BEHIND AL PACINO'S CURTAIN; `HUGHIE' TAKES ACTOR BACK TO LOVE OF THEATER.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

Given his druthers, you suspect that Al Pacino might've spent his entire career hunkered down in some overworked, underpaying off-Broadway theater deconstructing Shakespeare and honing his avant-garde muscles.

Instead, he's had to settle for being one of the planet's biggest movie stars.

Ah, the entertainment gods can be cruel.

Of course, it's not unusual for successful Hollywood actors of a certain age to speak wistfully of the theater as their ``first love,'' just as some burned-out journalists prefer to think of themselves as frustrated novelists.

But in Pacino's case, the years of dedicated theatrical craftsmanship speak louder than the cliches. So do his two Tony Awards, the first of which he earned in 1969 for his performance as a drug addict in ``Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?'' the second for playing a nondescript nobody caught up in the turmoil of the Vietnam War in a 1977 revival of ``The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.''

Time and again, when he wasn't making movies, Pacino has returned to live theater, tackling everything from the title role in ``Richard III'' (which he also filmed) to Oscar Wilde's ``Salome'' and a rave-inducing 1982 revival of David Mamet's ``American Buffalo.''

Those occasions have allowed the Oscar-winning actor to reconnect with the challenges of stepping out in front of a live audience, minus the safety net that movies provide in the form of skillful cinematographers and sympathetic editors.

Pacino will walk the tightrope again this summer at the Mark Taper Forum, where he'll be directing and starring in Eugene O'Neill's ``Hughie,'' a brief, little-known two-character drama by the author of ``Long Day's Journey Into Night'' and ``The Iceman Cometh.''

In a recent interview, Pacino, 59, spoke of the occupational hazards of stage acting with evident satisfaction.

``I enjoy the feeling of the journey, going out there and you can't turn back,'' he said. ``Generally, you really are, in movies, just trying to get by, trying to live within the wires.''

Compared to the millions who've seen his films, only a relative handful of people have witnessed Pacino's stage work. By all accounts, the Method-trained actor brings the same compacted intensity to a 1,200-seat house that he does to his big-screen portrayals of manic low lifes (``Dog Day Afternoon''), calculating Cosa Nostra dons (``The Godfather'' series) and iconoclastic cops (``Serpico,'' ``Heat'').

In ``Hughie,'' Pacino plays Erie Smith, a Times Sqaure hustler, gambler and horseplayer who, in the wee morning hours, bends the ear of a night clerk (Paul Benedict) at the run-down Manhattan hotel where Erie lives. Erie has just come off a five-day alcohol binge occasioned by the funeral of Hughie, the previous night clerk, who for years had been a willing co-conspirator in Erie's chronic self-delusions.

For Pacino, ``Hughie'' is practically an extended monologue, during which the bored night clerk's thoughts wander hither and yon, according to stage notes supplied by O'Neill that are never spoken aloud.

Do O'Neill's italicized prompts actually help, or are they distracting?

``Well, you know, you try not to read those things,'' Pacino says. ``Usually you'll get them later as you get into rehearsal. But it gives you a general idea of a sense of what was going on with O'Neill at the time and what he was thinking about. That's what intrigued me, really, how to communicate that.

``I mentioned before (that) this is the same author who wrote `The Hairy Ape' and wrote `Strange Interlude.' (`Hughie') is this kind of expressionism, which made me think it's possible to actually voice the hotel clerk's ruminations. And it has to balance the play, too. Where there is the touch of irony or humor, I think it comes through a little more, in that juxtaposition.''

To communicate the night clerk's subliminal ruminations, Pacino briefly thought of adding another person on stage to read O'Neill's editorial asides. Then, after trying out different approaches, he came up with another idea.

``I tried to set it up in such a way that there's a different tone in his voice when he's speaking (his thoughts),'' Pacino explains. ``We spent a lot of time trying to find the right kinds of sounds and present something that would give us the sense that he's (thinking out loud).''

Though he has been down this road before - he first did ``Hughie'' in 1996 at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn. - Pacino speaks of the L.A. revival as if he were wrestling with a freshly minted drama instead of returning to an obscure, 70-year-old piece that O'Neill himself never intended to be produced.

In conversation, Pacino gives you the idea that his background as a New York actor, trained by the venerable Lee Strasberg, is never far from his mind when he sets about constructing a character. ``I just read a Chekhov story the other day ...'' he'll begin an anecdote, then digress into a point-by-point reminiscence of a show he saw at a downtown New York theater 20 years ago.

Later, responding to a question about stage-acting methodology, he launches into a quietly impassioned soliloquy about ``finding a way to discover this play'' and the ``whole sense of adventure'' that comes from making dramatic sense of a difficult text.

``It's always taken me a little longer to come to something,'' he says, ``and I'm happy that it does. And with Shakespeare, I'm not ready to start until the run's over.''

``In a way, that's what I was saying in `Richard III' (his 1996 `Looking for Richard,' a documentary-style film about his staging of the Shakespeare play). You're not going to get the play, you're going to get pieces of it. But as you learn it, you're forced to digest it, and it's with you in that way.''

That aforementioned ``sense of adventure'' is why Pacino prefers what he calls the ``fluidity'' of live performance vs. the ``fragmentation'' of film. When Hollywood came knocking 30 years ago, ``It was suddenly a life that I wasn't prepared for,'' he says.

``I'm starting to feel that in order to do a movie, one has to have an appetite, because there's so much that goes into it. For me, (film acting) is an exhausting experience - not just the acting itself (but) the being uprooted from where you are and sitting seven or eight hours in a camper. As Orson Welles said, that's really what you are paid for.''

While the movies have made his fortune, Pacino still harkens back to a memory of seeing a performance of Anton Chekhov's ``The Seagull'' that he says changed his life. At the time he was ``just a kid from the South Bronx,'' and that experience ``was the moment that changed me.''

``I remember the line `People don't do things like this' at the end of the play,'' he recalls.

``I had never heard anything like that. It was a whole (new) world, like my whole life I was walking around and I had never looked up at the sky - and looking at that was like looking at the sky.''

``There I was, this kid sitting up in the third balcony. It's like this ticket fell out of heaven.''

And while great acting parts rarely drop from the sky - either in film or in theater - Pacino seems content, for now, to let the career chips fall where they may.

``I'll tell you, I'm sort of trying to go with the flow. And I'm happy in the sense that I don't know what the next thing is I'm going to do. So maybe I can listen to these passions that are there. 'Cause you don't - for the most part.''

The facts

What: ``Hughie.''

Where: Mark Taper Forum, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave.

When: Opens Sunday. Performances 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays. 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays; through July 25.

Tickets: $25 to $40. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

PHOTO (1--Color--Cover) Stage presence

Al Pacino makes his L.A. debut in Eugene O'Neill's `Hughie'

(2) Paul Benedict, left, is the hotel desk clerk who listens to a Times Square hustler played by Al Pacino in ``Hughie,'' the Eugene O'Neill play that Pacino also directs at the Mark Taper Forum.

John Lazar/Daily News

(3) no caption (Al Pacino)

John Lazar/Daily News