The Stage Is Her Best Medicine

If CCH Pounder is well-known, it’s largely because she makes a good television doctor.

Nominated last year for an Emmy for her work on “ER,” where she has long appeared in the recurring role of Dr. Angela Hicks, she is also known from Fox TV’s “Millennium,” in which she plays Dr. Cheryl Andrews. But there’s much more to Pounder than lab coats and an authoritative manner.

A veteran of regional and off-Broadway stages, including the New York Shakespeare Festival and Lincoln Center, Pounder has also appeared at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and San Diego’s Old Globe (where she played the title role in “Hedda Gabler” in 1995). She opens tonight in John Henry Redwood’s “The Old Settler” at the Pasadena Playhouse.

The role reunites the actress with Pasadena Playhouse artistic director Sheldon Epps, who staged “Hedda Gabler.” And if the acclaimed San Diego production is any indication, it could prove a fruitful teaming.

“I feel that we have a really strong artistic partnership,” says Epps of his work with Pounder. “I also knew that whoever was going to play [the role of Elizabeth in ‘The Old Settler’] needed a vast emotional range and my work with her certainly told me that she had that. If there’s anything that I most admire about her, it’s that she’s incredibly audacious and courageous. She goes for the strong and unexpected choices, and then really fulfills them as well.”

And she makes it look easier than it is. “The theater is sweat, workout, lines, rehearsals and lots of work for really very little money,” says the charismatic Pounder, flashing her radiant smile. “So you’ve really got to be doing it for a different reason. And that reason is still powerful for me.

“It’s a kind of communion with an audience,” she continues. “I like the boo, the hiss, the cry, the giggles. I really love to hear that. And then what they give you back at the end of the show. It’s very visceral.”

‘The Old Settler” tells the story of Elizabeth and Quilly (Jenifer Lewis), two unmarried sisters in their 50s living in 1940s Harlem. Their lives are upset when they take in a young male boarder who has come to New York to search for an errant girlfriend.

Pounder has played the role of Elizabeth once before, in a production that the O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut sent to Russia as part of an exchange program two years ago. When director Epps approached her to play the part in Pasadena, however, he didn’t know that she’d done it before.

Her interest in returning to the role stems from the challenge it presents in terms of character development. Although Elizabeth is easily recognizable as a certain type of spinster, she must also have depth.

“One of the things about Elizabeth is that she is that epitome of the untouched woman, physically and mentally,” says Pounder. “She has been the nurturer for others: She touches you, she helps you, she cleans for you. Nothing comes to Elizabeth, nothing.”

Similarly, her relationship with the young boarder must develop in ways that are both organic and spontaneous. “In her effort to protect him from this wild child that he is looking for--Lou Bessie, who’s changed her name to Charlemagne, now that she’s made it to Harlem--she tries to let him see that she’s not quite the Lou Bessie that was down in South Carolina,” explains Pounder.

“But her protection steps over the bounds of motherly love and moves on over into something else,” she continues. “It’s subtle, but when it happens, suddenly you’re on the wrong side of the fence. It’s a great challenge to be able to do that without people seeing it coming from the very beginning.”

The way to do that, Pounder has found, is to allow Elizabeth to reveal herself gradually. “It’s got to be certain quirks about her,” she says. “I’m young for the part--I’m [in my] 40s and she’s 55--so I don’t necessarily have the physical presence. I’ve got to add all these little things to create her in me.”

And for those traits to ring true, the actress had to find a way to identify with a character whose life experience is far different from her own. “I’ve been really well-nurtured in my life, but there are areas of starvation, and I can look to those areas, even if they’re professional areas, and have that feeling of longing, and invest that feeling in Elizabeth,” Pounder says.

“There’s memory of when it wasn’t [all good], of the men I had and don’t anymore,” she says. “The one I have now doesn’t negate all the experiences of my past. I can call them to memory very quickly. And some of them I’ve eradicated from memory!”

Artistic challenges such as these aside, though, there was one other reason that lured Pounder back to Elizabeth. “In exchange for doing ‘The Old Settler’ again here, I told Sheldon [Epps] that I want to do a full production of ‘Medea,’ ” says the actress of a quid pro quo that the director acknowledges. “Medea --she’s a stranger in a strange land, and I could really relate to that.”

Carol Christine Hilaria Pounder was born on Christmas Day in Guyana. She is one of six children--all of whom now live in the United States--born to a father who worked in agriculture and a mother who worked first at the U.S. Embassy and later for the Herald Tribune.

“Carol is for Christmas Day, Christine is my godmother, and Hilaria is my grandmother’s name,” says Pounder, explaining the three initials of her professional moniker. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like my name. I just thought that in the industry that I was going into, the strength of ancestors and elders and Christmas seemed to be an appropriate thing, so let’s just put them all together.”

She was educated at a convent school in England, where she first acquired a love of acting. “I was about 15 years old, playing boys,” says Pounder. “I had my head shaved at that time, too, because the nuns really didn’t know how to comb this hair. So I looked pretty much like a young lad. I played lots of ‘Yes, my liege’ and that kind of thing.”

Pounder later moved to the U.S. and attended Ithaca College, where she studied drama. “I was hired the day I graduated, in 1975,” she recalls. “One of the professors at Ithaca had a theater in Maine, and I went there and apprenticed with them. Then somebody from Actors Theatre of Louisville came along and took me to their theater.”

So began a seven-year stretch of working in regional theaters, “from Maine to Milwaukee,” before Pounder wended her way to New York. But by then, her theater-only days were numbered.

Pounder moved to Los Angeles in 1981. In the years since, she worked in TV series--in addition to “ER” and “Millenium” she was nominated in 1996 for a recurring role as agent Lucy Kazdin on “The X-Files.” She also makes a point of staying close to the theater: “I try to do at least one [project] a year,” she says, “but it’s harder and harder.”

Her films include the recent “Face/Off” as well as “Benny and Joon,” “Sliver,” “Postcards From the Edge” and “Prizzi’s Honor.” Yet, in her mind none of those experiences have equaled her starring role in “Bagdad Cafe.”

“I’m sort of a voracious animal, always hungry,” says Pounder. “I just want to have more than one ‘Bagdad Cafe’ in my life. The role was wonderful: You can go to the bathroom and come back and I’m still on the screen. The experience of filming was a kind of cooperative effort where you have input and are really participating.

“I’ve had that in the theater, yes,” she continues. “But I want it in film too, and television as well. It doesn’t mean that I have to pine for it. It just means that I get on with what I have to do, but it’s a nice little shining star to look toward. And one day, you’ll wake up and be there.”

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“THE OLD SETTLER,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Dates: Opens tonight. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m. (except May 17, 5 p.m. only); Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Through June 21. Prices: $13.50-$42.50. Phone: (800) 233-3123.