Only the act is rich

No one could accuse him of doing it for the money.

Actor Joe Garcia can’t remember how much he gets paid per performance for his role in “Play Strindberg” -- Friedrich Durrenmatt’s farcical adaptation of Strindberg’s dark dissection of a marriage, “Dance of Death” -- presented through Feb. 22 by Company Rep at North Hollywood’s Deaf West Theatre.

It’s $7, maybe $10, he guesses.

Garcia is one of the legions of actors in Los Angeles who make their careers mainly in theaters with 99 seats or fewer, exempt from providing the scale wages required by the professional guilds in larger spaces. Many nonequity theater companies also charge their members nominal annual dues to be part of the company’s talent pool.

Though occasional Hollywood roles -- and his wife’s full-time job in the student loan business -- pay the bills, Garcia’s usual theater wages barely cover the gas to commute from the home he and wife Debbie recently purchased in Fontana, hoping to land in a decent public school district for their 3-year-old son Samuel to grow into.

Many actors who come to Hollywood see theater as nothing more than a vehicle to take them to the screen. “You come out here and everybody wants to be a star -- hey, it’s about TV, movies,” Garcia says. “I think they view theater as a way to escape the fact that they are not doing anything else.”

Not Garcia. After almost 20 years on the L.A. theater scene, the play is the thing for this affable 45-year-old Texas native.

In the low-rent world of small theater, Garcia is one of the successful ones. “Play Strindberg” has garnered fair to positive reviews and won raves for Garcia’s highly physical performance as the couple’s weirder half, Edgar, a writer with illusions of military grandeur who is seized by frequent catatonic fits that cause him to fall comically prostrate, one hand frozen in a military salute. Garcia admits to being chronically sore from all the pratfalls. The three-person cast also includes Holly Jeanne and Travis Michael Holder.

“Garcia simply chews up everything in sight as Edgar,” the Los Angeles Daily News said. Times reviewer Rob Kendt calls Garcia “a mercurial comic powerhouse” and praises his “gut busting solo aria of gluttonous gorging” in a notable eating scene.

The play’s director, Hope Alexander, chose the foods -- soup, apples, spaghetti, chicken and bread -- careful not to pick those that might potentially choke the actor. But Alexander notes that Garcia is wholly responsible for the scene’s comic eroticism -- although she sometimes had to coax the mild-mannered actor to take it over the top. “I said, ‘Make some noise for me, honey!’ ” Alexander says with a laugh. “ ‘Come on, there’s nobody else in the next room. Let it go.’ ”

Review-wise, Garcia has been equally lucky in other productions, winning praise for his portrayal of a paranoid shut-in in postwar Berlin in “The Puppetmaster of Lodz” at Circle Theatre at North Hollywood’s El Portal Center for the Arts in 2000 and for a turn as William Faulkner unwittingly cranking out a screenplay for two dead stars in “Only the Dead Know Burbank” for Actors Alley, among others.

Garcia, a 1985 graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts West who now serves on the directing staff there, jokes that a character actor doesn’t have to worry about aging gracefully: “I’ve never been Brad Pitt, so it’s not an issue,” he says, adding: “I wouldn’t want to be a leading man. I think a character is much more fun if there is something not quite right about them.”

Garcia acknowledges that some might think there’s something “not quite right” about an actor who works for gas money. He doesn’t care. “I love what I do,” he says. And the minute he stops enjoying playing to houses with fewer than 99 seats, he adds, “I’ll stop doing it.”

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‘Play Strindberg’

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Where: Company Rep at Deaf West Theatre, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood

When: Thursday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday 2 p.m.; and Feb. 27 and 28 at 8 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 28

Price: $20-$22.50

Contact: (818) 506-7550