Growing Into a Tough Role

‘Ten minutes,” the Pasadena Playhouse stage manager yells out from the darkened auditorium--giving the cast of Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter” a much-needed break. “Bless you . . . can we make it 20?” the lead, Robert Curtis Brown, says, dropping his Oxford accent and throwing a Dinah Shore kiss.

The man, clearly, has been running a marathon--so much so that he woke up with acute laryngitis the day after this 10-hour rehearsal. Adding to the challenge, sweltering conditions prevail onstage where the actor is a virtual fixture.

“This is the biggest part I’ve tackled,” says Brown during a separate interview, enjoying a rare moment of calm at a Santa Monica beach cafe. “I’m on 95% of the time--all but seven to 10 minutes. This isn’t a play in which I can have a cup of coffee between scenes or play a hand of cards.”

In the Pasadena Playhouse production opening today, Brown plays Garry Essendine whom the playwright acknowledged he wrote as an alter-ego role “with the sensible object of providing me with a bravura part.” When “Present Laughter” opened in Blackpool, England, in 1942, Coward played the lead. The play targets the timeless topics of vanity, friendship, and selfishness--as well as the plight of the actor. Written when Coward was 40, it’s also a commentary on middle-age.

The part, Brown, 41, readily admits, is not that much of a stretch. “I feel my youth running out of the hourglass.” he says. “And in Hollywood, you’re viewed differently at 40. During pilot season, I call up my agent who tells me they’re looking for a 22-year-old neurosurgeon. ‘When,’ I ask, ‘did this guy go to school?’ Though I love Ally McBeal, where in the world are the grown-ups?”

George C. Scott was cast in the 1982 Broadway production of “Present Laughter” and Frank Langella in the 1996-97 revival--despite the fact that both were older than Coward intended, according to Richard Seyd, director of the current production. Brown, Seyd believes, is not only age-appropriate but, in many ways, the ideal choice.

“I wanted someone with energy so you can understand why he’s hanging onto his youth,” says Seyd, who first spotted the actor in Costa Mesa in 1997 in a South Coast Repertory production of Alan Ayckbourn’s “How the Other Half Loves.” “I also wanted charm so you can understand why people are drawn to him. Coward loathed seeing the role played like a ‘WASPish tyrant,’ which it usually is in the U.S. As a person, Robert is not only likable but, like Garry, sings and plays the piano. He also went to Yale, which is about as English as you can get.”

Growing up in Pennsylvania’s bucolic Bucks County, Brown started acting in high school. Becoming a professional actor seemed like a longshot, however, so he enrolled in pre-law at Yale. As a freshman, however, he appeared in Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” which led to his first lucky break.

Tom Hulce was leaving the Broadway production of “Equus” and the “Wilderness!” director sent Brown to audition. One month and five callbacks later, he was rejected for being too tall. That he came so close to starring opposite Richard Burton, however, caused him to take acting--and himself--more seriously. Changing his major to theater studies, he starred as Brick in the university’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and appeared in two or three shows a year.

Accepted into the graduate program at the Yale School of Drama, Brown counted Frances McDormand (“Fargo”) and Burton’s daughter, Kate, as classmates. In his third year, he invited five talent agents to watch him as “the juvenile” in George Bernard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” Four wanted to sign him, he says, but he stayed to get his degree.

Five days after graduating in 1982, he was cast as Lysander in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, after which he moved to New York. Three weeks later, he lined up a role in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of David Hare’s “Plenty” which announced a Broadway run the day he showed up for rehearsal. Brown played a Frenchman in the play. (“My agent told them I spoke fluent French when, in fact, I’d just spent a few days in France.”)

Unlike most performers, he never had to struggle, Brown concedes; personally, too, his life has been charmed.

“In 1990, I won $11,000 on the game show ‘Sale of the Century’, “ he recalls. “I also won a trip to Hawaii. It rained nonstop so I flew back early and stayed in L.A. with a director-friend, Robert Egan. We were discussing ‘The Thrill’ which he was doing at Taper, Too [the Mark Taper Forum’s second space] and he decided I had more to say than the actor he’d cast. Monday, I auditioned. Wednesday, I rehearsed. Friday, we opened--and the following year I married Diane Reynolds, the woman playing opposite me.”

Brown’s credits cut across TV (“NYPD Blue,” “Hiller and Diller”), film (“Legal Eagles,” “Bean”), and theater where, in 1994, he played seven different characters in the South Coast Rep’s “Night and the Stars” and a sports addict in Cecilia Fannon’s “Green Icebergs.”

Each medium has its trade-offs, the actor says, which is why he likes the mix. “Theater becomes an actor’s project on opening night, since the director is forced to turn the play over to us,” Brown says. “Still, a week’s work pays about as much as working a few hours in movies. In movies, actors are terrified of handing seven takes over to a director who, in the end, is making the decision.”

With his wire-rimmed glasses and preppy demeanor, the actor has been pigeon-holed as a professional. He played a stockbroker in 1983’s “Trading Places,” his first cinematic outing, and a gay pediatrician in the national tour of Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles” at the Doolittle Theater in 1990. Last fall, he was seen as a lawyer in “Mad About You.”

His favorite project is “Same River Twice,” a small independent white-water rafting film by Scott Featherstone that has yet to find a distributor. Wearing shorts and T-shirt, he says, got him out of a suit and permitted him to “paint with more colors.”

Brown is a romantic comedian who does Cary Grant-type roles, Seyd observes--and shedding his “cool” is a challenge. “He’s got warmth and charm--he just needs to let them breathe, I told him. We worked a lot on that. Acting, incidentally, is a form of therapy, a very sane profession. It’s the marketplace that creates neurosis.”

Though his next move is not yet in sight, the actor is taking it in stride. A popular Mazda commercial that ran a few months ago paid his mortgage for a year. And, as the father of a 3-year-old, with another child due in February, he’s much more relaxed these days.

“Being a parent freed me--all my eggs weren’t in one basket,” Brown says. “And I didn’t stop working the year after my son was born. As one casting director told me, you can smell desperation a mile away . . . and it’s not terribly attractive.”

Right now, the actor is focused on the present, trying to revive strained vocal chords and impatiently awaiting the opening. Though rehearsals can be stimulating, he says, the process is inherently incomplete.

“In comedy--more than drama--you long for the audience,” Brown says. “You’re dying for people to come in. The audience affects the rhythm and tells you what works--it’s another character in the play.”

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“PRESENT LAUGHTER,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Dates: Opens today, 5 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 23. Prices: $13.50-$42.50. Phone: (626) 356-6275, (800) 233-3123.