BERKOFF’S TURN TO BE A ‘KVETCH’

The redoubtable Steven Berkoff (“Greek,” “Metamorphosis,” “Decadence”) is back in town with a new play he’s written (and directed) called “Kvetch,” which opens today at the Odyssey.

Anyone who’s seen Berkoff’s baleful visage (he played the top bad guy in “Beverly Hills Cop”) wouldn’t think that he experiences much stress, but to the extent that a playwright can only write about what he knows and feels, “Kvetch,” by Berkoff’s description, is an almost extravagant confessional.

“It’s about the pain of living in a stressful situation,” said Berkoff during a rehearsal break. “Stress is created by the contrast between what one does and what one feels, how one lives and how one wants to live, the things you say in public and the things you really would like to have said. I show characters living two lives, their real lives and their projected fantasies. It’s an expression of my neurotic terror. If you can write about passion, as I did in ‘Greek,’ you can write about terror. It comes from the bottom drawer of my being.”

Berkoff only opens that drawer for the theater, even though his film career is going swimmingly. He’ll play Hitler in “War and Remembrance,” the upcoming sequel of the TV miniseries “Winds of War.” “He’s so real and demonic that it’ll be a challenge,” Berkoff said. “It requires demonic energy from an actor to play the role of someone everybody knows.” Still, Berkoff doesn’t think much of films. “I wish the film industry had more of the passion of the theater,” he said. “It’s a pile of crap, junk food. It plays to the lowest common denominator. That’s the conflict in me. Language is the be-all and end-all in theater; as an actor in the movies, you have to turn yourself inside out with frustration because you don’t have the words. Still, it makes it possible for me to start something like ‘Kvetch’ for nothing. I hope the play goes on to a long life of its own.”

Every now and then you’ll see a feature story on dispossessed farmers, or the homeless, which quickly washes away in the more exigent pursuits of a decade in which the haves treat the have-nots with notable indifference.

Another economic blight goes underreported--the disruption of blue-collar lives when an obsolete smokestack industry folds. “Lady Beth” refers to the Bethlehem Steel Co., which closed its Vernon plant in 1980 and added to the economic woes of many of the people who live in the increasingly depressed Vernon-South Gate-Huntington Park-Bell-Maywood region (the Goodyear and Firestone Tire companies, and General Motors, have also pulled out of the area).

“Lady Beth” is also the title of a play that opens Wednesday at the Ensemble Studio Theater. Rob Sullivan wrote it and Darrell Larsen directs. But what makes it unusual is that it has been largely created out of the real lives of six men who lost their jobs at Lady Beth and joined the Theater Workers Project--created by actress-producer Susan Tanner--to see their tale dramatized.

“Few people realize that Los Angeles has a heavy industrial base,” said Tanner, who put together her theater with a California Arts Council grant. “One hundred thousand people have been thrown out of work in the past seven years because of plant closures. In that Southeast area the unemployment rate is up to 12%, and this is just one of numerous industrial areas in the country facing the same thing. Fortunately, the steelworkers union local stayed open to become a crisis and food center as well as a home for the theater project. Workers’ theater is not an uncommon thing in places like Cuba, Mexico, Central America and the Socialist countries. We’ve had it in L.A. too--the garment workers put on ‘Pins and Needles.’ I feel these people have an important story to tell.”

LATE CUES: The Assn. of Asian/Pacific American Artists holds its second annual Media Awards Dinner Monday at the Beverly Wilshire. Cocktails will be at 6 p.m., dinner at 7:15; show gets under way at 8:15. Information: (213) 654-4259.