Addressing Unfinished Business

The living-room walls of his Los Angeles home are lined with books on theater, cowboy culture, yoga, comparative religion, music and myriad other topics both classic and contemporary. Joseph Conrad keeps company with Ambrose Bierce, Anton Chekhov with Elias Canetti, Glenn Gould with Pogo.

This is not the library of a single-minded man. But it does offer a glimpse at the vast and varied intellectual appetite of actor-playwright Mark Harelik.

For nearly two decades, Harelik has been seen on the stages of many of America’s finest theaters, and he is considered one of the best by those who should know. Old Globe Theatre artistic director Jack O’Brien calls him “the quintessential leading man”; former La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff dubs him “a star of the stage.”

Yet Harelik is every bit as much, and perhaps even more, a playwright. His 1985 play “The Immigrant,” despite mixed reviews, was one of the most widely produced plays of the early 1990s. It was also, in a way, only the beginning of Harelik’s writing career.

His sequel, “The Legacy,” opens Saturday at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. The second installment in the actor-writer’s autobiographical trilogy, the story has at its heart a fictionalized version of the life of Harelik’s father (played by the playwright), who attempts to hold together his family and ensure that the practice of Judaism is passed on to his son.

Set in 1962, “The Legacy” is the story of a clan in crisis, but it is also a meditation on the anatomy of faith--a field of inquiry that’s one of Harelik’s passions.

“I’m fascinated by religion in general--what part of our psyche demands it,” says the magnetic actor. “I am eager to write about why faith fails and what kind of a mind believes or must believe in something.”

In so far as “The Legacy” works on two levels and more, it’s also an apt reflection of Harelik’s versatility. “He is the kind of artist that America doesn’t quite know how to embrace,” says O’Brien. “It’s the embarrassment of riches: that he is so accomplished in so many different areas.

“How many do we know who can write nationally affecting plays, sing, scale classical heights, make a living in network TV sitcoms and still remain enthusiastic, committed, centered? He’s just larger than life.”

‘The Immigrant” tells the story of Harelik’s paternal grandfather, Haskell Hareelik, a Russian Jew who immigrated to Texas and settled in the small Baptist town of Hamilton in 1909. “The Legacy” captures Harelik’s parents, as well as a pre-adolescent version of the author, at a critical juncture. And a third play, as yet unwritten, will be about Harelik’s father closing down the family business in the late 1980s.

“It’s a Jewish family’s beginning and end of life in a small town,” says Harelik. “It occurred to me that I could use my family to tell a larger story about a part of the Jewish American experience.”

And yet, these family bonds are not the only ties that bind. Harelik’s plays are also united by a common thread of ethical inquiry. Like Arthur Miller, Harelik employs the saga of the common man as a vehicle with which to raise much larger questions about morality and decency.

His plays are also haunted by a keenly American sense, shared by immigrants and minorities alike, of being the cultural Other. In Harelik’s case, it was the result of growing up in the only Jewish family in Hamilton.

Fortunately, Harelik’s childhood also included contact with an extended family. “My father’s parents were the spiritual and physical center of the family,” says Harelik. “Every Sunday all the aunts, uncles and cousins would come to Hamilton and we would have these huge family dinners. We felt like a really solid Jewish family.”

The tide turned, however, when the first generation died. “When that center dropped away, what was lost was that connection back to the old country,” he says. “After they were gone, the attrition of Jewish observance proceeded apace.”

There was nothing at the University of Texas, Austin--where Harelik studied piano before switching to theater--to keep him connected to Jewish life. “When I went away to college, I stopped practicing Judaism,” he says. “I didn’t grow up with Jewish friends. I was never around Jewish girls until college, and I shunned them like the plague.”

After college, Harelik began working at Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria and later at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, which is where he first met O’Brien.

“I’d heard a lot about him,” recalls O’Brien, who first directed Harelik in 1981 and, most recently, as Hotspur in “Henry IV” at the Old Globe in 1995. “He had such an amazing reputation, even at that point, that I came thoroughly prepared to be somewhat resistant to his charm. I walked in to meet him and nearly fell over at the impact of this guy.”

Others apparently had a similar response, for Harelik, 46, has worked pretty much nonstop since then, with starring roles--including those in his own plays--at many prestigious regional theaters. He has worked extensively on TV as well, with recurring roles on such series as “Wings” and “Hearts Afire” and guest spots on “Picket Fences,” “Seinfeld,” “The Practice” and many other shows. He has had key film roles, too, including most notably in “Barbarians at the Gate” and “Upworld.”

Yet the stage remains Harelik’s creative home and the source of his greatest renown. “He has a great deal of charisma and a lot of intelligence, but he’s also very humble and serious about his work,” says McAnuff, who directed Harelik in both “Much Ado About Nothing” and the musical “Elmer Gantry,” in which the actor played the title role. “There are certain actors I’d drive a fair way to see and he’s certainly one of them. We’re lucky to have them in our midst.”

And he’s a mensch. “Mark is incredibly honest and disarmingly open in kind of a heartfelt way,” says “The Legacy” director Laird Williamson, who was Harelik’s first acting teacher in college. “He’s sincere, honest, mischievous. He has a lot of integrity.”

Still, if Harelik’s humanity and intelligence come through in his acting, they are even more evident in his writing. “I went to see ‘The Immigrant’ and again steeled myself with ‘let’s get a grip’ talk and was reduced to tears,” recalls O’Brien, referring to the play’s 1985 Denver Center Theatre premiere.

“That’s no accident,” he continues. “I’m committed to doing whatever Mark wants to do. If he has a role he wants to do, I’ll do it. If he has a play, I will produce it. He has a musical version of ‘The Immigrant,’ and I’m going to produce it.”

Ironically, the approbation sometimes gives Harelik pause. It was, in fact, the success of “The Immigrant” that gave him second thoughts about that play. “Something started niggling at me about the popularity,” he says. “It began to feel like I was fudging the story a little bit. It inspired great feelings of nostalgia, but nostalgia, by definition, is revisionist history.”

Partly in response to these feelings, Harelik wrote “The Legacy,” which premiered in a Gaslamp Quarter Theater production in San Diego in 1995. Arguably his most ambitious work to date, the play is at once intimate and far-ranging, posing the basic question of theodicy, or how a benevolent God can allow pain and suffering.

Prompting this question is the fact that the mother is dying of cancer, while the father does his best to cope. “My father was the guy trying to keep everything together and losing everyone,” says Harelik. “There was no right decision to be made.”

“I’m now older than my father or mother was at that time, and I can see how much they were struggling, innocently, and that every single thing that they attempted to do during that time was a gesture of love.”

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“THE LEGACY,” Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Dates: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 23. Prices: $22-$39. Phone: (619) 239-2255.