The Morning Call from Allentown, Pennsylvania • 178

'STAT star had no choice but to take part By EIRIK KNUTZEN tiny cockroach meanders across the wall at the Disney Studios commissary and comes to rest about three feet from Dennis Boutsikaris' salad plate. "Look it! 1 -NCJJ V- Gerrit Graham, Casey Biggs, Alison LaPla-ca, Dennis Boutsikaris, Alix Elias and Ron Canada (clockwise from top) star as the compulsive and highly skilled staff of a New York City hospital trauma center, in the comedy series "STAT." You can't tell if it's a real cockroach or an anima'-tronic replica that's the wonderful thing about working at Disney," the actor observes casually, lifting an eyelid. "But it sure ain't Jimminy Cricket." The unflappable Boutsikaris, of course, has been hanging around legendary madmanproducerwriter Danny Arnold too long. As the star of Arnold's midseason replacement sitcom (which had it's final, limited-run broadcast on last Tuesday night) "STAT," he portrays the compulsive and passionate Dr. Tony Menzies the senior resident physician at the Hudson Memorial Hospital's weird and wild trauma center.

The "pit doc" rides herd on the strangest, quite competent and most paranoid emergency room doctors and nurses in the universe. Dr. Menzies, the voice of reason, is assisted by a motley crew that includes the over-organized Dr. Elizabeth Newberry (Alison LaPla-ca), a first-year resident intent on bringing order to inherent chaos; Dr. Lewis "cowboy" Doniger (Casey Biggs), a highly dedicated womanizer and skilled physician; and Jeanette Lemp (Alix Elias), a perpetually frustrated insurance carrier near nervous exhaustion with an unrequited lust for Tony Menzies.

"STAT" from the Latin word statim, according to deadpan artist Boutsikaris, "is like 'Barney Miller' set in a hospital and I'm sort of like Hal Linden's character, the guy who holds it all together. We're the gonzo doctors always battling with the rich, uppity doctor's upstairs. And Danny Arnold created the whole thing in his own brilliant way. He's a master who can take something funny and make it funnier with time and care. Do you think my nose is brown enough?" The series is a major break for the short, slight, dark and bearded 38-year-old actor best known for the 1986 Steven Spielberg produced feature "Batteries Not Included (few, if any, remember him as hotshot lawyer Joe Calvo in the episodic "Nurse" a decade ago.

"I am so recognized today that approximately half of the people who approach me think I'm Ron Silver and all of them say I did a wonderful job in the film "Wall Gracious about it, I thank them very much." Boutsikaris. a five-foot-six flyweight who was born in Newark, N.J:, and reared in nearby Berkely Heights, claims he had no choice but to become an actor while a student at Governor Livingston Regional High School. "That's because I was too short to do sports and incapable of doing a number of other things. The only thing 1 excelled at was acting, so I stuck with it. And i was so serious about it that I commuted to New York every weekend as a teen-ager for acting classes at the Circle In The Square Theater School." His liberal parents fueled the fire by sending him away to several "leftist art camps in the Catskills" during summer vacations.

"I lived for those summer camps in the late "60s and early '70s because it meant that I would do plays the whole summer along with some music instructions. My favorite place was Indian Hill, which was started by Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Carly Simon was the guitar teacher I lusted after there." The next stop was Hampshire College in Amherst, an alternative institution without tests or final exams. A theater major, he was a member of the first graduation class in 1974 which included Ken Burns, the man who wrote and produced the celebrated "Civil War" miniser-ies for PBS earlier this season. "It was a beautiful, nurturing environment where we were left to our own devices and put on whatever plays we felt like," Boutsikaris recalls fondly.

"I went back to Hampshire College for an alumni reunion a few years ago and spent most of my time trying to figure out what I was doing there. Within an hour, I was back to dealing with familiar faces exactly as I had done as a student there saying hello to some and ignoring others. I wound up wandering aimlessly from building to building, just like I did as an undergraduate." In 1975. Boutsikaris made his profes sional debut as a member of John Houseman's Acting Company and performed in scores of Shakespearian productions mounted in 35 states Please See 'STAT' Page 1 6 1.