Where There’s a Will, There’s a Whitmore : Theater: Rogers ‘has become a part of me,’ says the actor, who brings his one-man show to Irvine tonight.

A man in his 20s approached James Whitmore not long ago and asked, “Aren’t you the man who said, ‘I never met a man I didn’t like?’ ”

“Well, I did say it. I did indeed.” Whitmore laughed as he recounted the incident. “I’ve been saying it for 26 years. That’s a lifetime. Will Rogers is a part of me now.”

He was talking about “Will Rogers’ U.S.A.,” his perennial one-man show in which he portrays the legendary cowboy, rope artist and pricker of political and social pomposity. Whitmore will do the show tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

He remembers seeing Rogers once on stage. Whitmore was a child, and his father assured him that Rogers indeed was a cowboy.

“I thought that sounded promising.” But Rogers “came out in a blue serge suit, with a newspaper, chewing gum, and he proceeded to talk about politics, which were of absolutely no interest to me as a 9-year-old boy. I thought my dad had let me down terribly.”

He was impressed, however, when banner headlines announced Rogers’ death at 57 a few years later. He also couldn’t help but notice the grief he saw all around him.

Forty years later, when adaptor/director Paul Shyre brought him “Will Rogers’ U.S.A,” Whitmore found Rogers’ words “very wise and very funny. But I didn’t think I could conceivably carry an evening by myself. I had difficulty holding the attention of my family.”

The show did go on, in a small theater in Webster Falls, Mo., and the enthusiastic audience prompted Whitmore to continue.

“I realized immediately that I was in the presence of an extraordinary man. I didn’t realize that until I heard the response of other human beings to him.”

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Was it daunting to re-create Rogers onstage? “Yeah, sure! Well, I find acting a daunting profession anyway. I do not find it a simple task at all. Then, of course, doing an icon onstage, I thought, was not the best scheme in the world.”

He doesn’t use makeup to re-create Rogers. “I do try to get the forelock down,” he said, a reference to the lanky hair that had a habit of falling over Rogers’ forehead. “That’s all I do. And I try to keep my weight down. I’m 74, and fighting it. Oh, I may grunt and scratch a bit where he didn’t, or whatever. I try to find the warts on the man, just to humanize him a little more for myself.”

Whitmore said he has about eight hours of Rogers’ wit and wisdom at his fingertips and that he changes the text of the show each time he does it. They’re all Rogers’ words.

“It’s really just an evening of Rogers talking and touching the minds of other people. Everything but the cracker barrel is there.”

He said he is most pleased when his audiences are young, because most of Rogers’ genius is unknown territory to them.

“Young people come back and say they think I made it up,” he said with a chuckle. “I wish more youngsters knew about Rogers. He was the voice of America, and a real American, an American Indian. He’s not taught in the schools, but of course a lot of things aren’t taught in the schools. Like geography. ‘Where’s Syracuse?’ ”

Whitmore maintains that much of what Rogers had to say is still applicable in the ‘90s. Congress is still, as Rogers said, “a large body surrounded by Standard Oil” and “funnier than any hit show on Broadway.” Rogers also asserted that he was “not a member of any organized party--I’m a Democrat.”

And behind all that, Whitmore said, he has found a feeling of sentiment he considers crucial to hold onto. “Oh, God, we must never lose that heart, no, no. We must never. And that, of course, implies passion, too, which is terribly important. The joy of just bloody well being alive.”

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James Whitmore presents “Will Rogers’ U.S.A.” tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $24 to $32. (714) 854-4646.