t be more unlike Dick Hurley, the hustling, Maalox-swigging executive in Vince McKewin’s “Ad Wars,” a comedy about a group of ad agency employees under the gun, so to speak, to come up with a campaign for a bomb.

For starters, Dukes has none of Hurley’s antsy ambitiousness. “I never really wanted to be a star,” he says. “I never courted it actively. What I wanted was enough notoriety to get considered for the big parts along with good people. And you have to have some notoriety to get there.”

Also unlike Hurley, Dukes has an easy laugh, a warm smile and an unassuming manner. “He’s the easiest person in the world to work with,” says “Ad Wars” director Jenny Sullivan, speaking by phone from New Mexico. “We’re lucky to have him.

“Someone like David could come in (to a small theater production) as the person with the resume a mile long, but he (behaves as though) he’s just on first base like everyone else,” Sullivan continues. “There’s a certain lack of ego. David instills confidence in other people.”

But Dukes doesn’t stint on his own work in the process. Los Angeles Times reviewer F. Kathleen Foley said of his performance in “Ad Wars”: “Dukes manages to make even his pointedly amoral character engaging.”

Similarly, Newsday’s Linda Winer-Bernheimer called his portrayal of the womanizing yet morally vexed doctor in “Broken Glass” “dashing and compassionate.”

If Dukes comes by such charm--or even Dick Hurley’s venom--naturally, though, it’s also the result of decades of on-the-job training.

Dukes, 49, grew up in the San Francisco area and joined the American Conservatory Theatre in 1967, the year it began. He spent three seasons performing in repertory with that company before moving to Los Angeles.

In L.A., though, he found that he “couldn’t make a go of it,” turning instead to work in some of the best repertory theaters in the country, including the Alley Theatre in Houston, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Pennsylvania.

Then, in 1971, Dukes landed a supporting role in his first Broadway show, “The School for Wives” with Brian Bedford. He spent six months on Broadway and completed a national tour with that show.

One year later, Dukes became a charter member of the New Phoenix Repertory Company in New York. Around this time as well, he began to work steadily in Manhattan. He also did some directing, primarily in Off Off Broadway venues.

In 1974, Dukes returned to L.A. for his first television job, establishing a pattern of seasonal bi-coastal migration that he sustained through much of the 1970s. “I initially started coming out here so I could make money and go back and do theater,” says Dukes, who took up full-time residence in L.A. following his 1983 marriage to poet-novelist-professor Carol Muske-Dukes, with whom he now has an 11-year-old daughter named Annie.

“I made the choice to stay in L.A.,” Dukes says. “You just can’t make enough money in theater and that’s really why I chose to be out here.”

Yet he remains ambivalent about that decision. “With kids and dogs and all that stuff, it is easier out here,” says Dukes, who also has a 29-year old son named Shawn from a previous marriage. “But the cultural-intellectual life is in New York and not necessarily here, unless you’ve got the right circle of friends. I’d love to be back there. I think about it all the time.”

Here, though, is where the income is, and so here is where Dukes has stayed. He has appeared in such films as “First Deadly Sin,” “A Little Romance” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” and numerous TV movies, including “The Josephine Baker Story,” for which he won Emmy and Cable-ACE Award nominations.

His miniseries have included “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” and he’s been featured on many series. Dukes’ most famous TV appearance, though, was as Edith Bunker’s putative rapist on “All in the Family.”

Yet Dukes’ relationship with serial TV has had its problematic side. “I did one series early on in my career where I had three episodes in a row where my character woke up with a hangover, had an argument with my father, then came to some kind of awareness,” Dukes says. “Then the next week, I started all over as if it had never happened.”

For a long time, he vowed to steer clear of such facile plot lines and similar perils, but eventually Dukes returned to TV, if only to make a living. “I resisted for the longest time, then I finally recognized that I had to start getting into series,” he says.

Recently, Dukes played the husband of one of the leads in NBC’s “Sisters,” and spent more than a year, also as a husband, on NBC’s “The Mommies.” But the latter was an aggravating experience.

The problems were not only those endemic to the medium, but also others specific to the show’s operation. “On ‘The Mommies,’ we could never get anything decided and there was always confetti in the air about something,” Dukes says.

Ultimately, the show felt like a setback. “I feel like I retired for a year and a half, that I left the business, because very few people watched (“The Mommies”) and I really wouldn’t want them to watch my work on it because I wasn’t particularly happy during any of the time,” Dukes says. “I gained 25 pounds. It just was not a good time for me.”

Hence Dukes’ return to the stage. “In the theater, there’s a dynamic I know,” he says. “The relationship between the playwright, director and actors gets established quickly and it’s a medium I’m comfortable in.”

“In the filmed mediums, you’re simply not in charge,” Dukes continues. “Where they place that camera changes everything. And if you’re an actor who bounces off people, who uses other actors, it’s almost impossible (to act).”

Yet no matter what vicissitudes TV may present and theater may heal, Dukes remains vigilant about nurturing his craft. “When you’ve been at it long enough, you succeed and you fail and you try and learn from each one,” he says.

“You usually learn more in failure. Success tends to reinforce all your habits, good and bad, whereas in failure, you have to re-examine everything. That’s not a bad thing.”

* “Ad Wars,” Court Theatre, 722 N. La Cienega, West Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends May 28. $20. (213) 466-1767. (“Ad Wars” reopens at Tiffany Theatre without Dukes on June 2.)

* “Rage in Tenure” opens June 3 at Theatre Geo, 1229 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood, (213) 660-8587.