It’s him, but not really

Matthew Modine is a brave guy.

On Wednesday, he opens in a comedy at the Geffen Playhouse as a has-been actor and opportunist who goes to South America to create a photo op as a celebrity “humanitarian” so he can get back on the A-list. By saving an endangered herd of alpacas, he figures he’ll save his career. The character’s name?

Matthew Modine.

And so the curtain rises on the world premiere of “Matthew Modine Saves the Alpacas.” Only that Matthew Modine and this Matthew Modine aren’t really the same guy -- they just look the same.

When the actor first read playwright Blair Singer’s Hollywood satire, he howled with laughter. “It was so funny and weird, and I let my son read it because he saw me laughing,” the actor recalled recently, perched on a chair in a Geffen staff lounge before a rehearsal. “He put it down and said, ‘This guy really hates you.’ And I said, ‘It’s not about me. It’s a person who happens to have the same name as me.’ ”

Confused? Don’t be. Modine does have a few causes, but he’s so low-key about them that Singer didn’t even know he’d taken up his planet-friendly Bicycle for a Day campaign only months before the playwright wrote the script for him.

(Modine’s 30-year custom of riding his bike in New York, ever since he was a struggling actor there, has helped keep him miraculously recognizable for a Hollywood actor well into middle age. Still earnest, boyish and hirsute at 50, he resembles the wiry wrestler he played in his 1985 film “Vision Quest,” just a more weathered version.)

For six months during the play’s development, Singer gave Modine’s character a made-up name so audiences wouldn’t mistake him for the play’s hypocrite. But it didn’t quite work. “I don’t think people believe false celebrity,” Singer says. “You name a guy Caleb Moore, and nobody buys it. Matthew is 180 degrees away from this character. This character has nothing to do with him, and that’s the only reason why I knew I could write the play.”

Still, it’s hard not to marvel at Modine the actor’s moxie in taking on Modine the character. He’s certainly not the desperate Modine of the play who has spent the past 20 years slumming in a Winnebago. Indeed, after a dozen years as an all-American leading man, starring in ‘80s films like “Married to the Mob” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” he has continued to work steadily in smaller films, television and theater. In his latest film, “Opa!,” which opens Oct. 16, he plays an American archaeologist who finds romance amid the ruins in Greece.

But Hollywood is inescapably ground zero for America’s youth obsession, and most actors of a certain age move into a different category if they’re not Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep. Modine too is in the army of older actors relegated to the “Memba Him?” category on the fame barometer TMZ.com.

“The only line in the play that’s really truthful to me was, ‘Back in the ‘80s, my fame came and went so fast, it was gone before I knew I had it,’ ” Modine says. “ ‘But I’m not going to make the same mistakes I made when I was 20. This time, when I rise to the zenith, I’m going to stay there. I’m going to plant my flag.’

“I’ve had that discussion with my wife -- when it came, we were so flabbergasted by the ease of access we had to anything we wanted. The doors that were open to us because of some films I made astonished us. We never took it for granted until it kind of went away, and we thought, things are not as easy as they were. But it was OK, because there are phases. I think if you work hard and hold true to the things you believe in, if you’re lucky, it does come around. It is cyclical.”

Wrestling ideas into shape

Singer has been “a huge fan” of Modine’s ever since the mid-1980s, when Singer was on Calabasas High School’s wrestling team. That’s when most young people are fine-tuning the all-important definition of what’s cool, and Modine’s performance as an earnest high-school wrestler in “Vision Quest” supported an incipient theory of the young Singer -- he was, or could be. “That was the cool wrestling movie,” the writer says, “and he was really cool in it.”

Cut to 2007 and the third-season set of the quirky Showtime dramedy “Weeds,” when the grown-up Singer, then writing for the series, was about to meet the object of his man crush. By now, Singer was a Juilliard grad, a recovering actor and an accomplished writer who’d had plays produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and other stages of note. (His most recent L.A. production was “Placement,” a 2006 drama about adoption at the Black Dahlia Theater, which was nominated for four LA Weekly Awards.)

His plays are an eclectic assortment of dramas -- “Matthew Modine” is his first comedy -- about subjects as diverse as being a white person with no African American friends in the age of Obama and the aftermath of witnessing a death.

All along, Singer had followed Modine’s career, and his admiration for the understated actor had continued to grow. “I just felt there was something about him that was very different from other movie stars,” Singer says. “There was a very honest quality to him in a Gene Hackman type of way. And I just really liked him. As somebody who was becoming an actor, he was one of my touchstone actors that I wanted to emulate.”

As serendipity would have it, Modine had joined the cast of “Weeds” as a corrupt real estate developer. Blair would go to the set to watch Modine work, and when it came his turn to write an episode, he focused on a mischievous underground plumbing explosion at Modine’s development. And so a collaboration was born.

Singer offered to write a play for Modine and promised to staff the production with people who were pleasant to work with. It was a novel venture for both: Modine had never had anyone actually come through on such an offer, and Singer had never written a play for a specific actor. But the first attempt -- a play about a Jewish college professor who goes to Israel -- was a total misfire. Modine was kind about it, but, says Singer, “It was just a dreadful, dreadful play, and I put it in a drawer.”

Next he turned to celebrity humanitarianism, a topic that had piqued his interest ever since 2000, when Leonardo DiCaprio kicked up a media sandstorm with his Earth Day TV interview of President Clinton -- Hollywood humanitarianism, which can also be self-serving.

“I do think celebrity humanitarianism would be better for questioning itself,” Singer says. “Why do you cut that check for charity? Yes, the charity is better for it, but at the end of the day, the intention is also important.”

Into the maw of the machine

The play also roasts the Hollywood image machine and its youth obsession, some industry execs’ penchant for reducing actors to their sexual appeal, international relief organizations’ eagerness to provide photo ops for stars, and more. Helping bring it to life are two stars of long-running TV comedies: Peri Gilpin (“Frasier”), who plays a relentless PR crisis consultant, and French Stewart (“Third Rock From the Sun”), as her assistant.

The Geffen seemed almost tailor-made for the show’s debut. Not only does it skewer Hollywood in a way that would be most appreciated by Hollywood itself -- reminiscent of “The Player,” but in a different way -- but the Geffen’s producing director, Gil Cates, is an industry insider who produced 15 Academy Award broadcasts.

“I was particularly entertained not only by the way it tweaks Hollywood specifically, but society in general -- this desire to get back to the top at all costs,” Cates says. “And the fact that Matthew Modine is prepared to play the part is just icing on the cake.”

The Geffen’s literary manager, Amy Levinson-Millan, had stayed in touch with Singer since 2001, when they’d discussed the possibility of producing his adoption play, “Placement.” So he sent her “Matthew Modine” last winter.

Sweetening the deal was the fact that Geffen veteran John Rando, who had the same agent as Singer, was attached to direct, and the theater had been hoping to find another production for him to helm. Rando -- whose credits include Broadway’s “Urinetown,” the off-Broadway hit musical “The Toxic Avenger” and collaborations with playwright David Ives -- is considered a masterful shepherd of edgy comic material.

As he later told the cast on the first day of rehearsal, “I was very excited” by “Matthew Modine.” “It’s very funny, but it’s also very poignant. As I read this play, I wrestled with altruism, so that’s a great reason to do it.”

With a $28,000 grant from the Edgerton Foundation New American Play Awards, which bankrolled two extra weeks of rehearsal, the New York-based team of Rando, Modine and Singer converged on the Geffen during the last week of June for a workshop reading. The workshop led to some critical changes: For one thing, Matthew Modine now actually does save the alpacas. In the earlier versions, he tried to but inadvertently killed them off. As became clear in reading the play out loud, “it’s a comedy, and once people start dying off, it’s a little less funny,” Singer says.

At Rando’s suggestion, Singer also cut a scene in which a film director parachutes in to court Modine. That enabled the creators to shorten the play enough to try eliminating the intermission.

“It just felt like we were on this roll, and all of a sudden you had time to sit and reflect on something, where maybe we didn’t want to give the audience time to reflect,” Singer says. “We just wanted them to go on this ride.” They’ll use the previews to try the play both with and without an intermission.

Gilpin and Stewart were brought aboard in July, and on Aug. 4, the cast and crew came together for the traditional meet-and-greet. Forming a circle in the cavernous room off the lobby where they would spend the next month rehearsing, everyone introduced him or herself -- everyone, that is, but Singer, who flew back three weeks later but continued to telecommute.

“I’m glad he’s not here,” Rando wryly told the group. “He’ll rewrite the label on your pants.”

In fact, several people connected with the production commented that Singer was unusually collaborative and amenable to other people’s changes. And his temporary absence was no accident.

“You want the playwright to go so you can say, ‘How do I make this work?’ ” Singer says. “You don’t want to feel that there’s a playwright there, waiting for you to get the play.” Ultimately what they’ll get is a tale turning on the Bizarro World’s Matthew Modine -- not the seemingly guileless, slightly awkward guy who tries to do the right thing, but an antic stand-in for the slimy underbelly of Hollywood’s myth-making machine.

And maybe -- no, probably -- some people will think he’s playing himself, a guy who’s pretty desperate. “And at times pathetic,” Modine says with a laugh. “I’m not thinking about it. I’m taking my clothes off and jumping into the Hollywood Jacuzzi.”

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‘Matthew Modine Saves the Alpacas’

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 LeConte Ave., Westwood

When: Opens Wednesday. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 18.

Price: $45 to $75

Contact: (310) 208-5454; www.geffenplayhouse.com