The face of the person who opened the door was crowned with a shock of red hair, but the face itself looked as if it hadn`t yet left adolescence. Certainly nothing like someone who`s ”thirtysomething.”
It belonged, nevertheless, to actor Timothy Busfield, the bearded character everyone loves to hate, the one named Elliot on that TV show. He`s in New York at the moment in a good-guy role, as a naval officer defending a couple of court-martialed Marines in ”A Few Good Men” on Broadway.
Asked about his clean-shaven new look, he laughed.
”I had to grow the beard,” he said. ”I know I look young, and when I auditioned for the part (of Elliot) four years ago, I wasn`t even
thirtysomething. I was 29. But I wanted the part, so I figured one way of making myself look older was growing a beard. I kept putting off an audition until I thought it was full enough.
”Now, I guess when the series resumes, I`ll have to start growing it again.”
Busfield is 33 now, and quite comfortable with his roles on the screen and in person.
”Theater`s my first love,” he said with conviction. ”I`ve been here in New York before, off Broadway at the Circle Rep, and off-off-Broadway, all that. Never on Broadway, though. I was an understudy for both Matthew Broderick and Zeljko Ivanek in `Brighton Beach Memoirs,` but I never went on. They never missed a performance.”
So why is he here now, in a role Tom Hulce originated?
”Fortunately, Don Scardino, the director of `A Few Good Men,` is a
`thirtysomething` fan, and he thought I`d be a good replacement,” Busfield said. ”I flew in and auditioned, and everyone seemed happy. Must have been,
`cause here I am.”
The likable Busfield is from Lansing, Mich., where his father taught theater arts at Michigan State University. Some of that must have rubbed off on the family, because Busfield remembers, even as a small child, putting on skits with his brother and sister in the basement.
”We were going to be movie stars,” he said. ”We thought it would be that easy.
”But I avoided acting as long as I could. I really was a jock. I had a baseball scholarship to East Tennessee State, and at that point, I thought I wanted to teach and coach baseball. But I got injured-a shoulder separation-and I was looking at surgery and felt my baseball days were coming to an end. The day I found that out was the day the theater department was holding tryouts.
”So I walked across the field to their building, tried out, and got a part. I kept getting parts, so I worked up a couple of monologues and drove to Atlanta, where they held auditions for regional theaters. I did my bit, 60 seconds with a song, but I really don`t have much of a voice.
”I got 26 callbacks from that audition, and not one was for a musical, so everybody must have agreed about my singing.”
He ended up at the Green Mountain Guild in Vermont for the summer, at $40 a week. From there, he went to the Actors Theater of Louisville, spent a year there as an apprentice, looking, listening and learning. Then he was invited to join the company, and he hasn`t been out of work for more than a few days at a time since.
He went to New York then, with his first wife, the actress Radha Delamarter, and their son, Willy, now 8. (Busfield and Delamarter have since divorced, and he`s married now to a former fashion designer, Jennifer Merwin, with whom he has a daughter, Daisy, 1.) They lived in Brooklyn while he worked at Circle Rep and for ”Brighton Beach Memoirs.”
When he realized most of the roles here were going to actors with known film or TV credits, he packed up the family and headed for California.
”I figured I needed those if I was going to work, and also, I wanted to learn something about movies.” So he ended up as Pernell Roberts` son in
”Trapper John, M.D.”
From that came ”thirtysomething,” and from that the role as a semi-bad guy, Kevin Costner`s doubting brother-in-law in ”Field of Dreams.”
But with all the success he has seen recently on the big and small screen, he says his heart is really with a touring theater for young audiences that he and his brother founded in Sacramento, where they live. It`s called the Fantasy Theater, and it travels around, putting on plays in schools. It`s a full-time, Equity Theater contract project.
”I did a lot of children`s theater when I was in Tennessee, and I loved it,” he said. ”You watch kids sitting in the audience, looking bug-eyed at what they`re seeing, and you know you`re getting through to them. It`s very gratifying.
”We do all new works. My brother and I wrote most of them at first, but we`ve been holding contests for new playwrights. Last year, we had 890 submissions-and we could only choose four!”
