The ‘Collected’ Works of Kandis

Kandis Chappell smiles easily, although she’s just been asked a potentially embarrassing question.

Why, despite her unforgettable performance in “Collected Stories,” currently on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory, and her formidable reputation as an actor’s actor, won’t she be going east with the play for its New York premiere later this season?

“It’s the name game,” she said in a recent interview, not for a moment showing the least discomfort or letting it interfere with her hearty appetite for scrambled eggs.

“My feeling is that it’s possible I could go. But it doesn’t matter how I feel about it, because I have no say at all.”

For Chappell, a three-time winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, the suggestion that she might actually be entitled to re-create her role sounds totally beyond the pale. This time she doesn’t smile; she laughs out loud.

“As my mother always said, ‘Don’t waste your energy on things you can’t do anything about.’ This is such a business, that as much as I hate that, a part of me understands why theaters operate that way. A name draws. SCR--bless their heart--did not hire me because of a name. Occasionally people who work here have one. But it’s not because of that they get hired here.”

So when the Manhattan Theatre Club mounts “Collected Stories,” she could be doing other things--notwithstanding the backstage gossip that MTC executives who came to see SCR’s production “absolutely loved” her performance.

As critically praised as Donald Margulies’ engrossing two-character drama has been, Chappell’s wrenching portrait of a declining, celebrated Greenwich Village author who teaches writing has been even more acclaimed. It’s fair to say, moreover, that without the wry emotional concentration she brings to her role, “Collected Stories” would be less deeply etched.

Chappell remains one of the busiest, if not most famous, actors in American theater. Over the past 15 months, her jampacked schedule has kept her traveling up and down the West Coast and back and forth across the country. She went from the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth comedy thriller “The Doctor Is Out” at San Diego’s Old Globe to Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle to the Broadway premiere of “Getting Away With Murder” (“Doctor,” revised and renamed) at the Broadhurst Theatre, with only a one-day break between each production.

After three weeks off last January, due to “Murder’s” chilly reception and abrupt closing, it was back to the Old Globe for “Private Lives” and, again with only a day off between shows, on to Boston for Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” at the Huntington Theatre. SCR’s “Collected Stories” immediately followed.

When this show closes Sunday, she’ll take another one-day break before starting rehearsals for “Arcadia,” previewing Jan. 5 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, in a different role from the one she played at the Huntington.

“I have a career that all my friends would kill for,” Chappell said. “I can pay my rent, but let’s see. . . . What else?”

She looks pensive. Her union benefits at Actors Equity are good for health care; her retirement pension will be worth “a pair of new shoes every year for the rest of my life.”

“I work all the time. I can’t work more than I do, and I can’t make any more money than I do. In New York my pay would go up, but my expenses would go up too. So I’m stuck.”

Verging on 50, Chappell has no illusions about life in the theater.

“I wish I was getting paid $2,000 a week. But once you’re hooked on acting, this is what it’s all about. One morning I woke up, and my dream had come true. I’m not sure I recognized it right away, but this is what I wanted to be doing.”

She is happy to have Broadway credits, of course, including a nine-month run in Neil Simon’s “Rumors” during the early ‘90s. Those earnings partially paid for a house in San Diego that she hasn’t been able to live in yet because she’s so often on the road.

Still, she said, “I don’t think I’ve done my best work in New York.”

Where, then?

“Here, at South Coast Rep.”

*

Chappell’s favorite role--”first and foremost, without having to think about it”--is the British housewife Susan who gradually descends into madness in Alan Ayckbourn’s “Woman in Mind” (1992); her second is brash American poet Joy Davidman Gresham, who goes to Oxford and falls in love with C.S. Lewis in William Nicholson’s “Shadowlands” (1993); her third is the dual role of unhappy Celia and her irrepressible servant, Sylvie, in Ayckbourn’s “Intimate Exchanges” (1993).

Her performances in “Woman in Mind” and “Shadowlands” won LADCC prizes. She doesn’t even mention the role of Elizabeth Proctor in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” (1988), also at SCR, for which she won her first LADCC award. But then, she doesn’t much listen to critics.

“I have to couch this carefully, because I don’t want to offend any of them,” Chappell said. “I don’t read reviews, and I don’t need the critics to tell me when I’ve got it right. I usually know.”

Proceeding with more candor than diplomacy, she added: “The audience and I decide if it’s right. Not that I pander to an audience. But who the hell else am I doing it for, if not the audience? Otherwise I can go into a room and do it all by myself.”

* “Collected Stories” runs through Sunday at South Coast Repertory, Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. today through Friday; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. $18-$39. (714) 957-4033.