COVER STORY : The Essence of It All : John Goodman, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathleen Turner and Matthew Broderick aren’t doing live theater for the perks. They’re doing it for the rush.

Dorothy McGuire, Mel Ferrer and Gregory Peck founded the original La Jolla Playhouse in 1947 as a creative summer home for movie stars like themselves, as well as New York theater folks who’d come to “The Coast” for TV and picture work.

Soon, all Hollywood knew about the thespian playground amid the palms. Tinseltown veterans and recent transplants alike finagled to fit in their dates down south without taking too much toll on their more lucrative gigs in Los Angeles.

In her program bio for a 1958 production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” Rita Moreno thanked “two staunch supporters of this Playhouse, Robert Young and Jane Wyatt,” who had rearranged Moreno’s “Father Knows Best” shooting schedule so she could take her turn onstage.

Well, plus ca change . . .

In July, San Diego’s two major theaters will host productions featuring actors who are widely known as television and movie stars and little known, if at all, for their stage work.

John Goodman, a.k.a. “Roseanne’s” TV hubby, will play Falstaff in “Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2,” opening Saturday at the Old Globe Theatre--where both Victor Buono and David Ogden Stiers have, in years past, assayed the same role. And Malcolm-Jamal Warner, best known for his years as Theo on “The Cosby Show,” portrays Lysander in the La Jolla Playhouse’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” opening July 16.

But the phenomenon of screen faces popping up onstage is hardly limited to Southern California. A number of high-dollar actors hit the boards in New York this season and did pretty well for themselves, thank you.

Just three weeks ago, in fact, channel surfers could easily have mistaken the CBS-TV broadcast of the Tony Awards for an off-season Academy Awards, so familiar were the faces.

Although Glenn Close was already a household name before she took on the role of Norma Desmond when “Sunset Boulevard” opened in Los Angeles in December, 1993, many would argue that her turn in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical based on the Billy Wilder movie has been career-defining for the actress. Not surprisingly, she took home a Tony for leading actress in a musical.

This year’s Tony for leading actor in a play went to Ralph Fiennes for “Hamlet,” in Jonathan Kent’s staging, which began at the Almeida Theater Company in London. Fiennes became something of a household name for his Oscar-nominated role as a Nazi in “Schindler’s List” and then last year for his role as Charles Van Doren in “Quiz Show.” But Fiennes also has long been familiar to British theatergoers .

And Matthew Broderick--who told The Times in an interview last October that he “didn’t know what I was thinking--I thought I could whip off a musical in between shooting and editing a film”--took home the leading actor in a musical award in the Des McAnuff staging of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” a role that originated at the La Jolla Playhouse last fall.

Adding to the Hollywood flavor, Tony presenters included more movie stars currently doing theater, including Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathleen Turner. Also handing out awards that night was Laurence Fishburne, who just last November staged his own play, “Riff Raff,” at Los Angeles’ 99-seat Theatre Geo and this coming season will be taking it to be staged at Circle Rep in New York.

What does this all mean? It would be expected that actors should move from the theater to the screen. But why move from the lucrative world of Hollywood to the hard work and relatively lower pay of the theater--even Broadway takes its toll night after night--after you’ve hit it big?

We asked five prominent actors, and, as the following interviews suggest, there is a method (if not a Method) to their madness. Each of the five--Goodman, Warner, Parker, Turner and Broderick--began in the theater, though they have found fame elsewhere. All have recent, current or forthcoming projects. And yet they still long for the roar of the crowd--and more--that only the stage can offer.

JOHN GOODMAN

John Goodman is a little crazed these days.

“I’m pretty terrorized,” the actor confesses as he swings a black Jeep Cherokee out of a parking lot on the campus of the University of San Diego, where rehearsals for “Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2” are being held. “It’s just that I kind of feel I’m up to my ass in alligators.”

It’s dinner break and Goodman is en route to an auto parts store, on a quest to find some gadget or glue with which to re-affix his rearview mirror. There are no gofers around to run this errand for him, and no hot chow awaiting his return.

Well geez, it looks as if we’re not in Hollywood anymore, Toto.

The man whom the world knows as Roseanne’s Dan is, however, happily if nervously back where he once belonged. “It’s grrrrrreat! “ he says, a la Tony the Tiger, of his first theater gig in eight years, preempting further questions with a string of mildly blustering expletives prompted by a wrong turn. “I don’t need the dough right now, but I do need this.”

“This” is the artistic stretch of taking on a big role like Falstaff. “The television show’s really not that much of a challenge, so I get out of shape creatively,” says Goodman. “If you’re playing the same guy all the time, it’s like pushing a button as far as the reactions go.”

Shakespeare, though, is helping to get Goodman’s thespian blood flowing once again. “It just helps me get back in the groove, seeing a role all the way through in a three-hour period,” he says. “I didn’t want another year to go by without getting back onstage. I didn’t know how much I’ve missed it.”

Time was, after all, when Goodman, now 42, was known as a stage actor. He made his Broadway debut in “Loose Ends” in 1979. And it was in San Diego, in fact, that he performed as Pap in Des McAnuff’s staging of the musical “Big River” at the La Jolla Playhouse--a role that he continued in the show’s Tony-winning run on Broadway in 1985.

Goodman broke into films in the mid-1980s, right after his stint on Broadway. Then came “Roseanne” and the kind of fame only the mass media can provide.

Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien, who directed Goodman in “Lady of the Diamond” at the Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1980, has been after the actor for years to return to the stage, and in particular to the Globe.

Goodman always liked the idea, but it wasn’t until this season that he finally agreed to fit it in. “He doesn’t have to do this,” says O’Brien. “He’s at the height of his career. To come out once a night for 650 bucks [per week]--I have such respect for that.”

Fortunately, O’Brien hasn’t run into any skepticism about the project so far. “I haven’t gotten any ‘yabba dabba do’ stuff,” he says, referring to Goodman’s screen turn as Fred Flintstone. “People know that he’s capable of this. I don’t think this is a joke to people at all.”

Yet Goodman’s TV fans don’t know, and others in the business do tend to forget, about his stage past. “You have to remind people,” says Goodman, now back in the rehearsal room, where he’s wolfing down a cold sub and potato chips. “It’s what I was doing when they found me for [“Roseanne”].”

“People point at me and go ‘Roseanne,’ ” he continues. “I’ll always be proud of the [TV] show, and that’s probably what I’ll always be remembered for. And if [my TV fame] parks butts in the theater, that’s fine with me.”

What Goodman’s fans will find is an actor who knows all about the fear and loathing the stage can inspire. “I’ve gone up [forgotten lines] onstage before and it’s not pretty,” he admits. “But I guess I’ll just mumble thees and thous until somebody takes care of me. There’s always somebody that rides in and saves your ass.”

The risks, it seems, are part of the thrill. “You trust the people you’re up there with with your life, ‘cause there’s nothing worse than dying onstage,” Goodman says. “Except dying in real life or having a stroke or something, I guess.”

The payoff, however, makes it worthwhile. “When everything clicks, it’s one of the best feelings in the world,” says the actor, who’ll spend his Mondays during July commuting to L.A. to tape “Roseanne.” “It’s a fun process. Why the hell else would you do it?”

Then, answering his own question, Goodman continues, “Maybe [for] recharged batteries, a sense of achievement that I lived through it and some fun,” he says. “If I manage to do it, it’s something to pat myself on the back about.”

Then again, Goodman still has his moments of doubt. “I was thinking about faking a heart attack this morning to get out of it,” he says. “I didn’t think they’d believe me, though.”

MALCOLM-JAMAL WARNER

Twenty-four-year-old Malcolm-Jamal Warner is having a tough time living down his past. For eight years, he was Bill Cosby’s TV son, Theo, on “The Cosby Show,” and despite the fact that it has been three years since the show went off the air, the character is still with him.

In fact, Warner “jumped at the chance” to do “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in part because he thought it might help him leave Theo behind. “You want to be able to leave that show and go and do different characters,” he says, speaking by phone from La Jolla. “I don’t want to rely on Theo-isms, so [I need to] go back and get my body re-accustomed to the process [of creating a character].”

It might also help to dim the memory of Theo in the public’s eye. “[This is] for myself, in terms of getting that much further away from what people are used to seeing me do,” Warner says. “With these kind of experiences, the easier it will be finding the character in anything.”

The L.A.-raised actor appeared with Wesley Snipes in the film “Drop Zone” and is in the HBO movies “Tyson” and the upcoming “The Tuskegee Airmen.” Yet during the past decade, he has made several forays into the theater and been glad he did it each time.

In 1988, Warner turned down a film to play the lead role of a troubled teen in the Off Broadway production of the drama “Three Ways Home.” Five years later, he returned to the stage as a drug-dealer named Spoon in a 1993 Chicago production of “Freefall.”

It wasn’t the way Warner’s public was used to seeing Theo. “Because that character was so different [from Theo]--and he wasn’t your every day hat-to-the-back, grabbin’-your-crotch, yo-yo-yo drug dealer--I got a kick out of the audience reactions like ‘Oh my God,’ ” he says.

But playing bad guys is actually less problematic than portraying earnest young men who aren’t all that different from Theo. “Now the question is, when you’re doing something that’s not 180 degrees different, how do you make that [character] different [enough],” says Warner, referring to Shakespeare’s Lysander.

“Theater is like acting class: You never learn too much,” he continues. “It’s like paying your respect to the acting gods.”

Then again, it may also help fend off a certain career anxiety. “When you’ve done a lot of television and some film, there’s still this feeling of wanting to prove yourself,” Warner says. “You want to know, if I never got another TV or film job, could I still hang if I had to do theater?”

Warner, who has directed some episodic television and music videos, also plans to continue that work and hopes doing theater will help him direct for the stage as well. “At some point, I see myself directing theater, so this is also a learning thing,” he says.

“What [often] happens with TV and film directors is that they get so caught up in the technical side, they forget how to deal with an actor,” Warner continues. “With theater, you don’t have to worry about the technical end in terms of camera shots, so it helps you with directing actors.”

Ultimately, though, Warner views the stage experience as an essential rite of passage. “No matter how well you do in film or television, no matter how much money you make, if you can’t do theater, you’re not really an actor,” he says. “Theater is acting in its purest sense.”

SARAH JESSICA PARKER

Sarah Jessica Parker has gone from sharing the stage with a pooch--when she made her 1979 Broadway debut at age 13 in “Annie”--to being one. These days, she’s portraying the title canine of A. R. Gurney’s “Sylvia” at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

Playing a dog may not sound like a glamour turn for a young actress who was, after all, one of the “newest generation of stars” featured in a lingerie lineup on the cover of Vanity Fair’s recent Hollywood issue. But Parker thinks it’s a howl.

“It’s a complicated role and there’s not a lot of material in terms of [what] other actors [have done],” she says in a phone call from New York, where she lives with Matthew Broderick and his border collie-Queensland heeler, Sally. “But it wasn’t as terrifying as I imagined.”

“Forget Lassie, Lad, Rin Tin Tin, Benji, Asta and ever-reliable old Nana,” wrote the New York Times’ Vincent Canby. “I’ve never seen a dog portrait in films or on the stage that quite matches the truth and wit of Ms. Parker’s performance as the part-Lab, part-poodle Sylvia. How she does it, I’m not quite sure.”

At 30, Parker has several TV series to her credit, as well as a range of films, including “L.A. Story,” “Honeymoon in Vegas” and “Ed Wood.” She starred in “Miami Rhapsody” and also has a leading role in the forthcoming “If Lucy Fell.”

Yet she has continued to work on stage and is particularly remembered, for example, for her work in the Off Broadway and Lincoln Center stagings of Jon Robin Baitz’s “The Substance of Fire” in 1992.

Despite her increasingly visible film presence, Parker still believes that the stage offers the thrill and satisfaction of working without a net. “There’s an ongoing challenge that film doesn’t provide by virtue of the fact that you can continue to fix things on film until [the performance] is masterful in everyone’s eyes,” she says. “[Onstage] is the only time an actor truly feels he owns a performance.”

Besides, all that Hollywood time can leave an actor in need of a refresher course. “What’s been the hardest [is] just silly things like projection,” Parker says. “We’re not miked, so you have to remind yourself of the fundamentals.”

Then, too, there’s the roar of the crowd, even with their whispers and candy wrappers. “I’ve not yet had the desire to hit anybody,” Parker says. “With a comedy, you really need the audience. We throw the ball out and they throw it back.”

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. “Sometimes, they don’t throw the ball back,” Parker continues. “We’ve had a few quiet houses where there’s not a peep to be heard.

“That’s the worst,” Parker continues. “You want to tell them: ‘Go home! I’m so sorry that somebody forced you to come to the theater tonight.’ ”

It’s the kind of confrontation a film actor never has to face. “There’s such a sense of hostility from the audience that you really don’t know what to do,” Parker says. “You start doing things that you might not want to remember in the morning. You become desperate for a laugh.”

So, why does she stay? “Even at its worst moments, as terrible as those can be--and I might have a different spin on this if the show had been received poorly--I love it more than I could ever articulate,” says Parker, who has been considering a lot of potential theater projects, including musicals, lately.

“It’s the best place in the world to be.”

KATHLEEN TURNER

She first appears onstage decked out in a mass of blond curls and lacy boudoir wear. The audience begins to whisper, wondering if the insulin-shocked wench they’re watching can really be the famously sultry film actress Kathleen Turner.

Yet as soon as she issues her first words--a throaty plea for “sugar,” in that unmistakably bluesy voice--they know it’s her. Recognition spreads throughout the house.

The play is Jean Cocteau’s “Les Parents Terribles,” billed in the United States as “Indiscretions,” in the successful production currently on Broadway. And according to The Times’ Laurie Winer, Turner “delivers deliciously” the demented logic of her character, “a diabetic, hysteric, neurasthenic shut-in . . . in love with her grown son.”

It’s not a character for a timid actress, but that’s exactly the kind of role that Turner craves. “I’m often too ‘big’ for the screen,” says the actress who first gained widespread public attention for her stint as a scheming seductress in the 1981 noir film “Body Heat.” “I’m always being told to tone it down [or] get quieter.”

Onstage, however, bigger can be better. “I’ve always thought that I was a stage actor, that that would be my career,” says Turner, speaking by phone from New York, where she lives with her husband and daughter. “Films came along and that was nice, but it’s nothing like being onstage in front of an audience, the power and the freedom of it.”

What’s more, finding challenging roles has become even more important to Turner in recent years. “I want the good work,” says the actress, 40, who was nominated for an Oscar for the 1986 film “Peggy Sue Got Married.” “There are many more great roles [in the theater], and I’m getting to that age where I can tackle the really big ones.”

In 1989, in fact, she did just that, in her much-praised Broadway debut as Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Following that, Turner went back to making movies (starring roles in “V.I. Warshawski,” “Serial Mom” and other supporting roles), and though her work in such films has been praised, none of them had the impact of her earlier work.

You’re only as good as your material, and therein lies the problem with film actresses who weren’t born yesterday. “I don’t see many interesting roles for non-sexual objects,” Turner says. “We don’t have the respect for older women’s allure.”

Turner’s solution is to go where the roles are, regardless of the medium. “Most of the characters onstage are quite viable and powerful,” she says. “You have time onstage to get to know the characters, so you must have a more interesting detailed character to present. You really have to know something about the person.”

It’s a challenge that allows an actress to really show what she can do. “You have the time to really dig into the richest little corners of a character, to feel that you’ve gotten this woman pegged,” Turner says. “On film, you never have that luxury. It doesn’t make it any less true, but it does make it less detailed.”

She will, no doubt, return to the big screen, in her own time. “I’m not concerned that they’re going to forget me in six months,” she says. “If I take a year off to do a play, then I will come back when I find a good film.”

MATTHEW BRODERICK

His publicist promises that he will call.

Yes, Matthew Broderick is mega busy these days, but he’ll fit it in. The actor--who has just won the Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk and Tony awards for leading actor in a musical for playing J. Pierrepont Finch in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”--isn’t about to rest on his laurels.

Without missing a beat on “How to Succeed,” right now he’s spending his days in New Jersey, completing the final shooting for his directorial debut, “Infinity,” a film about Manhattan Project scientist Richard Feynman, in which Broderick also plays the starring role.

So, he doesn’t call. He’ll phone tomorrow, his publicist says, “promise, promise, promise.”

Though most of the shooting for “Infinity,” written by Broderick’s mother, Patricia, was completed just before the actor went into rehearsals for “How to Succeed” at the La Jolla Playhouse in September, 1994, there’s still work to be done.

And Broderick, 33, has long tended to set a tough pace--especially since 1982, when he appeared onstage in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and then had 10 films in the can over the next eight years, including “WarGames,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “The Freshman,” opposite Marlon Brando.

“It seems like I either have more work than I can handle or none at all, and I’ve been on a roll since ‘The Night We Never Met,’ ” Broderick told The Times before he went into rehearsals for “How to Succeed” in La Jolla last fall. “A roll, of course, can be a positive thing or a boulder going downhill.”

So, another day passes, he doesn’t call again. “He’s shooting today, a delicate scene with Patricia Arquette,” the publicist reports of her client, who has been seen in such recent films as “The Road to Wellville” and “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.”

“I’ll keep after him. . . .”

It’s hard to get mad at a guy with a good excuse.

Of course, being a nice guy is also Broderick’s shtick, after all, and he knows it. “I think I’ve almost gotten past being typecast as Ferris Bueller,” he said last fall, “but this play isn’t going to help that, because it’s basically the same role.”

Or, as The Times’ Laurie Winer wrote last October when the high-tech Frank Loesser revival opened in La Jolla: “Matthew Broderick uses his famous tentativeness to create a comic timing and a Finch all his own, one whose back-stabbing is a complete pleasure to behold.”

Press time approaches. He doesn’t call yet again. OK, so maybe Broderick isn’t quite as diligent about promoting himself as his window-washer cum schmoozer extraordinaire .

But having two careers takes its toll.

At least he doesn’t miss the curtain.