Father on One O.C. Stage, Daughter on Another

Rene Auberjonois says he no longer feels so fatherly while watching his daughter, Tessa, follow in his distinguished footsteps. Instead, he feels like a professional colleague, free to analyze, critique and enjoy a fellow actor’s performance without turning into “a nervous wreck.”

Auberjonois won a 1970 Tony Award for supporting actor opposite Katharine Hepburn in the musical “Coco.” He’s most widely recognized for playing Clayton Endicott III on “Benson” and Odo on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”

His daughter, three years out of the Yale School of Drama, is beginning to win strong notices of her own--most recently at South Coast Repertory in the world premiere of Annie Weisman’s “Hold Please,” which concerns four women clinging to jobs at the bottom of the corporate ladder. She plays Erika, a sexy young telephone receptionist who rides out personal and workplace crises.

Father and daughter never have acted together, but tonight will display their talents simultaneously miles from each other at two venues in Orange County. Tessa will be at South Coast, where “Hold Please” runs through Oct. 21. Rene will have a one-nighter at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, playing two upper-crust WASP characters in A.R. Gurney’s “Ancestral Voices.” The cast also includes former “Wonder Years” star Fred Savage. (“Ancestral Voices,” again with Auberjonois and Savage, also is booked at Fullerton’s Plummer Auditorium on Jan. 19, 2002).

Rene, 61, says his transition from nervous stage daddy to impressed peer was completed last year when he saw Tessa play the title role in William Wycherley’s 17th century comedy “The Country Wife” at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.

“I was sitting there and suddenly I wasn’t a parent watching a child. I was watching a fellow professional.” Rene says he underwent the same parent-to-peer transformation with his son, Remy, last summer while watching him in Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters” at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival.

Father and daughter spoke in separate telephone interviews on Monday from Rene’s home in Los Angeles. Tessa, 29, shares an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with her brother, who is two years younger. While working at South Coast over the past two months, she has been spending Mondays--her day off--visiting her folks. Judith Auberjonois, wife of Rene, mother of Tessa and Remy, writes about theater and has produced radio plays for L.A. Classic Theatre Works.

Rene Auberjonois says he knew acting was his destiny from the age of 6, when he first heard an audience’s applause in a school play. Of his two children, he says, it was Remy, not Tessa, who was the born actor. It just seemed a fait accompli that Remy would be an actor, Auberjonois said. Father and son performed together on occasion, including a 1988 episode of “L.A. Law.” Tessa, meanwhile, was considered the dancer of the family.

“My brother was sort of a ham, and I was very shy. I still am shy,” she said. “I wanted to be doing what my brother was doing. I always sort of struggled with that.” In 1984, when she was 12, she and Remy appeared together in “Dead End Kids,” a drama about nuclear power that the New York City troupe Mabou Mines performed at the Mark Taper Forum.

She says she wanted to pursue acting then, but her parents were leery about taking the children on professional auditions. She continued ballet training until she was 16, when a year away from her family at a dance school in New York convinced her that she wanted to have a more normal life.

She returned to Los Angeles to finish high school and began acting in school plays. Rene says it took him by surprise when acting emerged as Tessa’s chief interest during her undergraduate years at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

Tessa says that their relationship as actors deepened during the summer of 1997, when her father went from being just her dad to a valued mentor. She was at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, playing Viola, one of the lead roles in “Twelfth Night,” and she was disappointed with her performance. Until then, she said, when her parents came to see her perform, she would ask what they thought and they usually would just tell her how nervous they felt.

This time, Tessa and her father went for an eight-hour hike through Zion National Park, discussing her work in “Twelfth Night,” where it had fallen short, and what she might do about it.

“I really trust and respect the aesthetic and taste of the people in my family,” she said. “We can share our opinions, and it can be very honest.”

Rene says it works both ways: “[Tessa and Remy] are very good at pointing out when I fall back on tricks I’ve learned over the years.”

The challenge of the father’s and daughter’s current stage roles are very different. Rene plays a grandfather who collapses into alcoholism and aimlessness when his wife leaves him for his best friend.

“He’s someone who obviously has been so full of life, and then the rug is pulled out from under him,” said Rene, who played the same roles--the grandfather and the betraying best friend--during the six-week West Coast premiere run of “Ancestral Voices” last year at the Falcon Theatre in Burbank.

As Erika in “Hold Please,” Tessa plays a likable but unpromising character who seems about to be swept under by assorted woes, including a crumbling affair with her boss. “It was very difficult for me to navigate my way through the play at first, because it does take so many twists and turns. The character seemed to be responding in ways that didn’t seem logical to me.” Then she realized that playwright Weisman “was writing about the fact that girls go through these phases where they do dumb things in relationships, but then they learn what they’re doing and move on. That’s where [the character’s] resiliency comes from.”

Nowadays, Tessa says, she reads scripts with an eye toward finding something she and her father might play together. They say the Colorado Shakespeare Festival was interested in having them play King Lear and Cordelia last summer, but Rene said scheduling problems made it impossible.

Tessa is keen on David Auburn’s “Proof,” which won this year’s Tony Award for best play as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It concerns a 25-year-old woman’s relationship with her father, a brilliant but unstable mathematician who has passed on to her his genius, as well as a touch of his madness.

“It’s sort of a mentorship that they have,” she said. “They’re very close, and she sort of lives in his shadow. Not that I feel I live in [her own father’s] shadow, but when you choose to go into the same profession as your parent there are certain things that come up, and they are dealt with in the play. That really spoke to me.”

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“Ancestral Voices,” tonight at 8, Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $26-$32. (949) 854-4646. Also Jan. 19 at Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton. $22.50-$27.50. (714) 278-3371.

“Hold Please,” at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 and 7:45 p.m. Ends Oct. 21. $21-$51. (714) 708-5555.