LATINO ACTOR SEEKING A DIVERSITY OF ROLES

Tony Plana was trying to be nonchalant about giving a newspaper interview, while another part of him badly wanted to watch the Hagler-Leonard fight.

“It’s probably not a very good fight,” he said, consoling himself and glancing at newcomers’ faces in a Beverly Hills restaurant for some hint of the drama in Las Vegas. “I don’t mind, really,” he declared. “Sitting here and doing this is more important to me than a fight.” The broad smile was meant to convince--the same overeager smile that stretches Plana’s face nightly at South Coast Repertory theater in Costa Mesa. In his role as Charley Bacon, he is the son of Hollywood extras, envious of the establishment but distracted by his dreams.

The play by Arthur Giron, “Charley Bacon and His Family,” starts its West Coast premiere run Friday.

The play traces the battle that art and commerce wage for Charley Bacon’s Latin soul, from his star-struck childhood in Burbank with a mother who wears hand-me-down MGM jewelry, to encounters with a loutish boss in a New York bank and Charley’s emerging passion for dancing.

The play’s 20 scenes include 17 filled with Plana’s acting and dancing. There’s also a scene in which he boxes with the boss.

It is a whirlwind tragicomic evolution for Bacon and a demanding evening for Plana, 33, whose credits in theater, television and film could easily earn him the label of “Rising Latino Actor.”

Cuban-born, with dark eyes and equally dark, expressively agile eyebrows, Plana says he wants to escape the stereotype. Yet he knows he’s lucky to have gotten several vivid roles that used his ethnic quality--including those of an assassin-politician in Oliver Stone’s “Salvador” and a CIA agent’s Cuban friend in Keith Reddin’s “Rum and Coke.”

“Charley Bacon,” which received a workshop production in New York, was extensively reworked at SCR where it has involved close collaboration between the playwright and the actors.

“I thought Charley was having too many epiphanies about living in California with nature and the Indian heritage and so forth and said I thought some of it should be cut,” Plana said. “I thought it was implicit. . . . He talked about it too much. That made it too much of a philosophy, and it isn’t that so much as an integration of his personality. It was cut.”

He also thought that the main character’s suffering in his corporate environment should be made clearer. Here, he said, the playwright listened to his advice and then rejected it, saying he believed that certain later scenes adequately emphasized the pressures that Charley Bacon endures.

Another parallel between the last Plana performance at SCR and the current one is his identification with the character. “Rum and Coke” was an often-comic look at political ideals and confusions of the early 1960s, assembled around the Kennedy Administration’s ill-fated invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Plana’s father, who had left Havana for Miami, was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion force that never made it into action. “I played my father,” the actor said. “I imitated his gestures. I used his accent.”

After moving to Los Angeles in about 1964, Plana’s parents worked for local banks.

His mother is on the operations side for Bank of America, whose old downtown office building is the setting for a scene in which Charley Bacon shows up for a job interview with a briefcase full of ballet books. Still suspended between two worlds, he shows off the books to the interviewer. He doesn’t get hired. His frustration with the corporate world prompts him to improvise a grinding, tortured dance called “The Banking Rhythm.”

The grimace with which he performs the dance reflects an inherited distaste for the banking business, he said. “Banks are notorious for underpaying their people even though they control so much of the money in this country,” he said. “All my life we were very money-conscious, and the only way I got the education that I got was with scholarships.” That education was at Loyola High School and Loyola Marymount University, where he says he was bent on becoming a lawyer until a theater professor who directed campus productions asked him to play Snoopy in the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”

“I wanted to become a lawyer like F. Lee Bailey. Or F. Lee Sanchez. One or the other. But after that (playing Snoopy) I was hooked.”

Receiving credit toward his degree, Plana spent more than a year in London, studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. His courses included fencing and boxing.

Unlike many young actors’ careers, Plana’s has been serendipitous. Shortly after graduating from Loyola, he won the role of Robert Kennedy’s assassin in a play called “Sirhan & RFK.”

“I got very good notices, and that brought in some agents, and I chose one,” he said. Plana has acted steadily in Los Angeles and New York ever since. He just finished work on a “very good role” in a soon-to-be-released independent film about a Latino broadcaster in Los Angeles in the 1930s.

If there is a major frustration for Plana, it’s with too-frequent type-casting for Latin roles.

“It is a real frustration. I want to play characters that have more of my sophistication, my education. A psychiatrist, a surgeon, a professor . . . but I have been very lucky in the roles I’ve gotten. I know that.”

Unlike Charley Bacon, he acknowledged as the interview ended that he did not have to spend years in a business that undermined rather than cultivated his idea of what he wants to be. “In the boxing scene, Charley is pummeled. His soul is pummeled,” Plana said. By now, the restaurant was full of people whose exhilarated expressions suggested that the televised Hagler-Leonard fight had indeed been high pugilistic theater. Plana, a Hagler fan, stopped waiters to ask what he had missed. Someone said Leonard had won.

The look on the actor’s face was one of obvious regret. Later, before bidding the interviewer good-night, Plana the actor tried again: “Thanks for coming. I enjoyed it,” he said, unassuringly. “Don’t feel guilty. My career is a lot more important to me than just watching a fight.”