The Man of a Thousand Hats

If Des McAnuff has learned one thing about Jefferson Mays in the 13 years since they began working together, it’s that this little-known but highly regarded stage actor is often at play when he’s at work.

“With Jefferson, the entire rehearsal process is hysterical,” says McAnuff, La Jolla Playhouse artistic director, who is staging Moliere’s “Tartuffe” with Mays in the title role. “He is as capable of being funny as anyone I know, and he knows that when you’re doing a comedy it’s important to laugh.”

So it was that Mays stalked across an orange-carpeted studio recently, clawing the air and letting out a Jurassic shriek after rehearsing a wild seduction scene. He announced that he would try playing his character, a seemingly pious con man who is one of literature’s great scoundrels, “just a little more reptilian.”

“You do reptilian well,” McAnuff said with a nod. They tried again, and Mays was all slithery, bodice-ripping, feet-off-the-floor sexual ardor--each grope and thrust plunging him further into the trap that Tartuffe’s lust object, Elmire, has set to reveal him for what he is. The scene required Mays to deliver demanding rhymed couplets while engaged in acrobatic exertions--and to shift in a matter of moments from libidinous frenzy to caught-with-his-trousers-down bedroom farce to the venomous rage of a cornered viper.

Yes, being reptilian would seem well within his compass--especially since he already has won over La Jolla audiences by proving himself a remarkable chameleon.

Last summer, during a three-week public workshop production at the playhouse, Mays starred in a one-man tour de force called “I Am My Own Wife.” Outfitted in a black housedress and pearl necklace, he played all 27 roles in Doug Wright’s stage adaptation of the life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a Berliner who outlasted the Nazis and the East German Communists without compromising his determination to live openly as a cross-dressing gay man. Born Lothar Berfelde in 1928, Von Mahlsdorf turned his home into a museum of elegant 19th century furnishings and “decadent” pre-Nazi cabaret culture. With Moises Kaufman (“The Laramie Project”) directing, Mays will perform “I Am My Own Wife” in its premiere next spring at Playwrights Horizons in New York.

“Whether the play is a work of genius or absolute dreck, there’s one thing I know in my soul, and that’s that Jefferson is absolutely astonishing in it,” says Wright, best known for “Quills,” a macabre, Obie-winning fantasia on the last days of the Marquis de Sade. “It’s going to show the breadth and magnitude of his talent. If people don’t know Jefferson Mays, I’m hoping that after [‘Wife’] he receives appropriate acclaim.”

Since his undergraduate days at Yale, Mays, now 36, has focused his existence on the stage. While earning a double-major degree in classics and art history, this hyper-articulate, Connecticut-raised son of a naval officer and a children’s librarian found that what he really loved was acting.

“I’m pretty much always doing theater,” Mays said during a break in rehearsals. “It’s like being in school for life. You’re always immersing yourself utterly in a subject, a period. And you’re thrown together with a bunch of charismatic, intelligent people. It’s really a wonderful life.”

Even off the stage, Mays cuts an actorly figure, enunciating precisely and sprinkling his friendly conversation with many a rhetorical flourish. Most folks don’t use phrases like “It chills the blood.” He wears a black beret--and keeps it on during rehearsals. Hats of all sorts have been his trademark since he was 5, he says, and he seldom goes about bareheaded.

Wright, who has known him since they were at Yale together, describes Mays as “an absolutely theatrical creature [who] truly has greasepaint flowing through his veins.”

An odd happenstance brought Mays into the orbit of McAnuff and La Jolla Playhouse in 1988. College was over and he was on the verge of moving to New York City to try his luck on stage. He had never been to California, and graduate school was not in his plans. But 3,000 miles away, one of the eight to 10 aspiring actors accepted each year by UC San Diego’s graduate theater program decided he wanted to attend the Yale School of Drama instead. Walt Jones, head of the acting program at UCSD, needed a player--fast. He conferred with students already at the school, and a couple of ex-Yalies, director Maria Mileaf and scenic designer Neil Patel, told him great things about Mays. From the sound of it, Jones said, this was the kind of actor--versed in Shakespeare but no stranger to experimental work--who could be a valuable swing man in the wide range of plays the UCSD grad school puts on.

He flew to New York and auditioned Mays in a tiny hotel room. The professor, still in his pajama top after taking the red-eye the night before, cleared away furniture and sat in the closet so Mays would have room to do a turn as Iago. “There was no doubt in my mind,” Jones recalled. “I told him, ‘You want the position, you’re in. I’ll get you help with finances, anything it takes.’”

Each graduate acting student at UCSD is guaranteed at least one paid role at the affiliated La Jolla Playhouse, which is on the university campus. Jones, who now is chairman of the department of theater and dance, says that getting to play two parts in three years is a mark of distinction. Mays played three--the porter in “Macbeth,” Fabian in “Twelfth Night” (both directed by McAnuff) and a part in Keith Reddin’s “Life During Wartime.” Mays’ first role after graduating in 1991 was in a La Jolla Playhouse production of Lee Blessing’s “Fortinbras.” A Times reviewer hailed him as “the play’s delicious second banana.”

By 1992, Mays was living in New York City with his drama school sweetheart (their marriage lasted five years). In 1993, he won an Obie for his work in the title role of “Orestes,” Charles L. Mee’s modern adaptation of Euripides’ drama. Mays wound up in a hospital emergency room for shots and stitches after his first performance: The production was staged on a crumbling, old, debris-strewn abandoned pier on the Hudson River, and somewhere near the end he noticed he had sliced his elbow open on a stray bit of metal or glass.

In 1995, he originated the role of the Abbe de Coulmier, the compassionate priest in “Quills” who tries to redeem the Marquis de Sade from an obsession with writing pornography. The priest’s attempt to cure the indomitable De Sade lands him in a hell of his own inner corruption. There was no place for Mays in the 2000 film version of “Quills”--even though his two enthusiastic fans, Wright and McAnuff, served as screenwriter and executive producer. In big-budget movies, names attract financing and help sell tickets; Mays says he understands the nature of things and had no problem with his friends drafting Joaquin Phoenix to play the part he had created on stage. McAnuff did cast Mays in a supporting role opposite Jessica Lange and Elisabeth Shue in “Cousin Bette.” The 1998 film, based on a novel by Balzac, was McAnuff’s debut as a feature film director. That and some small independent pictures have been it for Mays as a film actor. He said he recently received an offer to appear in an episode of “The West Wing” but had to turn down what would have been his network TV debut because shooting conflicted with “Tartuffe.”

“Inevitably, somebody will stumble across him and gobble him up” for screen roles, McAnuff says. “In the meantime, we’ve got him as Tartuffe.”

For Mays, who has played many classic characters, including a well-received Hamlet at San Diego Repertory in 1995, this is his first encounter with Moliere--and with dialogue in rhymed verse. “Trying to make it sound like living thought, spontaneous speech, is the big challenge,” he says. “And yet, also honoring the verse and not fighting against it too much.” If done right, he says, it should be “sort of like riding a wave, where you get carried along by the flood of language.”

Mays relishes playing a classic villain--but he is aiming for something more. “He is certainly diabolical, the seven deadly sins in action. But I’m trying to find some sort of humanity in him at points, little flashes of human frailty or vulnerability. I don’t want audiences to get a bead on him.”

Mays has another new challenge: waiting, night after night, to be Tartuffe. The title character doesn’t appear until nearly midway through the play; his arrival is given a big anticipatory buildup by his enemies and his dupes.

Mays confessed that nothing has prepared him for the acting challenge of doing nothing, and he hadn’t yet figured out how to cope with it. “Generally, I pace tiger-like in the wings” while waiting to go on, he says. But 40 minutes of that won’t do--too draining. “I could be going quietly mad in my dressing room. It could be terribly, terribly lonely.”

The wait will be worth it, promises director McAnuff, who has some highly unorthodox surprises up his sleeve for Tartuffe--and the audience.

“He’s going to have quite an entrance, as you can imagine.”

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Mike Boehm is a Times staff writer.

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“TARTUFFE,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla. Dates: Opens today. Plays Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends June 16. Prices: $30-$49. Phone: (858) 550-1010.