PORTRAIT OF AN ACTOR; KOEHLER TURNS `KATE & ALLIE' APPRENTICESHIP AND DRAMA-SCHOOL TRAINING INTO RIVETING ROLE IN `THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN' AT THE GEFFEN.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

He looks innocent, all right, but watch out. That blissful expression in Fred Koehler's eyes signals it's time for his midmorning smoke.

``No toxins in my cigarettes,'' Koehler says, smiling mischievously as he lights up. ``Very oxymoronic.''

Wait a minute: Wasn't it only yesterday we were watching this guy play Jane Curtin's prepubescent son Chip on ``Kate & Allie,'' the CBS sitcom that ran from March 1984 to September 1989?

Now Koehler sits in the outdoor courtyard of Westwood's Geffen Playhouse, a sharp, friendly 23-year-old savoring his next move in what's suddenly become a very hot stage career.

Last summer, barely a year out of college, Koehler was singled out by The New York Times for his portrayal of a young slacker in Sharman Macdonald's comedy-drama ``When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout.'' Though Koehler's part was the play's smallest, reviewer Peter Marks described him as ``a natural'' and praised his ``canny, effortlessly honest performance.''

This time, there'll be no chance whatsoever of overlooking Koehler. He's the title character in ``The Cripple of Inishmaan,'' Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's black comedy about what happens to a small Irish village when an American filmmaker arrives there in 1934 to shoot a docudrama about the locals' seafaring lifestyle.

Different than others

Koehler plays the clever, disabled young man universally known as Cripple Billy, who shares his neighbors' dreams of escaping their bleak, impoverished existence and striking out for Hollywood. While handicapped characters often are typecast as martyrs, Koehler says that's not the case with Cripple Billy.

``I think as an actor the thing is not to play (him) sympathetic or even pathetic. He's capable of cruelty. He's the one (the audience) is sort of rooting for, I would guess, but at the same time he's not the type of character who would just stand on a box of Wheaties being great while the other characters are bad. He's not a victim. I think he's manipulative, but in a great way.''

Riding a tsunami of expectations generated by McDonagh's previous hit, ``The Beauty Queen of Leenane,'' ``Cripple'' was greeted in New York last spring by some fairly scathing reviews. (Since the opening, the 28-year-old McDonagh has stopped doing interviews, at least temporarily, telling a Geffen representative that his New York experience with the press had ``bored me senseless.'')

Koehler arrived at the Geffen well-versed in his role, which he'd understudied for the New York production. Although director Joe Dowling hadn't seen Koehler act before, an audition convinced him he'd found ``exactly the right man for the job.''

``He's a very skilled actor, and there's also a kind of wonderful, innocent sweetness in his look,'' says Dowling, an Irishman who became artistic director of Minneapolis' renowned Guthrie Theatre in 1995. ``But as soon as you meet him, behind those eyes you also can see this wonderfully fun and beguiling quality in him.''

Unquestionably, Koehler looks the part. Wearing a baggy brown sweater, work pants and heavy boots, with a faint reddish-brown beard and a complexion that clearly hasn't spent the summer hanging at Santa Monica Beach, he almost could be a steerage passenger fresh off an ocean liner from County Cork.

A somewhat unexpected confluence of events brought Koehler to this pass. He admits he wasn't much interested in theater when he entered Carnegie Mellon University to study drama. The first play he ever saw was Andrew Lloyd Webber's ``Starlight Express.'' He exited the theater thinking, ``I never want to do this. I didn't want to be on Roller Blades, and I didn't want to be singing, and I didn't want to do that.''

As a teen-ager, he'd been much more drawn to movies like ``A Clockwork Orange,'' ``Taxi Driver'' and ``The Indian Runner.'' It was only in college that he developed an equal passion for Sam Shepard and David Mamet.

``When I went to college, I was clueless about theater,'' he says. ``Had never read a play. The difference between Neil Simon and Shakespeare wasn't that great to me. It was ridiculous. I had no idea how to project my voice, and I hadn't learned how to use my body. I never would've been able to do this part (Cripple Billy) if I hadn't gone to school.''

Koehler also credits his ``Kate & Allie'' apprenticeship with conditioning him for his new career.

``I don't think there are two better teachers you can have than Jane Curtin and Susan Saint James,'' he says. ``I feel really lucky about the experience. I never had any crazy child-actor syndrome. Me doing `Kate & Allie' was almost like playing Little League. I started it when I was 7 and ended it when I was 14. And by that time, it was such a part of everyday scheduling. Be on the set by 10 and home for lunch by 1. It was nothing grander than that.''

Like Chip, with his single mom and surrogate mom, Cripple Billy has grown up in a matriarchy, dominated by his two devoted aunts. Koehler can relate to that dynamic: He and his three older sisters were raised in Jackson Heights, Queens, by their own single-parent mom. Koehler says he hasn't seen his father since he left the family when Fred was 4 years old.

``He's gone off and done his thing, and I've done gone off and done mine, and I feel extremely lucky for it.''

His mother, Koehler says, served as both parents, taking him outside as a youngster to throw a football ``and demanding that I catch it.''

Second chance

Now Koehler, Dowling and the rest of the Geffen's production team are hoping to pick up the ball and run with a play that failed to score big in its previous outing.

``Whenever you get hype about something - and I believe `Beauty Queen' opened a couple months before `Cripple' did, and from what I heard was a magnificent play - when it opened with all the hoopla, I think everybody's waiting for the sophomore jinx,'' Koehler says. ``If you're an NBA rookie and you score 20 points a game, everybody's going to expect a slump the next season.''

This time, however, the smart money may be on the sophomore with the smiling eyes.

THE FACTS

What: ``The Cripple of Inishmaan.''

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10866 Le Conte Ave., Westwood.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays; through Nov. 22. Special performance 2 p.m. Nov. 11. No evening performance Nov. 15.

Tickets: $30 to $40; $10 student rush 15 minutes prior to curtain. Call [phone].

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Photo

Photo: Fred Koehler on his ``Inishmaan'' character: ``He's not a victim. I think he's manipulative, but in a great way.''