A High Flight, a Rough Landing, a New Blue Sky

Many actors struggle for years, waiting tables until that breakthrough role comes their way. For Alec Mapa, the dream role came first, followed by years of wondering if he’d ever make a living acting again.

Cast fresh out of college in David Henry Hwang’s Tony-winning “M. Butterfly,” Mapa followed B.D. Wong in the co-starring role of Song Liling--a French diplomat’s Chinese lover who passes himself off as a woman--on Broadway and on tour, from 1988 to 1991.

It was a young actor’s fantasy gig. “Everything was a free ride for three years,” recalls the gregarious and outgoing Mapa, during an interview at the Mark Taper Forum.

But the “M. Butterfly” ride didn’t last forever. “It was nonstop for three years and then everything just stopped,” Mapa says. “I had a series of really horrible things happen after the tour.

“I was in an awful, awful relationship and I got dumped,” he continues. “I had hired a friend to handle my money who totally screwed me. And then my mother died. All within the space of six months.”

It was a comedown for which the young actor was understandably unprepared. “Having everything go my way [so early on] taught me nothing about survival,” he says. “I didn’t know the first thing about getting a job or having to take care of myself.”

Fortunately, Mapa learned. And now he’s making hay out of those tough times, in a solo show titled “I Remember Mapa.” The piece, directed by playwright Chay Yew, will be performed on a double-bill with Sandra Tsing Loh’s “Depth Becomes Her,” at the Taper, Too, opening Friday.

“A lot of the show is about what happens after you get what you want,” says Mapa, a young-looking 32-year-old with a clean-cut appearance, a firm handshake and a beeper on his belt. “Everybody has all these survival stories about auditions and having to get by, but all my survival stories happened after I’d been working.”

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Born and raised in San Francisco, Mapa is a first-generation Filipino American. He traces his interest in performing to his father’s fascination with certain Hollywood films--a taste the elder Mapa acquired while serving in the Philippine armed forces during World War II.

“The soldiers had cans and cans of American films,” Mapa explains. “But because the Japanese occupied the Philippines, no new American movies were allowed to come in. So he watched the same ones over and over again.”

Later, the elder Mapa passed on his love of these films to his son. “He used to take me to all the revival houses and we’d watch all these Fred Astaire musicals,” Mapa says.

“It was a great escape for me, too--not because I was hiding from a war, but because I was such a big queen in school and all the kids would make fun of me.”

The on-screen world also pointed Mapa toward his future. “I think my desire to perform came from that fantasy life, from wanting to live in a world which empowered me,” he says.

In 1983, Mapa moved east and enrolled as a theater major at New York University. He began to work professionally in his junior year, performing in cabarets, as well as on-screen in the film “Bright Lights, Big City.”

Mapa graduated in 1987 and was cast, almost immediately, in “M. Butterfly,” which he began performing in 1988. All went well for the next three years, until the tour ended in 1991.

Newly unemployed, Mapa moved home to attend to family matters in the wake of his mother’s death. But once the trauma had passed, he returned to settle in L.A.

“When I moved back to L.A., I had nothing to focus on anymore, and I just became completely depressed,” Mapa recalls. “I found myself at square one, having to start over again.”

He had thought “M. Butterfly”--in which he was seen in L.A. at the Wilshire Theatre in 1991--would open doors. “I had this idea in my head that ‘M. Butterfly’ was just going to do it for me,” he says. “It didn’t work that way at all.

“Certain things never occurred to me, like this is a TV and film industry town,” he continues. “It was hard to get industry people to come see me in the show.”

Mapa began waiting tables at the California Pizza Kitchen in Encino to make ends meet, but even that made him feel worse. “At least once a week, somebody would recognize me from the show,” he says. “I had thousands of fans and they all had lunch in Encino.”

Mapa also continued to audition, but he just wasn’t clicking with casting agents and others. In retrospect, he thinks it was partly a matter of his own frame of mind.

The solution proved to be a matter of attitude adjustment. “I started concentrating on the acting,” Mapa says. “It became more important to give a good audition than to get the job.”

Sure enough, that worked. “Things started to turn around again when I got Chay’s play [“A Language of Their Own”] at the Public,” says Mapa, referring to the spring 1995 production of the Yew work. “It brought back so much self-confidence.”

Mapa’s association with Yew continued with the East West Players’ production of “Half Lives,” for which the actor won a 1996 Ovation Award. And the two artists have teamed up again for “I Remember Mapa,” which was given a workshop performance at East West in September 1996.

“It’s just been this little seed that everybody’s nurtured,” says Mapa of his first solo show. “I never really looked at it as anything more than therapy for me. But this is an opportunity to be seen the way I wish to be seen, using all my talents.”

* “I Remember Mapa” and “Depth Becomes Her,” Taper, Too at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends April 20. $15. (213) 628-2772.