Prime time on the stage

NEIL Patrick Harris is late. He heads apologetically into the room set aside for an interview, extricating himself from the huge backpack that’s left him huffing and his Motley Crue T-shirt sweaty. Good thing there’s some Red Bull energy drink on the table in front of him.

Red Bulls are a favored drink of Barney Stinson, the sex-crazed, conscience-free jokester that Harris inhabits on CBS’ hit sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” The onetime child star of “Doogie Howser, M.D.” has TV stardom again as fans mouth such Barneyisms as “steak sauce” (A-1) and “suit up” (wear a suit), write mash notes to Barney’s e-mail address and devour his weekly blog at CBS.com.

But this time the interview isn’t about the cut of Barney’s designer suits, his laser tag abilities or even his bad advice to friends. “How I Met Your Mother” is on hiatus, but Harris isn’t. He’ll soon be on stage in Los Angeles.

Harris plays the demanding role of Chris Keller in a revival of Arthur Miller’s first hit, “All My Sons,” opening Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse. Set in what Miller called a “placid American backyard,” the prize-winning 1947 drama examines the devastating consequences of wartime decisions on the Keller family and its neighbors.

Harris had planned to “hang out and regroup,” but the opportunity was just too alluring. Alternately idealistic and disillusioned, sober World War II veteran Chris Keller is what Harris calls a polar opposite of fun-loving Barney. “Barney is super-caffeinated, and I think Chris eats a lot of green vegetables. The sitcom is short spurts of broad comedy for me, and this is creating not only a character but a person.”

The play’s director, Randall Arney, says the actor’s recent stage work in such shows as “Assassins” on Broadway and “The Paris Letter” at Culver City’s Kirk Douglas Theatre “went hand in hand with my very specific idea for Chris.”

Whether talking about Barney, Chris or practically anything else, the 32-year-old actor is both earnest and engaging, traits Arney calls imperative in this role. “Chris carries a lot of Miller’s moralizing, and as a result you require an actor who is likable and charismatic yet possessing the power to handle the explosiveness of the family drama. This is a guy who has had some horrific war experiences, and the actor has to be able to reach the darker tones in the play.”

Experience helps. Harris has been performing either onstage or on-screen pretty much nonstop since his fourth-grade debut as Toto in a school production of “The Wizard of Oz.” New Mexico-born and raised, he comes from a musical family: Both of his lawyer parents played musical instruments, sang in the church choir and, says Harris, encouraged self-expression as well as music.

The actor had his first major career break even before starting high school. Sent to a drama camp run by New Mexico State University’s theater arts department, he immediately impressed then-department head Mark Medoff. Playwright Medoff (“Children of a Lesser God”) knew they were casting his screenplay for “Clara’s Heart,” and called producer Martin Elfand after the camp’s very first warmup exercise.

Medoff was encouraged to tape a scene with Harris, he says, that he later brought to the film’s director, Robert Mulligan. “When I put on Neil’s tape, he watched 10 seconds or so, and said, ‘That’s your kid,’ ” Medoff recalls. “He was a natural performer, and I’m not surprised he’s continued to grow.”

Harris went on to receive a Golden Globe nomination at 12 for his portrayal of the “Clara’s Heart” teenager, playing opposite Whoopi Goldberg. But his greatest fame came a few years later when he was cast as Doogie Howser, M.D., the role that made him a television star.

Harris received another Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of Howser, a super-smart 16-year-old doctor. At the show’s start, says Harris, creator Steven Bochco took the teenager and his parents to lunch “and said this is going to be a big deal. You ride this wave and it will be a pretty exciting ride. But that wave will inevitably crash on the sand. That doesn’t mean it’s all done -- there will be many waves to come -- but you may have to sit and wait. I think it is a pretty apt metaphor for the business.”

Harris didn’t have much of a wait for the theatrical wave. Within months of “Howser’s” ending its fourth season in 1993, Harris was cast as the lead in James Lapine’s morality comedy, “Luck, Pluck & Virtue” at the La Jolla Playhouse. “I remember thinking he was extraordinarily talented,” Lapine says today, “and he’s done some amazing stuff since.”

Back and forth he’s gone, between dramas and musicals, smart guys and flashy ones. His first major musical role came in 1997 as Mark in a touring production of “Rent,” which played at the Ahmanson. He returned to the Music Center in 1999, playing Tobias in a concert version of “Sweeney Todd,” a part he later re-created in three more concert versions of the show. In 2004, he was on Broadway, cast as both the Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald in a revival of the musical “Assassins.”

“Assassins” followed two other Broadway shows in as many years. He played a math student in “Proof” in 2002 and the uninhibited MC in “Cabaret” for six months in 2003. Last summer he made his London debut as “Rent” creator Jonathan Larson’s alter ego in the musical “tick, tick ... BOOM!”

At the same time, Harris has rarely been off-screen, showing up again and again on TV shows and in voice-over parts, in the CBS miniseries “Joan of Arc” and the short-lived NBC comedy series “Stark Raving Mad.” He’s appeared in such television movies as Showtime’s “The Man in the Attic” and CBS’ “The Wedding Dress” and on the big screen in films including “Undercover Brother,” “Starship Troopers” and “The Next Best Thing.”

“I was sort of the nice guy who got married to Tyne Daly’s daughter in a TV movie,” he says. “Probably why I ended up doing as much theater as I have is that theater casting directors have been much more likely to hire me to do interesting roles.”

Harris, who divides his time between Los Angeles and New York, also relishes what he calls “the truth” of theater. “You can’t edit. There’s no second pass at it. Audiences paid a lot of money to watch you perform for them; their expectations are high,” he says. “With television, the expectation drops a bit so if you’re good, it’s a happy surprise. Mediocrity doesn’t bode well live -- you have to be on your game.”

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‘A bit of hipness’

YOU also have to take risks, as Harris did in “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.” In the 2004 comedy, he played Neil Patrick Harris on Ecstasy, a sex-crazed actor wild for strip clubs and drugs, stealing cars and snorting cocaine off a stripper’s bared bottom. “I was nervous that it would be taken in the wrong vein, but it was probably two of the most rewarding days of work in my life, career-wise,” he says. “It busted open the Doc Howser shell and gave me a bit of hipness to a crowd I don’t think even knew who I was.”

It also helped him land Barney. “How I Met Your Mother” co-creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays saw the film not long before they cast their show and, recalls Bays, were already favorably disposed when he came in to audition. “As we conceived the character, he was sort of a Jack Black, a big, surly John Belushi character. Then Neil did an audition and from that moment on, he was Barney. He was on his way to his car, and we brought him back, and said, ‘You’re our guy if you want to do it.’ ”

He did. Barney isn’t the show’s lead, but he’s definitely the scene-stealer. Harris demurs that “it’s all a big yuk fest,” but Bays disagrees. “He’s got such a deep reservoir of talent, he brings dimension to even a silly role like Barney. It’s the kind of thing you learn in theater.”

In “All My Sons,” Chris’ father, Joe Keller, is played by Len Cariou, with whom Harris is working for the third time. “Neil has great self-confidence, and that’s a huge plus when you’re walking onto a stage and baring your soul as he has to do in this play,” Cariou says. “He listens well. The most important thing for an actor to do is be able to listen in character. And he’s certainly learned that.”

That’s clear in rehearsal. The listening. After a brief scene, Arney explains to Harris and Laurie Metcalf, who plays his mother, that Chris is there to protect his family. Harris nods his head and tries the scene again. He understands.

Throughout the play, he is trying to balance Chris’ many sides -- someone loving and skeptical, someone alternately at peace and suspicious. “Something said in naivete at the beginning of the play is really loaded with information that will be revealed later on,” explains Harris. “If Chris is suspicious, it isn’t that interesting. But if he has no suspicions, he’ll look like an idiot later. You can’t be too naive or too knowledgeable. It’s tricky.”

During rehearsal breaks at the Geffen, Harris heads to the back row of seats, pulls out his laptop computer and answers e-mail. “I thought I’d be tired when ‘How I Met Your Mother’ ended the season, and that I’d want a vacation,” he says. “Instead, I popped into rehearsing an incredibly challenging and sophisticated play. There are certain theater parts you would be remiss to turn down, and Chris in ‘All My Sons’ is one of them.

“The timing of the play is so right on. It’s bizarre how current it feels. It doesn’t feel like a modern play, but we’re past the third-year anniversary of the war in Iraq and everyone is numbed to reading about car bombings and death and copters that have gone down. It’s a bit of a wake-up call to see a show like this -- or to be in a show like this -- where you have to confront actions from the past.”

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‘All My Sons’

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: May 21

Price: $35 to $69

Contact: (310) 208-5454