A familiar face takes center stage

Lawrence Pressman’s heart seems pretty chipper. You can tell because he wears it on his sleeve, and on a sunny mid-December day his arms are covered in perky green stripes, which he selected to go with his red paisley scarf. The day after the presidential election, by contrast, his sleeves were a good deal less colorful. The Kerry supporter dressed in black down to his underwear. (The man is all about detail.) He even tied a black scarf belonging to his wife around his arm before a rehearsal for Jon Robin Baitz’s new play, “The Paris Letter.”

“Everyone laughed, and it made me feel better,” Pressman says. “I knew I wouldn’t be offending anyone.”

When the curtain goes up on “The Paris Letter” at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, where the play is running through Jan. 2, Pressman’s emotional haberdashery is in full regalia, although it’s of the figurative variety. As the play’s narrator, Anton Kilgallen, a sophisticated, older gay man who has lived a bold life with no excuses, Pressman delivers a deftly layered performance. Writing in The Times, Don Shirley said he “pulled it off with aplomb.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Ed Kaufman called him “eloquent and wise.”

Since a triumphant opening night that brought the audience to its feet, Pressman hasn’t been sleeping well. At 5 the following morning, he was so wired that he bolted upright in bed, -- and this is a man who has forsworn both alcohol and coffee.

“The energy on the stage was so exciting that night -- the interchange between the audience and us and us and them,” he says. “I’ll always have that stupendous opening night, which was the most exciting thing I’ve ever been a part of.”

Pressman never expected to be in such an enviable position at the lordly age of 65. Indeed, while he has had a long, successful career as a character actor in TV and film, more than four decades leaves plenty of time to pack in disappointments. And the interplay between his stage and screen work, which has been growing closer in recent years, has delivered some real bruisers. Because while Pressman has a list of TV and film credentials as long as his green-striped arm, they were not -- with a few notable exceptions, such as the 1975 film “The Man in the Glass Booth” -- starring roles.

That would be fine with Pressman except for one thing: You’ve seen his face, but you may not know his name, and that can be death in the fragile economy of New York theater. During the last couple of decades, he has been left behind more than once when a new play has roared off from Southern California to Manhattan for a glittering debut.

That happened in 1987 when he costarred with Michael Constantine in the West Coast premiere of Lee Blessing’s Cold War drama, “A Walk in the Woods,” at La Jolla Playhouse. After the play opened on Broadway, it was nominated for a Tony and a Pulitzer, but the train had left without the La Jolla cast. The New York production, which also went to Moscow, starred Sam Waterston and Robert Prosky.

“That was the most devastating experience I’ve ever had in the business,” Pressman says. “It’s galling to artists. You say, ‘But I’m the best one.’ Get a life. You’re the best one. Fine. But we don’t necessarily want the best one. We want the one who’s going to sell the tickets.

“If you do well in a play and your excellence doesn’t take you where it’s supposed to take you, then I wanted no part of it. I didn’t want to put myself on the line like that. After ‘A Walk in the Woods,’ I swore that I would never do another play that was new.”

Michael Morris, who is directing Pressman in “The Paris Letter,” describes him as “one of those really, really entrenched character actors. The moment you talk to him and you picture his face from television or film, you suddenly realize he’s everywhere, and those kinds of actors are some of the most interesting to work with. He’s not at the forefront of the public eye, certainly, but within the business, everyone knows Larry Pressman.”

So Morris is at a loss to explain why Pressman hasn’t developed a bankable name. “From my professional point of view, there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be,” he says. “If one of the many roles on television he’s had over 25 years had become a ‘Law and Order,’ who knows?”

A change of heart

Pressman also played Roy Cohn in a Taper, Too workshop production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: Perestroika.” But Ron Leibman took the role to the Mark Taper Forum’s main stage and on to New York, which Pressman found “a bit of a bump” even though he knew from the start that Leibman was the playwright’s first choice. In the end, though, time has been an ally in Pressman’s career, because it has enabled him to reconsider his boycott of new plays.

“Twenty years makes a lot of difference in your perspective about things,” he says. “I now do it for my love of it as opposed to my loving myself doing it. It’s why I can fit right into a company, because I love companies. I love other actors. I love them around me.”

In addition to Ron Rifkin, Patricia Wettig and Josh Radnor, the cast of “The Paris Letter” includes Neil Patrick Harris, whom Pressman suggested for the role of the young Anton. The two men have been close since their years as regulars on television’s “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” which featured the teenage Harris as a boy-genius doctor and Pressman as a hospital chief of staff.

“I said, ‘I think Neil can do me in a millisecond because he spent so much time with me in his formative years,’ ” Pressman says. “You know how a father will pace and suddenly a little boy will start doing that? Neil started picking up a lot of my mannerisms. He knows when I’m being serious and when I’m being grand and when I’m being ridiculous. Here he’s doing me doing Anton.”

“The Paris Letter” is scheduled to open at New York’s Roundabout Theatre in May with a different director and possibly a different cast, but Pressman says all the sleep he’s losing isn’t over that.

“I haven’t a clue who will play it,” he says. “I wish whoever it is well. I’m doing it here. I was the first to play Anton in the first full production, so I’ll always have that.”

Baitz says he wanted Pressman’s “quiet strength and great rueful intelligence” for his play. “He has the kind of trustworthiness that that part requires, because he really serves as the maitre d’, as it were, and takes us in. So it has to be someone one would feel in good hands with.

“And then I found that as he worked, he’s a beautiful miniaturist, building tiny detail upon tiny detail very delicately. One day you notice that this accumulation that you’ve watched different bits and pieces of amounts to someone essaying a whole character.”

The straightforward character of Anton is a counterpoint to Rifkin’s self-loathing Sandy Sonenberg, who lives a lie, submerging his homosexuality to assume the socially acceptable mantle of married man and father. When Sandy meets an attractive but scurrilous young financier, also played by Harris, the lie implodes, taking his carefully ordered life with it.

“I was just shattered by the play. Shattered,” Pressman says, before pausing to take a sip of hot tea with honey in his dressing room. At his elbow lies a copy of Charles Kaiser’s “The Gay Metropolis,” which he has been studying between performances. “The idea that a lie in one’s life perpetuates itself and causes ruin all the way around you. I think there’s a political statement as well. I think there’s a lie being told in this country, and the red states bought it.

“It’s a play about the awful period of self-loathing which homosexuals had been subjected to over centuries. And you can’t lie about sexuality. There’s that whole theme of ‘find out who you essentially are and then live up to that, be honest about it, be what Anton is.’ I think that what people love about Anton -- I sense the audience’s love -- is the hard-won comfort level within his own being.”

A move West

Anton wears his sexuality on his sleeve, and Pressman says the carefully modulated mannerisms that help define the character were inspired in part by a couple of his friends in New York. “I know a lot of gay people, and I think I have a very strong empathy for gay men and women. I have absolutely no judgment for them whatsoever, and coming from where I come from, that’s pretty strange.”

He grew up in rural Cynthiana, Ky., and, as a Jew from the South, understands what it means to be an outsider. Despite the remoteness of his hometown, Pressman’s retailer father wanted his four sons to have a cultured upbringing. So he frequently took them to see plays on Broadway, even though he often snoozed through the performances.

The trips inspired Pressman to study acting at Northwestern University. He continued his training at the American Shakespeare Festival and Lincoln Center and, after 13 years in New York, moved to Sherman Oaks, where he lives with his actress wife, Lanna. Their son, David, is an actor and director. Pressman is also godfather to writer-directors Chris and Paul Weitz.

Although Pressman moved to Sherman Oaks so he could be Hollywood-adjacent, he became a regular at the Taper and the South Coast Repertory theaters. He’s also closely involved with the Matrix Theatre in Hollywood and the Antaeus Theatre in North Hollywood.

“My tendency is to want to go into smaller permanent companies,” he says. “It’s just my nature. But as I get older, that’s less important to me. So when a project comes up like this that’s out of my safety zone, I’m all for it. As you get older, you have less to lose.”