The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 398

Stage Barbara Colby: New Breed of Professional Repertory Actress BY JOHN WEISMAN Barbara Colby has come a long way from checking hats at New York City's Russian Tea Room. These days she's forging Congolese destiny on the stage of the Mark Taper Forum, where she appears as Madame Rose Rose, Patrice Lumumba's fictional secretary and lover, in the Center Theatre Group's current production, "Murderous Angels." She is a tall, leggy lady, who offstage sometimes affects the kind of soft-peaked cap that James Cagney wore in a dozen tough-guy movies. And when she settles into an overstuffed chair at the Malibu house that she and her husband have rented, she shares her seat with an oversized Old English Sheepdog named Ganky, whose surf-matted coat dribbles water on the chair, the rug and onto Miss Colby. Except for matinee performances, her days are her own. It's a new experience for Barbara Colby, who for the past two years has been a leading member of Bill Ball's American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

In that time, she appeared in approximately 30 productions, as well as maintaining a full schedule of classes in the conservatory. Miss Colby is representative of a whole new generation of American actors, bred and trained in regional and repertory theaters. This new breed of actor is much removed from his Broadway ancestor; he is much less cynical about his craft and his industry, and better equipped to handle himself in a broad variety of parts. And, like Barbara Colby, the new breed of American actor has a basic hunger to act, and through the practice of his craft to communicate with an audience on a multiplicity of levels. Miss Colby's professional hunger was assuaged at ACT.

With Bill Ball she found a way to communicate with both her co-workers and with the audience. "The thing that happened," she recalls, "was that we were able to evolve together as a "During rehearsal the cast spent days and nights together. Now it's like a marriage breaking up" company. One of the biggest flaws in the commercial theater is that you get a scenic designer, a costume designer--a whole bunch of people who have perhaps never met each other. They come together and design everything even before there's been a rehearsal.

And when you walk into the rehearsal hall for the first time, there it is--a plot for the play. Lights, sound, all the things that affect the play, before the actors and the director have a chance to find out what the play's about. "Whereas if you have a company evolving 1ogether, and minds which can work together and develop a kind of theatrical shorthand, you can create something without all the handicaps of people meeting for the first time. At ACT, the first week of rehearsal was like the seventh week anywhere else, 1 ecause Bill Ball made us develop that shorthand." Working at the Taper is to Barbara Colby "a scene." To her, Gordon Davidson's theater more reminiscent of Broadway or off-Broadway than it is of a regional repertory company. "For the tour weeks of rehearsal, the cast spent whole days and nights together.

We shared a lot. Now it's like a marriage breaking up, and we come to collect our clothes at night. the reviews are in, you settle down to the business of trying to keep the show alive and exciting. That's perhaps the hardest part. In any long TWENTY-EIGHT A A 1 Barbara Colby plays Patrice Lumumba's secretary in "Murderous Angels," at the Mark Taper Forum.

run--even seven weeks, like we have, all actors begin to get indifferent toward their roles. It's like we all say 'Now we're open, I've got to find some new But it shouldn't be that way. We should still try to realize the magic of our situation in every show." For Miss Colby, the "magic" of her involvement with the theater lies in the communication of "reality between the actor and the audience." "At one point at ACT, I was the rep--I did two two-character plays, 'Dear Liar' and 'Two for the There could be no two more different roles, so it was tremendously exciting. It made me want to communicate with the audience as much as was humanly possible. "You don't go into regional theater for glory, and you're not going into it.

for money (the top scale is below $300 a week), so obviously you're going into it for some sort of personal growth that you think is important for you to have in your work. To me, acting is an interpretative art that deals with other people's ideas. You're an instrument, and you want to refine and develop that instrument as much as is humanly possible. That's very hard to do in the commercial theater, where you do perhaps one show a season, and even then you get typecast most of the time. At ACT I was able to play a greater variety of things." Yet just as the repetition of a role night after night affects an actor's performance in a long-run Broadway show, the day-to-day schedule of repertory can be just as damaging.

"It became a 'job' job," says Miss Colby. "I woke up one morning in my Sausalito apartment, and all of a sudden the tremendous passion I had had was gone. I felt sort of jaded. The whole security thing worked against my situation." To offset the problem of stagnation that exists, sooner or later at all repertory theaters, Barbara Colby, like many actors and managers, suggests that there be more of an interchange between regional theaters, including the "cross-pollenization" of actors, directors and designers. Playwrights, too, could become part of a company in order to write material specifically for a certain group of actors.

She also feels that there must be a line of communication between a theater and the community that it is a part of. "The theater historically, and it's the magic of the theater, has been a revealer of truths. If it ceases to be that, then it becomes a museum piece. That's what it's doing throughout the country. It's becoming part of a 'Cultural so that the middle class has some place to go and feel And unfortunately it has to be careful that it communicates primarily to that moneyed, middleclass segment, or its funds will be withdrawn.

That's. not a very safe position to be in." Ball always used to tell us that people go to concerts and ballet with a whole different attitude than when they go to the theater. When they go to the theater, it's with the idea, 'I could probably do because it's reached the funny, stagnant level of reality that doesn't transform anything anymore. "People keep telling me that theater is dying. That's because so much of the time, it's terribly dull.

And once we've reached the point of taking off all our clothes and saying, 'Here we then where do we go? "It's like we've gotten into such a movie age. with television and everything. We just watch things without participating, and the theater is one of the few places left that's life, where people can reach out and feel a part of what's happening around them. Even if they don't agree with you, it's something shared." "You don't! go into regional theater for glory or money, so obviously you go into it for personal growth" She pulls at the cushion of the chair now, getting involved with her point. "Like when some black militant friends of Lou Gossett's came to see the show, and we all went out for a drink afterwards.

They hated Madam Rose. They just went mad. And they hated the fact that Lumumba is represented in the play as having a white mistress, whom he loved, and who loved him. And they despised me for playing that part. I mean, after the show, they still couldn't look me in the eye.

It was a fantastic, frightening contact. But in spite of the situation, it's the kind of thing I was able to use, as an actor, to make the part of Madam Rose work better for me. "The whole symbolism of 'Murderous Angels' is healthy. It talks about us. It talks about here, and now.

"It's to Gordon Davidson's credit that the Taper is doing five new plays. I mean, somebody has to let it be known that there are things to be said for now. The Greeks weren't doing ancient Greek plays, they were doing modern Greek plays. They were into revealing what their whole ritual and magic was about." In much the same way, that's what Barbara Colby is doing at the Mark Taper Forum. She's evoking spirits and making us all look just a little harder at ourselves.

Which is, of course, what she set out to do in the first place. 1. 8:.