"Sticking to the Script"
By Blake Green
Newsday, 06-18-2000

The "how-do-you-dos" barely out of the way, Harris Yulin, he of the haggard face and the piercing blue eyes, starts talking about his baseball cap with its logo of a Texas longhorn and the salmon-colored shirt he's wearing. Both, he reports, are mementos from a period he spent in the Lone Star State last year filming "75 Degrees in July."

"I actually wore this shirt in the movie," the bearded actor says, continuing, "The other day I went to an early screening and I happened to have it on then, too." He looks pained, his expression more dour than usual: "This is a really boring story."

It's a fair assessment. Yulin, hardly the most loquacious person, would obviously prefer that strangers hear his voice spouting the words of others - say Henrik Ibsen's.

In a few minutes, when rehearsals for "Hedda Gabler" got under way in Manhattan, he'd be doing just that - by way of Jon Robin Baitz, whose new version of the classic is being performed at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, beginning Wednesday. It runs through July 9. The show then moves to the Williamstown (Mass.) Theatre Festival's main stage, where it will run July 19-30.

Both locales fit in perfectly with a resolution Harris says he recently made: "To spend more time in the country." Bird-watching, he says, is but one of the bucolic endeavors he enjoys.

The veteran character actor - he insists he has "no idea" what that description means - is playing the powerful and conniving Judge Brack, who doesn't harbor the purest of thoughts about the frustrated and self-destructive Hedda Gabler (Kate Burton). Michael Emerson is George, her hapless husband - which is the role Yulin played (opposite Susannah York) when the Roundabout Theatre did the drama in 1981.

"I do remember some things about that production - mostly that I had a wonderful wig," he says, seemingly reluctant to leave behind the subject of apparel.

Then he moves to his art form: "It's always satisfying to go back to these plays because they don't really have a bottom." Nicholas Martin, who's directing "Hedda" and is the new artistic director of Boston's Huntington Theatre, has talked to him about doing "King Lear" up north. And he's tempted. It would be his second Lear. And why not? "Gielgud played him four, maybe five times," Yulin says.

When the 62-year-old actor was last at Williamstown, he was starring in "The Price" as the successful brother of Arthur Miller's estranged siblings. (He also liked the expensive camel's hair coat he got to wear.) Last fall, the play transferred to Broadway, where Yulin's face has become increasingly familiar in recent years. In 1997's "The Diary of Ann Frank," he played Van Daan, one of the people in hiding with the Franks.

Although Yulin is best known for his film work, often playing unsavory characters - recently, the corrupt politician in "Cradle Will Rock" and, in January, the crooked judge in TNT's "The Virginian" - Yulin says, "I think of myself more as a theater actor."

He was born in Los Angeles. His parents worked as a dentist and his office assistant. The family's show biz connection came via a cousin. "Linda Stirling, she was known as the Serial Queen of America because she starred in all those movie serials in the '40s," Yulin says, with the flicker of a smile.

But he doesn't credit her as a mentor. He became an actor, it turns out, after trying a few other things. Just out of college, "I had a lot of friends living in Florence and Rome who were artists, and I painted with them. I was very bad."

In the '70s, Yulin says, he experimented some with watercolors, "but I haven't done any of that kind of art for a long time; I'm not very good at organizing my time."

Recently, however, as an homage to his late cocker spaniel, Max, he began a project that he seems pleased to talk about. "Max was around for a long time, and we drove back and forth across the country a lot because he didn't like to fly. So he met a lot of people and had a lot of friends, and when he died, they wrote letters, sent me drawings." He's compiling the best of Max with hopes to get it published.

Also as a young man, Yulin flirted with architecture - "I'm still interested in that." Mulling over his options at that point in his life, Yulin says, "I remembered a pivotal experience, my bar mitzvah, and what it was like being on stage and communicating from that vantage point. I thought perhaps I could do that."

While he was living in Tel Aviv in the '60s, he began acting and directing, both of which he has continued. Last year Off-Broadway he directed "This Lime Tree Bower" by the young Irish playwright Colin McPherson.

Touting the talent of his "Hedda Gabler" cast, director Martin says, "Harris brings enormous masculinity and a very sophisticated sense of humor" to his work. "There's also a touch of danger about him. Harris is never predictable."

Article and Pic Contributed to The GBFF by Paul Rudoff.
Page by Doreen Mulman. Posted 06/10/2001.