Living the Part : Veteran Actor McMurtry Looks Behind the Lines

SAN DIEGO — After a lifetime in the theater, the routine is never routine to Jonathan McMurtry. He still works hard at every part he takes on. Studying the character. Trying to discern from the lines how he should talk and how he should walk. Struggling to pin down what his character is up to when he’s not on stage.

Take his approach to his latest starring role, the 53-year-old McMurtry plays an aging actor in David Mamet’s two-person “A Life in the Theatre,” which has its San Diego premiere tonight at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s Hahn Cosmopolitan.

Robert, McMurtry’s character, performs with a younger actor in a variety of scenes from a variety of made-up plays. Sometimes the older actor gives advice to the young man played by David Ellenstein, sometimes he just gives him a hard time.

Less than a week before opening night, McMurtry was laboring over his characterization like a builder trying to get the foundation of a house just right.

McMurtry has already invented a surname for his character--Pudderbaugh (after a street his friend, actress Katherine McGrath, used to live on). He settled on a voice--what he describes as an “actor-y,” radio-type voice, based on a line in the play where Robert talks about his reverence for sound, referring to it as “the crown prince of phenomenon.”

But he was still fussing about what the fellow does after his shows. “I don’t think he ever leaves the theater. I think he sleeps there,” he said with consternation, sitting in a Gaslamp conference room overlooking the stage.

And he was mulling over other performances of the part. He recalled the late Ellis Rabb playing the role in the play’s New York debut in 1977.

“Ellis was very ethereal, very wispy. He seemed to float through it.”

Recently he read about F. Murray Abraham getting a lot of laughs for his portrayal in a New York production. McMurtry doesn’t approve.

“I think there’s a seriousness about the play that I don’t think the New York production is getting. There’s a sensibility to the old actor. He’s fading and the new actor is rising. You feel it’s his swan song--his last time. I’m finding a yearning. . .”

In certain ways, McMurtry can relate to the part he plays. Like the aging actor in the play, he has truly made himself a life in the theater. And the theater is indeed his life--when he isn’t working, which isn’t often, he catches the performances of others.

Despite a handful of television and film roles, McMurtry has been able to support himself on Shakespeare (he has done all the plays except Henry VI, parts one through three) and serious, contemporary works such as the recent run of “Noah Johnson Had A Whore . . .” at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa.

He understands the frustration an older actor feels when he’s told he can’t play Romeo anymore.

“There’s a little resentment that you can’t do some of those things anymore. I use that. I protract that,” he said.

McMurtry, like Robert, also cares deeply about his work. While Robert finds in the theater a metaphor for life, McMurtry describes his experiences as sometimes spiritual, other times as “almost religious.”

And that’s something he finds hard to turn off.

“When the curtain goes down, I can’t turn off all that I’ve done,” McMurtry said. “It takes at least a half hour. I’m usually the last one to leave the theater and the first one to get here.”

But there are significant differences. There’s a loneliness to Robert that McMurtry does not share. Robert does not have a life outside the theater, McMurtry does. McMurtry, who is spry, small-boned and blond, with gray at the temples, is warm, engaging and personable. He also giggles like an adolescent when he describes his wife, Terri.

“She’s gorgeous,” he said with obvious delight.

He talks about having children someday. And he has friends. Lots of friends. A longtime associate artist at the Old Globe Theatre (where he has worked since 1961), he checks in with Craig Noel, executive producer of the Old Globe or Jack O’Brien, the artistic director, before he takes any parts--to make sure there are no conflicts with anything the Globe wants him to do. He expects that he will be performing in the Globe’s upcoming summer festival--but he doesn’t yet know in what part or parts. He also talks with Douglas Jacobs, artistic director of the San Diego Repertory Theatre for whom he made his San Diego Rep debut in “Cymbeline” in 1990.

And then there are his actor friends. It is his friendship with co-star Ellenstein that led him to making his Gaslamp Quarter Theater Company debut in “A Life in the Theatre.”

He and Ellenstein did the play as a staged reading 15 years ago at Theatre 40 in Los Angeles. They talked about getting together to do it as a full production ever since. When a slot at the Gaslamp became available, Ellenstein, who was performing in “The Heidi Chronicles,” suggested that the company fill in with “A Life in the Theatre.”

Steve Bevans, managing director of the Gaslamp, immediately offered McMurtry the role.

“I’ve always wanted to play that role, and I particularly wanted to play it with David. I think it’s a wonderful play, a wonderful part.

“I like the guy. There’s a spirituality in the play that’s larger than life.”

McMurtry lives in Ocean Beach. But he was born in Detroit--”in a trunk,” he jokes--to two vaudevillian performers. When he was just a kid, a man named Amos Jacobs was the master of ceremonies on one of his parents’ shows. Years later, Jacobs changed his name to Danny Thomas.

McMurtry never planned to become an actor, his dream was to be a commercial artist. Then he won a nationwide audition for a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. After two years of training, he returned to the United States. And he’s acted ever since.

Although he loves to play roles such as that of Alan Turning in “Breaking the Code,” which he performed at the South Coast Rep, and the German policeman in “The White Rose,” which he recently played at the Old Globe, he has also relished the small character parts he’s played in the Globe in “Uncle Vanya” and “The Merchant of Venice.”

And that’s another key difference between the Robert of “A Life in the Theatre” and McMurtry.

Robert is an extravagant character who has to be a star. Although McMurtry is not playing him as a ham, because he believes that Robert is “a good actor,” he does see Robert as having an almost desperate need for attention. For McMurtry, the play’s the thing.

Even in a show such as this, in which he is clearly the star, McMurtry’s hope is that the audience will soon forget McMurtry-the-actor and instead get caught up in the story itself. In fact, that is what he hopes for himself, in the course of a performance, that he can forget he’s performing and just feel, as he puts it, “free.”

“It’s like a spiritual experience. I find that really exciting. And I think that’s why I do what I do. It’s an energy that’s larger than you are. You feel the audience, too. And they’re not looking at you. They’re looking at the idea. From that, something can go on to a higher place. I’s almost religious. And it’s extremely gratifying.”

* Performances of “A Life in the Theatre” begin today at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre and continue at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday with Sunday matinees at 2 through May 10. Tickets are $20-$22. At 444 4th Ave., San Diego, 234-9583.