OC LIVE : Theater : Moriarty Acts on His Own Now : He Split With Hollywood but Kept Custody of His Principles

Michael Moriarty, last seen telling U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to buzz off, has been doing some buzzing of his own lately--with his cabaret act, replacing Richard Chamberlain in “My Fair Lady” on Broadway, doing the lecture circuit and starring in his own one-man play, “A Special Providence.”

Saturday night the 54-year-old actor will bring “A Special Providence” to the La Mirada Theatre for one performance only.

Moriarty says he’s thrilled to be booked there because “it’s a nice big fat old house” whose size reminds him of the venerable Brooks Atkinson Theatre in New York, where in 1974 he won the best dramatic actor Tony Award for his role as a homosexual hustler in a little-remembered play, “Find Your Way Home.”

Moriarty--a Detroit native, Dartmouth graduate and former Fulbright scholar--has long made it clear he’s no thespian slouch. Remember him on television as the Gentleman Caller in “The Glass Menagerie” or as a Nazi in “Holocaust”? He won a pair of Emmy Awards for those two.

Remember him as the baseball pitcher in “Bang the Drum Slowly” with Robert De Niro? In “Pale Rider” with Clint Eastwood? In “The Last Detail” with Jack Nicholson? In “Report to the Commissioner,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” “Hanoi Hilton” and other movies?

We haven’t even mentioned his three Emmy nominations for the role of assistant district attorney Ben Stone in NBC’s “Law & Order,” which he left last year. He’s no slouch in other departments, either.

Moriarty has written classical music: “Symphony for String Orchestra,” “Psalm for Solo Violin” and “Dance Suite in Six Movements.” He’s a jazz pianist, too, and has played at big-time New York clubs: The Village Gate, Michael’s Pub, Fat Tuesdays and the Cookery. He’s recorded three jazz albums: “Reaching Out,” a compilation of vocals, “The Michael Moriarty Jazz Trio--Sweet’n Gritty” and, most recently, “The Michael Moriarty Jazz Quintet--Live at Fat Tuesdays.”

And are you ready for this?

He’s a published poet, a produced playwright--besides “A Special Providence,” he’s written “Flight to the Fatherland” and “The Ballad of Dexter Creed”--and he’s currently under contract to Simon & Schuster for a pair of mystery novels.

So, with all due respect, why the one-nighter in La Mirada?

Well, it’s politics. In a nutshell, Moriarty contends, politics put him at the head of a Hollywood “blacklist of one.” The big boys won’t hire him, he says, because they regard him as a bad boy. And that’s because of his run-in with Reno back in 1993.

They had a nasty public spat over the issue of media violence. He thinks that the attorney general is out to censor television and that she and other federal government officials are using the issue as a smoke screen.

Moriarty’s resignation from “Law & Order”--to protest what he believed to be network kowtowing to the feds by having him written out of the show--more or less set him on the path to La Mirada.

We caught up with him by telephone the other day. He took the call in his apartment at the Sutton Place Hotel in Toronto, which he considers his home base.

*

Question: Why Toronto?

Answer: I live here now. I still have one foot in New York.

Q: Do people accuse you of being a traitor to your country?

A: Not yet. I’ve heard the terms crazy, paranoid, flaky. But traitor? No. You’re the first.

Q: What is “A Special Providence” about?

A: It tells the story of how William Shakespeare saved my life. It’s an auto-mythography. The infusion of glorious language early in my life was probably what kept me alive. The vitality, the passion and the hunger of Shakespeare’s language in particular clashed with the reserved Midwestern approach to life. That’s what the drama of the play is about.

Q: Whom do you play?

A: I don’t want to spoil it. The characters are Shakespeare, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, a little comic character named Francis Xavier Markham P. Bloom Freely, and me as a young man, Ernest Hart. I do all four roles, but in the guise of William Shakespeare doing them.

Q: Was there some trouble in your life that the glorious language saved you from?

A: Yes. But I want to save the surprise for the play.

Q: Can you tell me anything else about it?

A: The interesting thing is that I thought I’d take “The Divine Comedy” and turn it upside down. It must make me some kind of strange heretic for sure. In “The Divine Comedy,” Beatrice wrangles Virgil into helping Dante. In my version, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets wrangles Shakespeare into helping me.

Q: It’s been said that you should have had a bigger movie career, that you haven’t lived up to your potential. How do you answer that?

A: I’m not a careerist. [Hollywood] painted a career which I was not only unfit for, totally, but had no desire for. It’s a value system I never reached into. I was trained as an actor in England [at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts]. Film glory has always been kind of anathema to the sort of careers that [Laurence] Olivier and [Ralph] Richardson had. So all my instincts couldn’t accept it or the insubstantial material that’s handed to stars to keep their names bigger and bigger. As the material gets too rich, the box office fails--and therefore the star plummets. So to build a career, you have to basically agree to do [expletive].

Q: Your play “Flight to the Fatherland” sounds like it might be political. Is it?

A: Yes, sir. The mother figure in the play says, “Don’t let your father know that this is not a fatherland. It will break his heart.” It’s my theory that any government or any people that calls their land a fatherland will rape and pillage it. Those who treat their land as a motherland may have their problems, like Russia, but they will not destroy it from within.

Q: Do Americans treat the United States as a fatherland or a motherland?

A: I don’t think we’ve decided. I think we think it’s an it , and that’s a precarious position to be in. To me, America is unquestionably a woman. I go so far as to say in “A Special Providence” that the Holy Ghost is a woman. Who else do you think can keep the peace between a father and a son?

Q: What about “The Ballad of Dexter Creed.”

A: That’s a play a clef .

Q: Whose clef ?

A: The drama critic John Simon. I take him apart in a highly metaphysical way. . . . The play is about love, language and fascism. At first I thought it was about a momentary issue between an actor and a critic. On further examination, you see it has to do with freedom and tyranny and how we tyrannize ourselves.

Q: Will you ever make up with Janet Reno?

A: I was just saying today that I have to write Janet Reno a thank-you note. My life has been freed. I am liberated. I’m building my own business. It’s called Michael Moriarty Performances. I have a brochure for entertainment conventions. So I will no longer have to wait around for NBC or 20th Century Fox to say, “Oh yes. He hasn’t been naughty for a while. Now we can hire him again.”

Q: Your fight with the attorney general took you off the entertainment page. But it put you on the front page.

A: Yeah, in a way. My anger was sincere, and no one wants to hear that voice. The issue of so-called media violence is one part of a whole war the federal government is making on the following adult substances: drugs, nicotine, firearms, cults and the newest one, free speech. Free speech is now an adult substance.

Q: Can you elaborate?

A: I’m writing a book called “The Revenge of Dionysus, Memoirs of the American Winston Churchill.” It’s all about American adulthood. People in adulthood should be able to make their own decisions about the substances they take. We fought that battle during Prohibition. America woke up to the fact that the cure was worse than the disease. Now we’re in the middle of a war on drugs. This is where all the violence started. The federal government wants to take people’s minds off the real cause of violence, which was the war on drugs in the 1980s, so they started blaming the television set.

Q: How do you draw that conclusion?

A: We thought at the end of the Cold War that the Iron Curtain had dwindled into history. But what I call the Iron Web has begun to replace it. We’re seeing an insidious, slowly growing power of the state to invade every area of our lives. . . . Americans have been transported by style. They do not hear content. The content is venom. It’s deadly. And the quieter the politicians talk, the more venom is contained. In fact, what is being handed out is the most frightening kind of attitude from the federal government. So I just go ahead and attack the federal government directly.

Q: How do you feel about militia groups?

A: The truth is, I don’t think bullets hurt my enemies deeply enough. My words will hurt them more deeply. And the voters of the American public, when they finally desert the two-party system, will hurt them more deeply. I understand the American militia. The depth of my anger after my treatment [in a private meeting with] Janet Reno was as if I were somehow living in the Soviet Union and she was from the KGB. It took my breath away. And it’s happening all over the country in little back-room meetings, where little gangsters like Sen. Paul Simon [D.-Ill.] with his bow tie is telling the network people what they can and cannot do. [Government officials] are blackmailing an American industry with the threat of unconstitutional attacks.

Q: Where do you stand politically?

A: I’m in opposition to what’s going on in the federal government as deeply as the American militia. But I don’t believe guns will do it. It’s a futile gesture, and I think they know it. No matter how many men they get together, no one is going to be able to overturn the federal government militarily. It’s just an idiotic presumption. But it’s kind of moving: “I’m willing to die to protect my rights.” It’s a self-destructive act of self-respect. And I cannot take that away from them.

Q: Do you think that even if there were another President--not a Democrat or Republican but an independent--that he or she would govern any differently? Wouldn’t the federal government still be ordering us around?

A: I’m as cynical as anyone. But I’m also reading the letters and speeches of Abraham Lincoln. It is possible to have a great human being in office. I’ve seen artists corrupted by Hollywood. There’s not a business in the world that doesn’t offer corruption. But I will not accept the fact that a politician has to be corrupted by politics.

* THEATER LISTINGS, Page F20

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* What: Michael Moriarty in “A Special Providence.”

* When: Saturday, 8 p.m.

* Where: La Mirada Theatre, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada.

* Whereabouts: From the Riverside (91) Freeway, exit at Beach Boulevard heading north. Go left onto La Mirada Boulevard. From Interstate 5, exit at Valley View Avenue heading north. Go right onto Alondra Boulevard, then left onto La Mirada Boulevard.

* Wherewithal: $25.

* Where to call: (714) 994-6310 or (310) 944-9801.