It’s a ‘Devil’ of a Good Time for One Actor

It is hard to imagine any actor anywhere having a juicier selection of roles over the past 12 months than Jay Fraley has had while starring at the Empire Theater in Santa Ana.

In November 1999 he opened as Jesus in Terrence McNally’s gay passion play, “Corpus Christi.”

Next he was Robert Falcon Scott, doomed Antarctic explorer, in “Terra Nova” by Ted Tally--a role that demanded the heroism, hubris and elicitation of pity and terror that are the classic requisites of tragedy.

Next, treading what may have been virgin Shakespearean turf, he played Kate, the title role in “The Taming of the Shrew”--not as a female impersonator but as a fellow named Kate who gets tamed by a woman named Petruchio in a gender-reversing experimental production.

And since Friday, Oct. 13, an appropriate opening date for an appropriately seasonal play, he has been appearing as Lucifer in Clive Barker’s “The History of the Devil or Scenes From a Pretended Life.” No encumbering horns, pitchfork and spiked tail in this one--just an opportunity to flex all manner of acting muscles as the piece’s protean, many-faced, inevitably evil yet oh-so-human antihero. The play is very sparing, with Barker’s trademark violence and gore while providing a nice dollop of philosophical speculation. It’s a richly entertaining and surprising leapfrog through the history of the devil--and the human race that made him what he is.

For all his recent laurels, probably no actor has been more underpaid than Fraley. He has earned a token stipend of $5 a show while helping set the tone for the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s emergence as Orange County’s most daring ensemble.

Fraley isn’t complaining. He earns his living from a photography and graphics business that he runs from his home in Laguna Beach, a modest but plushly situated stucco house with an ocean view out back. He shares it with two affectionate dachshunds named Spencer and Tracy.

When Fraley, now 40, moved here seven years ago from Los Angeles, he consciously stopped striving for a career as an actor. Having given up the world of his dreams, he gained, in amateur performances done for the love of it, an invigoration of his creative soul.

About 20 years ago he came west from Texas--his family runs a prosperous soda pop bottling business in Abilene--to earn a master’s degree in acting at CalArts in Valencia. Then he joined the vast majority of actors--”lost in the numbers,” as he puts it, fighting 200-to-1 odds at auditions, getting typecast as too boyish-looking for villain parts and not handsome enough for hero parts, foraging for what was available in tiny theaters that put on fringe plays by fringe writers.

Fraley had hoped to make it in television and film; the closest he came was a bit part on an obscure, short-lived 1986-87 TV series called “Stingray.” He played a kid freaked out on drugs who screams, tries to point a gun at himself, and is stopped by the hero. No lines, no springboard.

Fraley rekindled an old interest in photography as a necessity; his day jobs before that had included waiting tables and delivering singing telegrams. Contacts in the advertising and modeling businesses brought him to Orange County, and into its community theater orbit.

“I think my skills got better because I got to play leads and major parts in better shows and I wasn’t scrambling for leftover biscuits, which is what was happening up in L.A.,” he said.

Dave Barton, artistic director of Rude Guerrilla, needed a villain in a hurry last year when an actor dropped out of his revival of “ ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” John Ford’s post-Elizabethan blood-bath drama. Fraley came highly recommended by Sharyn Case, a veteran director on the local community theater scene. He had seen Fraley in comedies at the Theatre District in Costa Mesa and at the Huntington Beach Playhouse. Sure he was good, but he seemed too nice, too endearing, to play the malevolent plotter needed for “ ‘Tis Pity.”

“He came in and it was amazing how this person had transformed from Mr. Nice Guy to someone who could slit an old woman’s throat,” Barton recalled. “That’s when I realized, ‘Oh my God, I’ve found somebody who’s really good.’ ”

Barton and Michael Piscitelli, a Los Angeles actor-producer who has played opposite Fraley and cast him in three shows at small Los Angeles theaters, agree that not only can he carry a production as its star, but is an ensemble-conscious team player who helps make everybody else better.

Said Piscitelli: “A lot of actors are out for their own and don’t really listen to the other actors. Jay really listens to you; if you say something differently one night, he picks up on it and goes with it. You can automatically trust him on stage, that he’s going to give you what you need to feed your character.”

Fraley’s mercurial year in the Empire spotlight has given him an array of modes to play.

Passion for a cause drove him as Jesus in “Corpus Christi.” For Fraley, a gay man, the play’s simple, straightforward argument that homosexuals are equal inheritors of God’s love and the protections of Christian morality was essential in the wake of the gruesome hate-crime killing of college freshman Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.

“I was angry and devastated,” he says, and acting in the play was an outlet--although going through an agonizing crucifixion scene each night--with its parallels to Shepard’s death--was “horrific.”

Fraley was called on to die horribly again, this time in frozen Antarctic wastes, as the gallant explorer Scott in “Terra Nova.” He was the linchpin of a gripping production of a marvelous, devastating play.

“I put [Scott] up there with Willy Loman as one of the great, well-written tragic characters of theater,” Fraley said. “There’s so much going on in Scott, all this guilt and determination to bring his men back alive, his pride, his need to win at all costs. There’s so many conflicting emotions, so many layers.”

Now that it’s Halloween season, Fraley is masquerading as a particularly subtle Satan. Barker’s script imagines Lucifer pleading his case before a fantastical but earthly court: If he can persuade the jury that he has not been the prime instigator of evil, but merely an interested onlooker observing humans doing what comes naturally, he will get what he wants most--the right to return to heaven.

Fraley loves the epic sweep of the play, and the protean array of guises he gets to wear as Lucifer.

“The tragic thing about [Barker’s] devil is that in the very core of his personality he’s innately bad, but doesn’t know it. The joy of playing the devil is all that misguided charm and manipulation. He’s so charismatically evil. The devil is wildly fun to play.”

Though he grew up in a religious family in the Bible Belt, Fraley escaped the hellfire brand of preaching. He attended a “fairly liberal and open-minded” church where “you studied the Bible and it was educational.”

He said he would not have taken the lead role in “Corpus Christi” if he had thought the play was revising Christian doctrine to argue that the historical Jesus was gay; for him that would have been “inappropriate, though not offensive.” Clearly, he said, McNally’s work was intended as an exercise in metaphor, not iconoclasm.

On top of all the challenges of playing Lucifer, Fraley has to spend what seems like a small eternity during the final scene naked.

He had appeared in varying states of undress in one previous play, “Men’s Singles,” which is set in a locker room, but in that one he’d had two other equally unclad actors for company. In “The History of the Devil,” it’s Lucifer alone who is stripped bare in the end.

“I guess I was nervous the first rehearsal, but I was OK after. I don’t think about it in the show. We were toying with whether or not to do the nudity [which is in the script] and I kept saying, ‘It would be so shocking, so surprising if we do it just full on. To have him vulnerable and exposed adds a certain level of sympathy for the devil at that moment. It shows him at his most human.’ ”

Fraley is eager to go to greater extremes with Rude Guerrilla--and he said they are in the offing in the 2001 season. The role he most covets is a British heroin addict in “Shopping and . . .,” by Mark Ravenhill, set to open in February. “It’s really rough theater, dark, dark, hard theater.”

The Empire’s resident company, he said, “can take risks and chances, do provocative, thought-provoking, in-your-face theater that makes people go, ‘Wow, what did I just see? I want to think about that.’ Sometimes people walk out because they’ve been offended or their minds have been challenged. I like that, and I’m not going to get that anywhere else.”

SHOW TIMES

“The History of the Devil or Scenes from a Pretended Life.” Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Through Nov. 12. $12-$15. (714) 547-4688.