The Jesus Hickey, produced by Gary Grossman for Katselas Theatre Company, plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through July 11. Tickets: $15-$25. Skylight Theatre, 1816 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles; 310.358.9936 or katselastheatre.org.

“Fame is only good for one thing — they will cash your check in a small town.”
–Truman Capote

Los Angeles notable director/playwright Luke Yankee has written again…and again a provocative title: The Jesus Hickey.

The force was with Luke when he had a reading of Jesus. The Katselas Theatre Company stepped up to produce, and rehearsals soon followed. But, the path of a Jedi is seldom smooth and Luke lost his leading man.

Harry Hamlin

In the Katselas theatre family are master classes for working actors, among them one Harry Hamlin-Broadway veteran, original Titan, LA Law star and, yes, People Magazine‘s Sexiest Man Alive 1987.

Fellow classmate Greg Safel was in the Jesus cast and suggested Hamlin who then read the script, met with Yankee and the rest is testament. And, that’s how Hamlin opened in his first LA small theatre production on June 12.

His theatre roots are here. He’s been treading the boards since he was a kid at the Pasadena Playhouse children’s program. He remembers being terrified in high school when he had to take over “for some guy who got mono” as Mortimer in The Fantasticks.

College found him first at UC Berkeley, and then at Yale where he graduated in 1978 with a degree in theatre. Bill Ball of San Francisco’s famed Actors Conservatory Theatre offered Hamlin the position of his assistant in the directing of Cyrano de Bergerac being filmed for PBS at UC Berkeley.

With Hamlin’s knowledge of the Zellerbach Theatre there, he proved invaluable to Ball who offered him a full scholarship at ACT. Dealing with parents on this career move wasn’t as much fun.

“They flipped out,” Hamlin remembers. “They told me I’d be on the dole the rest of my life. I defied them and went out to my car to find they had removed the distributor cap. So, I took a cab to the airport…20 bucks. It was the only time in my life I intentionally bounced a check. But, I got on PSA Airlines and flew to San Francisco. I had no money and had to live on a stipend. It’s all in my upcoming book Full Frontal Nudity.”

The title comes from Hamlin’s first paying theatre job, playing naked-in-the-barn Alan Strang in Peter Shaffer’s Equus opposite Peter Donat at ACT. Hamlin was a student member of the professional company. He earned his Equity card and was working there toward his MFA degree.

Like most theatres, ACT had a green room. Walking through it one day, he discovered a fellow student filling out Fulbright Scholarship forms. ACT’s sister theatre was Russia’s Moscow Art Theatre where Hamlin wanted to study so he filled out the forms too.

“To my surprise,” he says, “I got it. I enrolled in Russian classes and learned to say, ‘Hello, how are you? I don’t know how to speak Russian very well. But, would you have sex with me?’ Then, Carter and Brezhnev had a blow-up and my visa was revoked.”

The alternate Fulbright plan was to study in England. “ACT was as good as LAMDA so I didn’t know what to do but I arranged for an apartment in London. While I waited, a friend called to tell me a casting director who had read my Equus reviews wanted to meet with me. She’ll take you to lunch.”

Obviously, that was a selling point to a starving actor. “She wanted me to read for a six- hour miniseries. Lunch was coming so I had to stay. I got the few lines and waited, sitting next to a blond guy shaking like a leaf. We read and by end of lunch, the casting director said, ‘You’ve been cast in the miniseries.’

“‘What? Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m going to England on a Fulbright.’ When you turn something down in this town, you’re hot. Oh, and the shaky blond guy was Corbin Bernsen” — Hamlin’s future co-star on LA Law.

Now hot, Hamlin was called by movie director Stanley Donen to read off-camera with Tovah Feldshuh and Ann Reinking for an upcoming movie. It paid $250 so Hamlin went. “It would pay for the 35mm camera I wanted to take to London.” Donen later wanted Hamlin to read again but on-camera in makeup and wardrobe. Hamlin declined.

“I’m a theatre actor, I don’t care about movies. Donen said I’d need film on myself when I got back from London and he paid another $250. So I did it. And, he offered me the lead in Movie, Movie.”

What to do. Hamlin was still living at home in Pasadena. His father was the bright engineer who worked with Wernher von Braun but it was his mother who gave him the critical advice. “They had seen me in Equus and she said, ‘You’ll learn a lot more making movies than sitting around London on a Fulbright. There’s a point when you have to stop adding to your resume.’

“I took a long walk to think about it, and did it.” The rest, as they say, is Hollywood history–the stuff that makes fantasy believable onscreen and off. Here then are some of the highlights of previous attractions…

In Movie, Movie, Hamlin played a John Garfield-like boxer spoofing the classic film Golden Boy. George C. Scott played his promoter and Eli Wallach the gangster who tempted him. Good company for an actor in his mid-20s who was later nominated for a Golden Globe Award as Best Motion Picture Acting Debut for the role.

Hamlin stayed hot and continued to keep good company in the original Clash of the Titans where Greek mythology got the Star Wars treatment. He starred opposite Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom and his 43-year old lady love Ursula Andress with whom he had son Dimitri.

“I did it,” Hamlin remembers, “because Laurence Olivier did. Maggie Smith asked him to because her husband Beverley Cross wrote it. Later, Olivier wrote me a letter apologizing for being in the movie, saying, ‘I had so many mouths to feed.’ I still have the letter framed next to a call sheet showing Harry Hamlin as #1 on it and Laurence Olivier as #2.”

Barbara Tarbuck, Harry Hamlin and Aviva

Hamlin’s third and last studio film ever was Making Love where he played an openly homosexual novelist. “I loved the part,” he says. “It was directed by Arthur Hiller, and was Sherry Lansing’s moment to do something cutting edge at 20th Century Fox.

“It was the first time for a feature with a gay leading character who wasn’t a criminal or a deviant. People said ‘Don’t do it!’ I said ‘f*** it. I’m an actor. I do different parts.’ I was wrong. People then thought if you play gay, you are.

“I think the same stigma exists today-it’s harder but then it was impossible. Even a hint you were gay, and No!” Oil wildcatter Marvin Davis later told me that just after he had purchased 20^th; they asked him to view an answer print of Making Love.

“I’m noshing on Michael Ontkean’s face and Davis was mortified. He turned to his wife Barbara and said, ‘I want my money back…this is a gay movie!’

“I was making studio film after studio film and, all of a sudden, the door shut and I couldn’t even get a meeting for a studio movie. So I became a TV actor and did theatre.” He started his Broadway career in 1984 in Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! To critical praise, he limped across the stage playing Moe Axelrod, a greasy Depression Era thug with a wooden leg.

“In 1985, my agent sent over a script for a TV series. I didn’t want TV and didn’t read the script. A friend was over for dinner and saw it on the table. ‘You have the LA Law script by the guy who did Hill Street Blues?’ My friend read it and said it was amazing. He was right. To this day, the pilot for LA Law was the best two-hour read ever.

“I didn’t know how I fit in. The role of Michael Kuzak was for a 45-year old myopic ex-linebacker lawyer with arthritis. I was 35 years old with perfect vision and no arthritis.  Steven Bochco still offered me the role.

I’d been doing stage and not earning much money for a while. My wife convinced me to do it. I was not happy about doing TV, but figured it would come and go in a year. We were shooting 15-hour days. I was completely spent and didn’t want to do any press.

“Steven Bochco said, ‘I’m on my knees. I’m begging you. Two or three outlets want to do features on you. It won’t take that long.’ So I did it.” One of the interviews was with People. The feature was turned into the cover story where Hamlin was named “Sexiest Man Alive.”

“I had no idea and was driving down the street in Sydney. I looked up and saw a billboard that said ‘Sexiest Man Down Under’…meaning I was in Australia. I never wanted to do press again.”

Once more, theatre was a haven for him. He played in Henry V at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC. A year later he was on Broadway in Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke opposite Mary McDonnell.

These days, life is different for Hamlin. “I’m close to 60,” he says. “I can’t wait to play Lear but I’m not there yet.” He has two daughters, 12 year-old Delilah and 10-year old Amelia with his actress wife Lisa Rinna.

“I went to Lisa and said, ‘I’m not leaving town while the kids are growing up.’ For Dimitri, I had been a ‘career dad.’ He’s 30 years old now. The only legacy you have in life is your kids. The thing that makes a difference is your family. I’m staying here.”

Staying here has led to his father roles such as the recurring Aaron Echolls on UPN’s Veronica Mars and Uncle Marty on CBS’ Harper’s Island which he calls his “old geezer” part. He has also followed Rinna’s footsteps on Dancing with the Stars, welcoming “the challenge to get in shape and walk out in front of 20 million people and not puke.” This year, he’s recurring on Lifetime’s series Army Wives and appearing in his latest stage attraction Luke Yankee’s The Jesus Hickey now playing at the Skylight Theatre.

Hamlin had a little concern about a playwright directing his own work, especially in its first production. This is a common apprehension which Yankee understands. But, he says, “I’ve been burned before so this time I’m a little more protective. And, as Douglas Wright says, ‘If Martha Stewart can write the recipe, she sure in hell can bake the cake!’” Since Wright won a Tony and a Pulitzer for his I Am My Own Wife and, among other things, wrote Grey Gardens and The Little Mermaid, who’s to argue?

Hamlin didn’t. After talking with Yankee, he said “I can start today.” He did and, according to his writer/director, “has raised the bar for the whole company, not just because he’s a celebrity. He’s a brilliant stage actor.”

Yankee should know. He regularly holds the seminars Conversations on Craft at the Stella Adler Theatre, is an award-winning playwright-you may remember his A Place at Forest Lawn, and a sought-after director both here, regionally and in New York. He had his Equity card by age 15, then Juilliard, then assistant to theatre icon Hal Prince.

Like Hamlin, Yankee had a mother who gave him good career advice…only Yankee’s mom was not from Pasadena. One might say she was from heaven or, depending on the role, hell…Oscar-winning actress Eileen Heckart.

Luke Yankee directing.

“She treated me like a peer,” he remembers. “The best lessons were in the living room.  She watched every monologue or scene I did for class, and every dress rehearsal in high school. She was my toughest critic. Sometimes I just wanted a pat on the head like from other mothers.” It was a loving and complex relationship which is explored in Yankee’s book Just Outside the Spotlight with a forward by Mary Tyler Moore.

Yankee’s The Jesus Hickey is the 50-year old’s first writing that has no connection to his famous mother. It is also the winner of the TRU Voices Award as well as the Joel and Phyllis Ehrlich Award given for “a socially relevant, commercially viable new work of theatre.”

In it, Hamlin plays a down-and-out Irish laborer capitalizing on the sudden celebrity of his daughter who, through a forbidden tryst, receives a hickey in the shape of Jesus.  Yankee is “fascinated by fanaticism and what people choose to see, as they desperately search for something to believe in.

“They see the face of Jesus in tree knots, pancakes and condensation stains on underpasses.” Or here, in the hickey of a teenage girl who, like Susan Boyle, finds that all the attention isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

There are two screen adaptations in the works-one that takes place in Ireland, and one in America. May the best producer win. Yankee is also hoping for regional theatre productions. “It’s a six character/one set play so is easy to produce,” he says.

As for the rest of us…maybe we should just head over to the Skylight and see if we too can be kissed by a deity. Or, at least, by one of its stars.

Feature image Aviva, Harry Hamlin and Barbara Tarbuck and production photos by Ed Krieger

Article by Geo Hartley