Professor Alexander

More than a few of the star-struck USC undergraduates lucky enough to be admitted to Theatre 397 came to class expecting to be handed the keys to the entertainment industry.

Instead, Jason Alexander -- in residence this term at USC as the School of Theatre’s first George Burns Visiting Professor -- handed them a challenge.

“I made it very clear to them the very first day: I don’t hold the keys to the industry; I don’t know anybody who does,” Alexander said in a recent conversation before class. “The only thing that will virtually ensure your success is if you are undeniably good.”

Undeniably ... what?

Here they are on the USC campus, achingly eager and impossibly young, coming from all over the country to study acting just a few freeway exits from the glittering gated lots of Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. They know a little bit about Hollywood -- or think they do. It’s an image pieced together from the media, the movies, maybe from their friends.

It’s all about looks here; it’s all about luck. It’s a town of connections; relationships. And what a shame, too, as you were just saying to your new best friend in the industry, Jason Alexander.

That was the fantasy. But now, here is your new best friend in the industry, standing before you in the modest classroom, telling you it’s not who you know, but what you know?

Maybe what you’ve signed up for is not Hollywood Connections 101, but just what it says on the syllabus: “Practical Technique and Material Development,” four weighty words that imply hard work. Friday’s class is Practical Acting Technique for Singers -- the same grueling process set to music.

“Time after time, they see ‘personalities’ spawn into acting careers or looks spawn into careers,” Alexander observes with an empathetic smile. “There’s a huge abundance of very limited talent doing very well. So it’s hard to say to them: ‘Work hard, work hard,’ when he ain’t workin’ hard, and he’s making 50 grand a week.”

Alexander is not referring to himself. While cracking jokes on “Seinfeld,” this dedicated actor was also attending classes with acting coach Larry Moss, sometimes far into the night. (That’s also someone else’s salary: By the end of “Seinfeld,” he and the non-Jerry cast members were pulling down $600,000 per episode.)

But Alexander knows the question students will eventually ask him. “I say look, if you are looking for my career, good luck, I can’t tell you how to get it,” he says. “I stepped in the right puddle. Nobody thought ‘Seinfeld’ would be ... ‘Seinfeld.’ ”

Before a class early in the term, a student rushes up to Alexander, worried because this student will be absent for an event planned for later in the year: As a final project of sorts, students will have the chance to perform before an invited audience of agents, actors, directors -- Alexander’s very good friends in the industry.

“Not that I’m just here to get an agent and move on, but ...” the student begins, interrupting himself with a burst of sheepish laughter.

Don’t worry, Alexander reassures him. “The people I invite aren’t going to turn around and launch anybody’s career.”

The student turns and walks away. Hard to tell whether the look on his face is relief or disappointment.

Juggling two jobs

There are two lunch reservations for Alexander on today’s list at the USC Faculty Club. Both are for 12:30 p.m. Alexander raises an eyebrow. He weighs his options. “I’ll take the 12:30,” he says brightly.

It’s a scene straight out of “Seinfeld,” that comedy about nothing. But the double commitment seems oddly appropriate. For the next few months, Alexander will enjoy a dual identity: as a working actor soon to star as Max Bialystock in the Los Angeles production of “The Producers,” and as USC faculty member.

In an hour or so, Alexander will trek across campus to the unassuming white building called the Drama Center to hold office hours before class. Right now, he’s fascinated that Faculty Club lunch tables bear cups of crayons, so brilliant academic minds can doodle on the paper table covers. “What if e doesn’t equal mc2? It could be discovered right here,” Alexander marvels, busily working on his own crayon sketch of a man’s face. After “Seinfeld,” Alexander says, everyone expects him to be as funny as his character, George Costanza. He says he’s not. He is. But Alexander is dead serious about his new responsibility: teaching college students to become better actors.

You can, he asserts, teach acting. “For my money, every time someone walks out the door, they are acting -- they are not, on the outside, the same way they are on the inside,” he says. “We are always unconsciously defining who we are talking to, and what we want from them, and what might potentially get in the way.

“There are some people who are scared to death to be in front of people, or they are scared to death to reveal certain things about themselves. But take away those impediments, and I think anybody can learn to act, yes. It’s magical when all those things come together in performance, but the rudiments of it are not magic.”

Alexander is an experienced acting coach, but has usually taught master classes and mostly for struggling working actors, not anxious 18- to 22-year-olds. He’s not quite comfortable with that yet.

“They are usually people who have had a great deal of training but not a ton of success,” he says. “What I talk about brings a great deal of clarity to the process. And then I walk away and wish them happily ever after. Here, I’m dealing with a younger group of people who haven’t had as much life experience.

“It’s dicey because the bulk of my students are girls,” he adds. “They are choosing pieces where their sexuality comes into play. I don’t even know if they’ve had sex. I don’t even want to assume they’re heterosexual. I’m not quite sure with this age group, in this setting, what’s acceptable, what’s proper.”

Outside, strolling across campus, Alexander knows what’s proper -- he’s just having a hard time accepting it. “I could never work on a college campus full time,” he says, a happily married, 43-year-old family man who can’t keep the wistfulness out of his voice as he watches willowy young women in low-rise jeans on their way to class.

A conflicted teacher

Although he continued to study with noted instructors, including Lee Strasberg and Moss, Alexander left Boston University after his junior year because he was being offered acting jobs. “I was petrified that I was doing the wrong thing,” he says. But it worked -- and left Alexander with mixed feelings about academic degrees in theater.

“I loved my university experience, it’s really valid for a lot of people, but I personally don’t believe it takes four years to teach the art of acting, of theater,” he says.

“I had an interesting conversation with a student who came to me and said, ‘I really want to be on “Saturday Night Live” -- is the stuff you are going to teach me going to make me a better contender for that?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ Improv has almost nothing to do with acting technique, it has more to do with a writer’s technique.

“I said, ‘Why do you want to be at a university?’ Because his parents want him to have a university degree. I said, ‘Get a degree in engineering. If you are going to go through the college experience, come out with something you can use. But to spend your time getting a BFA -- nobody’s going to ask to see it when you apply for work.’ Gee, the poor guy was totally rattled.”

For the record, the “poor guy,” Adam Ray, a sophomore from Seattle, was rattled. But also inspired. “He didn’t preach to me, or tell me what to do,” Ray says of the conversation with Alexander. “He just said if it’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ or more comedic stuff I want to do, get into improv groups, do stand-up.”

Ray has decided to stick with the class. Although “practical acting technique” might not get him on “SNL,” it just might get him somewhere. “I went in there with an open mind and let him work with me -- I’m there to learn, not to get defensive or intimidated,” Ray says.

Given his nonacademic philosophy, Alexander was amazed and amused last fall when he received an invitation to apply for the position of dean of the USC School of Theatre -- a position eventually filled by former Ahmanson Theatre associate producer Madeline Puzo. The invitation came about the same time that Alexander’s short-lived ABC series “Bob Patterson” was canceled.

“I sent them back a letter saying thank you for your invitation, but by your own criteria, I would be a horrible dean,” Alexander says. “I really don’t have the academic background, I don’t have the fund-raising background. I’ve done master classes but never at USC, if that’s of interest to you.”

Robert Scales, then the dean of the theater school, invited Alexander to become the George Burns professor. Burns left $1 million each to the theater programs at USC and UCLA. USC had decided to put the funds in an endowment to cover the cost of bringing theater professionals in to teach. The idea was to create short-term opportunities for professionals whose schedules don’t allow them to assume long-term academic posts. The drama school is still trying to establish a regular schedule for the fledgling program; there is no George Burns professor coming in for the spring term.

Puzo, the new dean, said admission to Alexander’s course was first-come, first-served, although the musical theater class required a singing audition. Each visiting professorship will be designed around the skills and interests of the invitee, she said, adding that future visiting professors may be distinguished in the field of theater, but not household names like Alexander. Although Alexander’s celebrity may be a motivating factor for students, she said, “once the work begins, it’s not about spending time with a star.”

In tribute to Burns, the school wanted the first visiting professor to come from the world of comedy. They asked Lily Tomlin; she wasn’t available because she was taking her one-woman show “Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” to Broadway and on tour, including a run at the Ahmanson Theatre. But Alexander had a window of time before beginning rehearsals for “The Producers,” opening at the Pantages in May.

Alexander visited the drama school several times during the previous academic year. He recalls how his silent presence in the back of a class on sitcom technique discombobulated the instructor.

Tears of joy

Practical Acting Technique for Singers causes floods of tears Fridays from 2 to 4 p.m.

Interviewed around the midterm, freshman Brandi Wolff from Golden, Colo., observes that of eight students who had the chance to work in front of Alexander, seven have cried.

That includes Aaron Neely, who tried to make a joke out of wiping his eyes after a few tips from Alexander transformed his chosen song -- “Lost in the Wilderness” from the Stephen Schwartz musical “Children of Eden” -- from a good imitation of the cast album into a plea, quivering with complex emotions. The girls were only too happy to offer sympathy and Kleenex. When guys cry, it’s cool.

“How much better is this? How important is it that we work this hard?” Alexander asks calmly, no more successful at hiding his pride than Neely was at hiding his tears. “You can own us, when you are this committed.”

Wolff cried too. The coltish brunet, who started singing at age 4 while Grandma played piano, may not have accomplished the full transformation into the downtrodden prostitute she needed to be for her song, “Someone Like You” from “Jekyll & Hyde,” but came closer than she’d ever been before.

“Jason is teaching in a very honest way, and I think the students see it as an opportunity to really express themselves, instead of just to put on a show and get praised,” she says later. “Most people, I think are just so inspired, and so touched, that we start crying.”

Alexander says acting can be taught -- but not everyone can learn. When do you tell a young actor there’s no chance at all?

“I would never do that,” Alexander says quickly. “When I was studying with Larry Moss, I would be watching certain people in the class, and I’d be thinking: ‘Let it go, tell them, they’re no good.

“But he’d say: ‘Wait, wait.’ Sometimes it would take a year, or two or three -- and then they’d come in with a breakthrough. “The question they always ask is, should I be looking for an agent now? Should I be going out on auditions now? And I say: ‘I can’t answer that question.’ I just say that any professional door you walk through, this is your shot. You’ll have it once. Are you ready to take a shot, in your assessment? If they say yes, I say, ‘Then go take the shot.’ ”

Alexander can’t give them the keys to the industry -- only tools. And, he hopes, the understanding that being success does not necessarily mean a role on the next “Seinfeld.”

“I have friends from college who work in small repertory companies, who make a small salary but do leading roles in some of the great stage productions,” Alexander says. “Are they failures because they are in Podunk, Ind.? I think to my class, they are failures, but time may change that opinion.”

*

Next up for Alexander

Between USC and “Producers” rehearsals starting March 13, Jason Alexander will be a producer -- of an independent comedy movie in which he will also star. “An Extra Marriage” is a co-production of Alexander’s AngelArk Entertainment (with partners Jennifer Birchfield-Eik and Michael Jackman) and Jon Aaron Productions, with a script by Mitch Markowitz (“Good Morning, Vietnam”). It will be shot in Los Angeles in January and February. Alexander will play a man who risks his happy marriage for one night with his fantasy woman.