ACTORS RELISH CHALLENGE OF MAMET'S DRAMA.

Byline: Rob Lowman Daily News Entertainment Editor

Every playwright represents a particular challenge for an actor. David Mamet with his complex cadences, minimum stage direction and oblique characterization perhaps more so than others.

We recently stopped by the Geffen Playhouse to talk with two of the actors - Ed Begley Jr. and Christine Dunford - currently puzzling out Mamet's code for their performances in ``The ``Cryptogram'' and the ``The Old Neighbor.'' The pair had just finished a rehearsal before a preview performance that night when they graciously took time out to discuss the challenges they face in performing a Mamet play. Having just worked together on stage, Begley and Dunford seemed to be on the same wavelength with their thoughts about the playwright, chiming in with quips right on cue.

Daily News: What attracts you to Mamet's work?

Dunford: I think there is a great muscularity and vigor to the language that is quite challenging ... and you really have to rise to the occasion of meeting the vitality in the language. There's a kind of intellectual rigor you have to have in approaching it that's really refreshing. I think it uses more of the actor than most pieces use because your intellect is involved.

... It's very difficult material. I think if you are true to the inherent rhythm that the playwright has put down on the page for you, you wind up finding a performance that surprises you. I think that a lot of performers try to bend Mamet to their will, and it's a big mistake. They wind up presenting it in an overly naturalistic way or heightened way. There's a very delicate balance between those two poles, and (Mamet) exists in a place that is very fragile. It's exhausting but challenging to always be trying to find the place between those two things. I really, really like it.

Begley: I found when I first did a play of David's ... that the lines are very hard to learn. But once I learned it, it's a song that is easy to sing. ... You know there's a rhythm to the language. I find myself in encounters constantly thinking (about it), say when I deal with clerks (here Begley goes into a cadence) ... ``could ya, could ya, put the, put the money on the counter.'' ... The kind of rhythms he puts on the page, I find them constantly in life ... I find it very real. And also what he does so well we have in this play.

Dunford: It's almost as if (Mamet's lines) are musically phrased. When somebody asks us to go back and do a section, we're always ``No, we can't do it there.'' We know that exact place.

Begley: Return to the coda.

Dunford: It's got to be that exact section because that starts the beat. And you can't go into the middle of it.

Begley: I forgot the syndrome of dealing with life while doing a Mamet play. I'm constantly snickering in stores and in conversations with people because it's Mamet-esque.

Daily News: Mamet is known for being enigmatic; as an actor, is it difficult to understand your character?

Dunford: It's very of funny that the name of this play is ``The Cryptogram,'' because you could name any Mamet play ``The Cryptogram,'' because I think investigating as an actor you sit down and ask, ``What are the clues? Where are they?''

The comparisons to (playwright Harold) Pinter, I think, are appropriate in that because the language does not rely on exposition and giving the audience - in an obvious way - all the information. You do get the feeling that it's kind of a voyeuristic experience watching it, I think, because it is as though the people seem to be speaking in ordinary terms, even vague terms, but there is a specificity and it is to be revealed in the process of the play.

Begley: (In doing the characters), I get all my clues - there is plenty of information - from the dialogue because he does not have stage directions. ``Enters. Exits. Hand knife.'' That's it. That's the second act.

Dunford: ``Starts to cry.''

Begely: That's as much as my character has, or her character has in an entire act of the play ... all the clues come from the dialogue. ... When he needs to be direct, Mamet certainly is. When he needs to be clear, he is crystal clear.

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Photo: Will Rothhaar, left, Christine Dunford and Ed Begley Jr. crack David Mamet's perplexing ``The Cryptogram'' at the Geffen Playhouse.

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