Bill Pullman, hyphenated

San Francisco

Bill PULLMAN is looking especially hungry these days for that special fix of live performance. But this go-to Hollywood Everyman isn’t just interested in treading the boards again -- he’s also eager to stretch himself as a theater director and, if the occasion calls for it, even a pinch-hit writer. Sitting in an office at the Magic Theatre, where he’s currently in rehearsal with a young company of actors for “Expedition 6,” a documentary movement-theater piece that he has “conceived and devised” and is now directing, he acknowledges that the time is ripe for him to get back to his roots.

“I don’t think I’ve done my theater thing as much as I would have liked,” Pullman says. “I had worked onstage in New York early on. And then later in L.A. -- Holly Hunter and I did a Beth Henley play together at the Met Theatre and I did a number of productions at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.” But he’d like to do more. And now that his kids are older, he says, it’s a little easier for him to split his time between L.A., where he lives in Hollywood with his wife, two sons and a daughter, and New York. In short, he’s once again hearing the siren’s call of Broadway and off-Broadway

Balancing a high-profile career in theater and film is hardly easy in a country this vast and prone to pigeonholing. Actors who want to enjoy the best of both worlds can be forgiven if, in the madness of their quest, they start unconsciously humming a few bars of Peter Allen’s “Bi-Coastal,” with its melancholy lyrics (“Fool, don’t you even know who you are?”) chipping away at the upbeat melody.

What interrupted Pullman’s theatrical résumé wasn’t logistical madness but -- enviable situation -- a steady stream of film roles. Supporting roles, mostly, and ones whose character names might escape you, but still a lot of them. In fact, he may be the most famous unfamous actor in America, thanks to appearances in such hits as “Sleepless in Seattle,” “While You Were Sleeping” and “Independence Day.”

Something you might not know about this utility screen presence -- a figure who stirs the same pleasant feelings as an anonymously attractive neighbor -- is that his understanding of acting has been informed by some of the most daring theatrical sources out there. Not your garden-variety Stanislavskian, Pullman, who has a graduate degree in directing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is more likely to bring up Brecht than Spielberg in conversation, was dazzled by the heightened purity of Joseph Chaikin and the Open Theatre and still glows when he talks about what he learned from the avant-garde Norwegian theater director Stein Winge, with whom he worked at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in the mid-’80s.

His appetite for risk-taking has only grown since he did Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” on Broadway in 2002. For his portrayal of the married architect who falls helplessly in love with his four-legged barnyard mistress, he earned a Drama Desk nomination and respect within the theater community for making an outrageous scenario seem not half as far-fetched as it sounds. In the fall, Pullman will be doing Albee’s “Peter and Jerry” at off-Broadway’s Second Stage Theatre. This work adds a first act to Albee’s 1958 two-hander, “The Zoo Story.”

“I think that there’s a certain corps of actors who are going back to New York to see if they can stay afloat and be potent in that arena,” he says. “It may be in front of a very small audience, but they want to test themselves. I’m thinking of Alfred Molina doing ‘Howard Katz’ or Jeff Daniels doing ‘Blackbird’ off-Broadway. I admire these guys for putting themselves in the frying pan. It’s a lot more challenging than taking another part in another movie, especially since at our age that other part might be just stabilizing background for a 20-year-old.”

Don’t get Pullman wrong: He wants to keep acting on screen. In fact, he’s been shooting in Northern California while starting “Expedition 6” at the Magic. The new film is called “Bottle Shock,” a historically inspired drama about a fateful wine taste-off involving French and California labels, with much national pride riding on the outcome. British actor Alan Rickman, another theater stalwart, is also in the cast.

“The other day on the set Alan was asking me about ‘Peter and Jerry’ and how I was feeling about it,” Pullman says. “I said I felt lucky, because I had done some reading with Dallas Roberts and Johanna Day. I didn’t really know them, and to me that’s the hardest thing about entering a situation like this -- working on so much material, month after month, with actors that you don’t have a lot of experience with. But now that I’ve gotten to know them, I’m feeling easier about it all. I guess you’ve got to trust Edward’s decades of casting wisdom.”

‘Some librarian in me’

Loping around the Magic Theatre in beige pants and a black tee, Pullman has the look of a friendly college professor, the kind who still opts to carry his life around in a knapsack. As it turns out, he’s lugged one to San Francisco stuffed to the brim with his Internet research for “Expedition 6,” a dramatic collage tracing the fate of the two astronauts and one cosmonaut who were stranded at the International Space Station after the Columbia shuttle tragedy in 2003. The piece, which splices together found texts, examines their rescue within the highly charged political context of the buildup to the American invasion of Iraq.

Pullman recalls his quiet devastation at the Columbia disaster. “I didn’t mention it to my family, which was strange since I’m the one that usually talks about the major events of the day to them. And then I remember reading about people in the Middle East who were celebrating what happened. That was a second stunner. I couldn’t believe that the loss of life could be used in that way. I started thinking about the two astronauts and one cosmonaut still up there in space, and just felt strangely mute about it all.”

But how does the Iraq war figure into this NASA crisis? “At this time, there was so much data streaming at you about the buildup to the invasion,” he explains. “It was a whole mess of things, like the way in which the words ‘preemptive strike’ had been incorporated from the think tanks into a frightening reality.” For Pullman, who admits being curious about omens and symbols, this period represents “a bottleneck in history” in which the United States would become a country different from the one he knew before. “So that’s probably why I started this file of articles,” he says. “I’m a little bit of an addict to the green hanging folder. I guess there’s some librarian in me waiting to happen.”

When he was invited by Jennifer McCray Rincon, an old acting chum, to work with students at Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ National Theatre Conservatory, he brought his research along and created this multimedia theater work that incorporates trapeze choreography, live music and historical collage. The piece, which has gone through several developmental workshops, has its world premiere at the Magic on Sept. 15. The cast includes five of the original Denver actors and three new actresses with dance and movement-theater backgrounds.

“I get restless just being an actor,” says Pullman, who admits that another side of him would like to initiate storytelling. “Most of my ambition outside of acting is involved with directing. As someone who has a very high regard for writers, I went into cold sweats trying to bring some of this material together for our first workshop. Oliver Stone once said that the secret of writing is ‘ass plus seat.’ Well, my ass doesn’t like the seat. But I’m doing it more and more. Maybe I’ve slowed down enough in my 50s to begin to realize that it’s still scary once you sit down.”

If the writing paralyzed him at times, working with this group of actors has been completely energizing. “I want to see if I can get them to a level of performance that’s free of crutches and theatricalisms,” he says. “This is such a physical, demanding piece that also has so many words. If I can just get them to become open vessels of all this information, and if I can somehow hold everyone inside this bubble for two hours onstage -- well, that’s why I decided to come here.”

How would he characterize his directorial style? “I come off as a friendly guy, so I get away with saying some blunt things. I think that’s good, but I also have to be careful. I don’t want to say anything that wounds. Having been a father and a pet owner, I know that there are critical thoughts you can voice to one but not necessarily to the other. There’s a certain pride in some of the actors in this group, and I don’t want to hurt them because I really love them.”

Chris Smith, artistic director of the Magic, describes “Expedition 6” as “a dance piece with primary source material for a text.” “It’s such an ambitious hybrid,” he says. “Imagine someone trying to communicate, say, the work of Mary Zimmerman before she was known. Bill is a true multi-hyphenate artist, and we’re set up here to nurture this kind of groundbreaking work, to help usher it into the public consciousness.”

Attuned to visuals

One of the unique aspects of Pullman’s vision as an auteur is that he’s as interested in fluid visuals as he is in nuanced acting. “I love Mary Zimmerman’s work, but I don’t feel particularly excited about the acting,” he says. “I love the directing and I love the storytelling, but I don’t think that in terms of the actors there’s that same level of engagement with the text.”

Pullman recalls once when he was performing onstage being thrilled to hear that Harry Dean Stanton was in the audience, then crushed when he saw that he left at intermission. But it made Pullman want to explore ways “to entice people who love deep realistic acting to watch actors onstage” and not have them turn off in the manner that he frequently does at musicals. “How can we work without hitting the corny bone?” he asks.

Still seeking that authenticity he found in the film of Chaikin’s production of “The Serpent,” Pullman looks to the example of Raymond J. Barry. “Ray came though the Open Theatre but then became part of the working stable of L.A. actors. He was in ‘Dead Man Walking,’ among many other movies. But it’s the way that he behaved onstage that really struck me. There was a reality to him that was unfiltered.”

Pullman’s sensibility is obviously far more adventurous than his screen persona might suggest. And yet there’s always been something haunting about his ordinariness.

David Lynch, who tends to pick up on what the rest of us miss, clearly spotted something darkly intriguing enough to cast him in his 1997 film “Lost Highway.” “I always saw something in his eyes,” the director said. “Playing these mild-mannered, guy-next-door characters who most of the time don’t get the girl -- but I saw the possibility for rage, for insanity. For a leading man. His eyes -- it was his eyes. There was a lot more going on there than he was being asked to play.”

Pop culture critic Greil Marcus, who relates this quote from Lynch in his recent book “The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice,” has partly devoted a chapter to the analysis of Pullman’s face. In a San Francisco Weekly interview, Marcus explained that he was “fascinated by the way [Pullman] played this person who seemed to embody a kind of resentment, and disgust and anger, but also had the face of someone who has given up -- and it was the face of the country having given up on itself.”

That’s a rather hefty claim, and perhaps too many viewings of David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” can have you hallucinating. But there’s definitely more to Pullman than surface blandness. Beneath that craggy, good-guy exterior lies a theatrical fault line that’s long overdue to erupt.

charles.mcnulty@latimes.com

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McNulty is The Times’ theater critic.