‘TRUE WEST’ STARS HAVE TRUE GRIT OF ACTING LIFE

Meet Daniel Bryan Cartmell and Bud Leslie, working actors.

You might have seen them last year in the Grove Theatre Company’s production of “The Dresser.” Cartmell played the flamboyant actor-manager, Sir. Leslie played Norman, his waspish dresser.

Stunning performances, both. No one in the Garden Grove audience would have guessed what the actors were doing before each show.

Cartmell was working on a roofing job. “A friend of mine hired me. I’d carry buckets of tar up the ladder, and go down for some more. Miserable work.”

Leslie was working in a Westwood hotel and commuting to Garden Grove every night. “The freeway would be a parking lot some nights. One time, I got to the theater at 5 minutes to 8. It was hell.”

“But now it was OK--we were inside the theater,” said Cartmell. “That’s just what our characters, Sir and Norman, felt, tryin’ to perform during the German blitzkrieg. Bud and I started understandin’ that on a very personal level.”

Cartmell is a big man who lumbers as he walks. Leslie is slight and agile. The contrast serves them well as the sparring brothers in the Grove’s current production of Sam Shepard’s “True West.”

“We’re like these characters in a way,” Leslie said. “I live in L.A., trying to do movies and television. Dan talks about gambling, golf and all the weird jobs he’s had--things I don’t know about at all.”

“I’m no high roller,” Cartmell put in. “But I know guys who are, desert rats like my character, Lee. Shepard and I grew up with the same kind of strange cats.”

Leslie, a graduate of New York University at Ithaca and the American Conservatory Theatre’s graduate acting program, teaches acting at a conservatory through Rancho Santiago College in Orange County, while Cartmell doubles as a director for the Grove. He just finished directing “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” and soon will turn to David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre.”

Cartmell’s background is a typically American stew of influences. He used to be a banjo and guitar sideman for country and bluegrass groups “and the first one to get canned.”

His encounter with Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre on its 1972 tour “turned me around completely.” Things became serious when he went to Illinois State University. (“The commitment to excellence in the middle of that cornfield was overwhelming.”) Then he went on the road with a Shakespeare troupe. He has been a regular at the Grove for the last seven years.

The work, though, never stops. Not with Frank (“The Chicago Conspiracy Trial”) Condon directing them in “True West.”

“I’ve never seen such detail work in rehearsal,” said Cartmell.

“He never let us get away with anything,” agreed Leslie. “He just called me today. He’s still giving notes.”

And they said lugging tar was tough. . . .