‘I can’t imagine not coming back to theater’

RIDING back to the Music Center from his costume fitting at the Mark Taper Forum’s annex in Boyle Heights, Laurence Fishburne is remembering leaner times. While navigating the forlorn warehouse district near the L.A. River, the driver of the car sees Vignes Street and says he thinks he knows where we are, prompting Fishburne to speak up. “I know exactly where we are,” he says proudly. “I used to live on Vignes Street.”

He lived here more than 20 years ago with another actor, Giancarlo Esposito. “We didn’t have a toilet,” Fishburne says. “We just moved in. We didn’t really think things through. It was pilot season -- ‘82, ‘83, ‘84? We had both come out from New York. We had one car. If you booked a [television] pilot, man, you could pull down 30K for the year, and as a young actor, man, 30K for the year, you could go back to New York and do all the theater you want. And eat too.”

By his own reckoning, Fishburne has never left the theater, where he first acted as a 10-year-old in a play by Charles Fuller in a tiny theater on the lower East Side of Manhattan. But all these years and big-budget movie roles later, he no longer has to rely on pilot season to allow him to return to the stage. Known to a generation as the fearsome cyber warrior Morpheus in “The Matrix” films and to others for his authoritative roles in “Boyz N the Hood” and “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” among many others, Fishburne, with his broad, tough face and no-nonsense lower lip, has moved well beyond his days as a “never-pass-up-a-free-meal actor,” as he remembers it. That warmup jacket he’s wearing, with the “M-i-III” on the chest? He’s in that too. But more to the point, he is preparing now to open at the Taper in a new three-character play called “Without Walls” by Alfred Uhry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Driving Miss Daisy.”

“Fifteen days,” he says after reaching the Music Center atop Bunker Hill and seating himself at the outdoor bar with sunset coming on, the pleasant bustle of early arriving theatergoers all around. “We’ll have an audience in 15 days.”

And counting. In “Without Walls” Fishburne portrays a talented high school drama teacher who gets himself into a compromising position while teaching at an experimental school in Manhattan in 1976. The time and setting are crucial to the events of the play that recall a period when some secondary schools were trying new methods, replacing discipline and authority with the notion that teachers and students could be friends and equals.

“The focus was on community and this communal learning environment,” Fishburne says after ordering a glass of red wine. Morocco Hemphill is the name of his character, whom he describes as a “very sophisticated, artistic kind of guy, very well spoken, affected even.”

One can’t help but think of his role in the current film “Akeelah and the Bee,” playing a brooding college English professor named Larabee who coaches an underprivileged African American girl from Los Angeles to the finals of a national spelling bee.

The actor is quick to head off a link. “When you see the piece and you hear what I’m doing vocally and physically with Morocco, he’s nothing like Dr. Larabee at all. The only thing they have in common is language.”

Back at the costume session, he had stood in front of a three-way mirror, his 6-foot, 1-inch, size-48-regular frame being fitted for the ‘70s clothes he will wear as Morocco, a former chorus boy from the South who has drifted into teaching drama to teenagers. “I’m thinking it’s a beautiful, colorful shirt,” he says to the Taper costumer, while discussing a scene in which Morocco goes to the theater. “And there’s a flower in the lapel” of the coat.

An assistant jots down his request while the costumer nods in agreement.

Some actors want their costumes early because they depend on the external trappings of disguise to find their way into a character. Fishburne says this was not the case with him, at least not with him and Morocco. “With this particular character, costume is not going to make it for me. The writing is so clear. And Alfred [Uhry] has been there, and I was able to gauge what kind of grasp I had on the character from his reactions in the room.”

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Risk and reward

PUTTING down his glass of wine, he says, “They sent me the script, and I thought, ‘OK, this is something that I’m a little afraid to do, that’s just a little scary’ -- which always means I should do it. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could do it, it was that I haven’t seen this character on the stage. I know people like this man. My best friend in the world is a drama teacher, Arthur Mendoza, who runs the Actors Circle Theatre in West Hollywood and was a protege of Stella Adler and Alan Schneider.”

Yet ironically, Fishburne, 44, has never studied acting. “I don’t believe in acting teachers for me, so it’s God’s joke that he gave me a best friend who’s an acting teacher.” He uncorks a deep, hearty laugh now that spreads his mouth open wide and undercuts the notion heard here and there that he takes himself too seriously and can be difficult.

One critic suggested this might have happened when he stopped being called “Larry” and asked to be called “Laurence” somewhere around 1992, after he won the Tony Award for his performance in August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” on Broadway.

“It’s funny, a lot of people think I take myself seriously because I come off so serious sometimes. But it’s not that I take myself seriously, I take what I do seriously. I came up around people who took acting seriously, who cared about acting, cared about the theater and, in the ‘70s, made movies that said something, that mattered. I came up with those people, and I was a kid. Their ethos and credo became mine.”

He refers to fellow African American actors Al Freeman Jr., Ellen Holly, Cynthia Belgrave and Moses Gunn, “who came out of the black theater in New York and were voicing all the things that black people needed to express with the whole civil rights thing that was happening.”

He refers also to Francis Ford Coppola, who cast him in “Apocalypse Now” when he was only 14. “I was in a movie with Marlon Brando. Now I didn’t have any scenes with Marlon Brando, but I had scenes with Martin Sheen and was around Dennis Hopper, who was a child actor in the studio system and was enamored of James Dean, as was Martin, and they were all sort of disciples of Brando.”

A heady experience for a teenager, but when he returned from the two years it took to make “Apocalypse Now” in the Philippines, he didn’t work again for 18 months. “It was hard, but it was a blessing in a lot of ways because I didn’t have to endure the child star thing. I was a child actor, but not a child star.”

He lived with his mother, a schoolteacher, in South-Central and began spending time at the Inner City Cultural Center. “I would do readings and things there and at the Matrix Theatre and at the Groundlings Theater.” He never worked at the Groundlings but met Paul Reubens there, and Reubens cast him as Cowboy Curtis in his TV show “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

Fishburne once said about his discovery of acting that it made him feel that he “fell into the flow of the universe.” He has been married since 2002 to actress Gina Torres and was previously married to actress Hanja O. Moss, with whom he has a son and a daughter. He is a founding member of the Guggenheim Motorcycle Club, a group that arranges rides to art museums around the world. He drives an Aston Martin but does his own grocery shopping.

While he has been sitting at the bar, only one stranger has approached, a white-haired man who tells him how much he admired “Akeelah and the Bee.” “Bless you,” Fishburne says graciously. Then three young women, identifying themselves as members of the cast of L.A. Opera’s “Grendel,” in rehearsals at the other end of the plaza, come over to pay respects. “Hello, you beauties,” Fishburne says, extending his hand. “I’m Laurence.”

“We love you,” one of them says.

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‘Rooted in the theater’

“I knew he knew how to talk and had the power, but I didn’t know he was such an informed theater actor,” says Uhry, who wrote “Driving Miss Daisy” for Morgan Freeman.

“It’s nice that you’re a big movie star and everything,” the playwright says of Fishburne, “but that has nothing to do with [the fact that] you were born to play this part.”

Uhry, who sat in on early rehearsals, has been more than pleased to have Fishburne in a play he’s been working on for 14 years. “Without Walls,” he says, is based on his experience teaching in an open school in Manhattan in the ‘70s, although the crisis in the play did not happen to him but to another teacher.

Christopher Ashley, the play’s director, has observed about Fishburne that “he is rooted in the theater as opposed to someone whose hobby it is. There are moments when he will do something that’s so different than what you thought about. He gives you what you ask for but better.”

“I play characters,” Fishburne says. “I don’t think I really have a persona per se. I don’t play the same guy every time. I show up, you don’t know what I’m gonna do. I like it that way. I’ve intentionally tried to do it that way. I think that’s what’s interesting.”

Through the years he has appeared in revivals of such plays in New York as Miguel Pinero’s “Short Eyes,” Michael Weller’s “Loose Ends” and, notably, “The Lion in Winter,” with Stockard Channing in 1999. He also performed in his own play, “Riff Raff,” at a small theater in Hollywood in the mid-’90s and later at the Circle in the Square in New York.

“I can’t imagine not coming back to the theater,” he says. “It’s where I started.”

Like Charles Dutton, who became a star in “The Piano Lesson,” Fishburne will be forever linked to the late August Wilson’s magisterial and poetic dramas about the African American experience in the 20th century. He spent the better part of two years playing Sterling, the edgy young ex-con in “Two Trains Running.”

“The Tony was just gravy,” he says, “because that was a dream of, like, 20 years. My dream was always to do Broadway. And in a straight drama. African American playwright, African American cast, director? A dream come true.”

Oddly enough, for someone from New York, his journey to Broadway began here. “I was supposed to do a production of ‘The Dutchman,’ ” by Amiri Baraka, “with Teri Garr here in 1990. I came here to rehearse, but I had also auditioned for August and Lloyd [Richards, the director] for ‘Two Trains’ up at the big church on Hollywood and Highland, near where I live now.” He had always wanted to do “The Dutchman” but he couldn’t say no to August Wilson and Lloyd Richards, the man who directed the original production of “Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway in 1959.

“I was surrounded by giants, man. An opportunity like that doesn’t come around too often.”

Some film actors balk at getting tied down with a play for six weeks, let alone two years. Fishburne saw it differently. “It’s not redundant, it’s fun. And it’s August Wilson, man! Nobody writes like him. How many times can you listen to a great piece of music that you love? If it’s good stuff, you can always find some juice in it. It’s all music to me. You just play it.”

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‘Without Walls’

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: Opens 2:30 p.m. next Sunday. Regular schedule: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.

Ends: July 16

Price: $42 to $55

Contact: (213) 628-2772, www.CenterTheatreGroup.org