In the Key of Very Sharp

Donald Sutherland has a piano lesson at 6 p.m., and he is not wearing a watch. Are we in trouble here? Among the actors capable of wounding you with a withering stare for making them late, Sutherland would be right up there with the withering elite, except that the longer you are with him, the more it’s plain he means you no harm and is probably not going to worry too much about the time anyway.

Endowed with a face and mien that can suggest chilly superiority or the hidden rites of Walpurgis Night, underneath he reveals himself to be solicitous, intellectual and kind. And he would like to see your Volvo if you own one--perhaps just to make sure it’s as good as he says they are in all those commercials. (He owns two.)

Shards of Donald Sutherland from 101 movies are loose in the national imagination, pieces of “Klute” and “MASH” and “Ordinary People” and “Kelly’s Heroes” and “Outbreak.” But he comes now to our attention as a movie star returning to the stage, with the approaching opening of the American premiere of a new French play, “Enigma Variations,” by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, at the Mark Taper Forum. If that qualifies as an event to those curious about the sometimes tenuous connection between the city’s flagship art theater and Hollywood, it qualifies to Sutherland as only incidental information, something to which he has given little or no thought.

“It was my wife’s idea,” he says simply about the decision to make his Los Angeles stage debut now at 63, returning to the theater for the first time since appearing on Broadway 18 years ago in Edward Albee’s short-lived adaptation of “Lolita.”

That he has never even seen a play at the Taper (as best he can recall) might say the usual something about the gulf between the movies and the theater in Los Angeles, but Sutherland says no. Instead, he says, “What does it say about me? All I can tell you is that I’m a performer. I perform.”

It seems he did go to the theater in Paris, where he has lived in recent years and where he and his third wife, Francine Racette, the French Canadian actress, saw “Enigma Variations” and acquired the English-language rights (now shared with producers Emanuel Azenberg and Duncan Weldon).

The two-character drama tells the story of a meeting between a reclusive Nobel Prize-winning novelist (Sutherland) and a journalist (Jamey Sheridan) who has ventured to a remote island in the Norwegian Sea to interview him. And the enigma of the title, itself taken from a piece of music by British composer Edward Elgar, refers to . . .

“If you knew, then it wouldn’t be an enigma, would it?” Sutherland says, only half-joking. “In the Elgar piece there are 14 variations based on a familiar tune, but no one has ever been able to pin it down. You think you have it, and it’s gone.”

Gordon Davidson, artistic director at the Taper, is a little more forthcoming when he says, “the enigma is the riddle of love and passion.”

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It strikes you that Sutherland is not being coy or perverse so much as he is someone whose pursuit of art, philosophy, nutrition and acting does not leave much space for plot summaries. He would rather talk about the charm of a letter Bertolt Brecht once wrote about Charles Laughton or the harrowing account in George Orwell’s diaries of watching a man hanged that turned Orwell against capital punishment. That sort of thing. Or his admiration for Gary Cooper.

“It’s not possible to describe it,” Sutherland says about “Enigma Variations.” “Stanislavsky said--and I don’t agree with him necessarily--that you should be able to describe a play in one sentence. This one you can’t do.”

For one thing, there’s the matter of it being a new play, in translation by Jeremy Sams. “French has a tendency to be more cerebral,” Sutherland, who is Canadian, notes, “and this is an attempt to turn it into something more available for an American audience. It’s really a work in progress. But can you really call it that? It’s a translation in progress.”

Schmitt, the author, teaches philosophy and has also written plays about Freud and Diderot. “It’s a really interesting play. Its ideas are interesting. And it’s nice to be a part of that, subservient to the intellectual process. And it’s fun.”

He chose for director the French Canadian Daniel Rousell, whose work he had seen and admired in Paris. “So he has both languages and is in contact with the writer and is able to bridge the two sensibilities.”

He can’t help remembering the time some years ago friends of his wife, in Paris, tried to cast him in another new play being readied for translation. “I went and looked at it and said, ‘There’s no way this play is going to run,’ and I said, ‘What is the title again?’ They said, ‘La Cage aux Folles.’ I said, ‘It will never work in the United States.’ So, I decided to go with my wife’s opinion this time.”

Jamey Sheridan, remembered as the star of John Sayles’ only TV series, “Shannon’s Law,” was originally cast in the role of the journalist, then dropped out to pursue a TV pilot. Bruce Davison was announced as his replacement. “We like each other a lot, Bruce Davison and myself,” Sutherland says, “but we rehearsed four days and he said, ‘It’s not going to work for me.’ He and the director were going different ways. He had real guts, let me tell you. He said, ‘Listen, it’s better that we stop. I’ve done it before, and I don’t want to end up onstage feeling uncomfortable.’ I just sat in awe of him. How does he know that?”

By this time Sheridan was available again and agreed to come back. “We’re kind of a week behind in rehearsals,” Sutherland says, “but it’s like Geoffrey Rush’s character says in ‘Shakespeare in Love’--it works out.”

When successful movie actors take time out from the big money of films do a play for, say, $1,000 a week, they often cite a desire to get back to their roots and experience the raw intimacy of theater again. But for Sutherland this is not going to be a returning-to-where-it-all-began story or anything like that, he makes clear after ordering a cup of tea in a booth at a Santa Monica hotel restaurant. He has picked hot tea because the iced tea here “is all kind of flowery, isn’t it?” he asked the waitress. Although it is technically his day off, he put in a session with Rousell this morning, and he looks bushed and cold, with a sweatshirt wrapped loosely around his neck over a winter coat and a suit.

“It began in a movie theater in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. I was 16, and I wanted to be an actor. I didn’t particularly want to be a movie actor because that was beyond conception when you come from a town of 5,000 people in Nova Scotia. Hollywood, because it created those fantasies for you, couldn’t be a place your ordinary self could have a connection to. These were people who were not knowable. But it did begin with the movies. The perception of drama began with the movies.”

Later, he won acclaim acting in the theater at the University of Toronto and after studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, went on to work in English repertory companies before joining the globe-trotting profession of films and filmmakers. “It’s not been that theater was my first love. My first love was just to be an actor. I was kind of dumb and cowish, and I didn’t think movies were something I could ever be part of. I don’t know why I presumed that the theater would be. It was more ordinary, I suppose. And certainly cost less. But making movies is what I do. That’s where my skill lies. My real skill lies in dubbing. That’s what I do best.”

Dubbing? “It’s just something that I can do. A lot of performers don’t enjoy doing it. But I love doing it, and I do it very well. I can do pages at a time. I luxuriate in it. I’m vain about it. You’re improving it, satisfying the director, you’re part of the final sculpting process, of this sculpted piece of work.”

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This perhaps explains why he cites as his hero and mentor, not an actor or director but Alberto Giacometti, the Swiss-born sculptor. But it does not explain why he has not bothered to see the completed versions of most of his films. He says he has seen “Ordinary People.” But he claims never to have seen “Klute,” the terrific 1971 thriller for which his co-star and former paramour Jane Fonda won an Academy Award. “My wife has seen it. She tells me I’m good,” he says.

“The other thing I would have loved to have been was a singer. I can’t sing a note. But the closest I can come to it is to go into a studio and Volvo gives me a lot of time and they let me do take after take of these things, and I just love it. Love it.”

And he has been the voice of Volvo for how many years now?

“I don’t know,” he says. “A while.”

Sutherland’s latter-day image as a heavy is understandable to anyone who remembers “Eye of the Needle” (1981), in which he played a Nazi spy coolly dispatching victims with a spring-loaded knife up his sleeve. Or the more recent “Outbreak” (1995), cast as a blackhearted U.S. Army general determined to fire-bomb a California town where a deadly virus was spreading. But these performances evidently have obscured to people in Hollywood his ability to play other, less villainous roles, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

It is dismaying to hear him tell how he had to fight a battle to win the role of famous Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman in Robert Towne’s 1998 film “Without Limits,” about the late Olympic distance runner Steve Prefontaine. The film (unlike “Outbreak”) was well reviewed, and more than a few critics thought Sutherland was great in it and might have picked up an Oscar nomination had the movie not disappeared so quickly from the nation’s screens. The National Society of Film Critics did name him best supporting actor runner-up to Bill Murray in “Rushmore.”

“They didn’t want me to be part of the scheme of selling it,” Sutherland says about the ad campaign for the movie that many thought was not one of Warner Bros.’ finer marketing moments. “They thought I would put off younger people.” Instead they tried to sell it as a love story between Prefontaine and his college girlfriend, a theme that was secondary in the script.

But even Towne was initially skeptical that Sutherland could do the part, he says. After reading the script, Sutherland prevailed upon Towne, the author of “Chinatown” and “Personal Best,” to meet with him, then insisted on reading for him. “He said, ‘I can’t ask you to read for me.’ I said, ‘Let me read.’ I read for two to three hours, and I did, I thought, quite well. I said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘I thought it was terrific, really great.’ So I said, ‘You think I can do it, then?’ He said, ‘No.’

“I said, ‘God, why not?’ He said, ‘Because audiences look at you as a killer, as a mean person, as a bad man. And I don’t think we can get over that.’ I said, ‘Trust me.’ ”

In the end Towne did trust him, even if the studio didn’t. (He will next be seen on film in “Instinct,” to be released in June, playing a psychiatrist who helps Cuba Gooding Jr. figure out what demons have overtaken a murderous anthropologist played by Anthony Hopkins.)

“Completing a character in a movie,” he says, “is like making the algebraic formula for defining the area of a curve. You know, you break it into tiny pieces. I have to give the director a lot of information, and then it’s his character and he makes the film. I give him 1,000 pieces and he takes 750 of them and out of that molds a character. I have to hope that I’ve been selective enough and created a relationship with the director such that he has enough respect for me that he will be beholden to the truth that I’ve been pursuing. And sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t.”

Isn’t that the appeal of the theater to an actor, that when he is out there in front of the audience, no one is controlling his performance but him?

“You can be tired,” he says. “There are those bad nights. But there are also wonderful nights. And there are certainly a lot of bad movies.”

He asks for the time now. The piano lesson looms. He took up the piano only recently, for a scene in the play. “All I know how to play are scales, but I’m getting fast.”

“I did ‘Lolita’ the last time,” he says, returning to the subject of the theater. “And I thought it was, in fact, the last time, but it turned out not to be. No, it was wonderful. My wife would come to the theater every night and we’d go have dinner and I had the days off. I had a wonderful time. It just didn’t come together.”

As things sometimes don’t. “No, they don’t. No matter what Geoffrey Rush says. Didn’t you love that movie? I think Tom Stoppard is so lovely.”*

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* “Enigma Variations,” Mark Taper Forum, May 6-June 13, Tues.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 7:30 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 2:30 p.m. $29-$40. (213) 628-2772.