If you think of theatre as "self expression," you’ll have to argue with actress/director Rosemary Luke of Carmel Valley. "Theatre’s not about you! It’s about mastering your self - it’s about getting out of your own way. It’s about making this role and this play live for other people."

I spoke to Rosemary the Monday after she had closed in Neil Simon’s ROSE’S DILEMMA - a project she says taught her a lot. "I used to hate Neil Simon. One liners and no real message. Well, I learned something every night of the run. Neil Simon is a genre. There is a style, and it has a lot more to do with inflection and rhythm than motivation.

"I’m the original motivation girl! But with Simon, you’ve got to just let a line sing and ice skate around out there in the audience - and they’re going to tell you whether or not you got it right. They’re either going to laugh, or they’re not going to laugh!

ROSE’S DILEMMA MPC Players at Cherry Hall

"It’s always about getting out of my own way - greeting the material fresh for what it is and recognizing it for what it isn’t. . . I’m always looking for the message and hunting for material that’s going to change the world. . . I had to learn - at my age! - that this play wasn’t about that."

I asked her how she got started in theatre. "Ah! - I was a junior at Occidental College, and I’d always been in music. Well, I didn’t make the glee club, and I felt rejected, so it was either jump off a bridge or go downstairs and try out for a play. I tried out and was made stage manager - that was for THE CRUCIBLE. Then in my next try I got the lead in ARMS AND THE MAN.

"When I look way, way, way back, I used to go into the back yard to do plays for nobody, so it was there, but it didn’t express itself untill I was 21 years old."

Big Sur and a teaching job at Stevenson School brought Rosemary Luke to the Monterey Bay area. "Without actually realizing it, I created the Robert Louis Stevenson drama department. When I arrived, there wasn’t one. When I left there was.

Festival of Firsts - Sunset Center

"Teaching was one of the happiest times of my life. Definitely. But everything has been fulfilling. In community theatre, where you find yourself working with people who think they know it all and with beginners who are convinced they can’t act. . . When there’s little or no rehearsal space and no outside support - well, it feels pretty triumphant when you come up with any kind of success."

She thinks that acting and directing call for two different sets of interior muscles. "So much of directing in community theatre is organization, and I have tremendous organizing abilities. Very little is creative when you are directing on the community level - and not much of it is intuitive. You’ve got to find the people, drum up a stage crew, do the publicity, keep all kinds of balls in the air. . .be rested, be healthy, be open, and keep working, working, working.

"Directing is about people. You can know the play up and down, inside and out, but if you’re not getting on with your cast, it’s no use. You‘ve got to tap in with what the performer has to do to be the best in the show. Acting uses a different part of my brain. It’s intuition, it’s flow. For me it’s more difficult than directing. You have to find that intuition, create the magic, be another person night after night.

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Forest Theater Guild

"Speaking technically, you learn the lines as soon as you possibly can, whatever that takes. Sing them, dance them, say them to a mirror, listen to yourself and ask, ‘Do I believe what I’m hearing?’ You listen to your director and throw out what doesn’t work. Get out of your own way and check in with the playwright on a daily basis."

She’s frank and pretty astringent in expressing her opinion of local community theatre. "We don’t ask enough of ourselves. We are content with too little. We prefer comfort zone to really, really, really igniting the artistic in ourselves. Part of that is supposed to be commercial - fill the seats at any cost! I just don’t buy that. I think as a race and nation we go for entropy. If in theatre we would conceive of ourselves as artists, we’d do much more meaningful and exciting work and produce more of it. We need good, articulate, demanding directors who will ask that kind of artistic commitment of their cast and crew . . .And the local community, of course, could support us by coming up with some money."

THREE TALL WOMEN MPC Players at Cherry Hall

She‘s very excited about her production of Peter Schaffer‘s LETTICE AND LOVAGE, which will run Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, June 2 through 25 at the Carl Cherry Center. "It’s a hilarious British comedy, and much of it will rest on two very eccentric and gifted women. The things they talk about! It’s uplifting, it’s light-hearted - and it does have a message as well as being hilarious."

Asked what else she’d like to say to the local theatre community that hadn’t been covered in my questions, Rosemary Luke didn’t even have to mull it over. "I’m ready for that one!" she said. "I have said this for so many years, and I just said it to my daughter, and I hope you’ll be allowed to print it in the Back Stage! Theatre is a bitch! And you know what? It has been such a good friend to me. I don’t know where I would be without it - not because I’ve always succeeded. Not a bit. It is terribly, terribly hard and terribly, terribly demanding, and what a passionate, glorious friend it has been!"