The actor’s struggle, on stage

By JERRY TALLMER

If Off-Broadway has a heart and soul, Terese Hayden must lie close to the center of it. She has been doing what she does — acting, directing, producing — since the 1950s, when, among much else, she furthered Equity Library Theatre as a sort of home away from home for actors and writers and directors with more creative hunger than credits.

And she’s still at it.

“Splatter,” a play she directs at a space called Center Stage, is precisely about that — struggling, aspiring actors with more creative hunger than credits. One of the actors is also a playwright, and he and seven others — plus two acting teachers — have come together on the fourth floor of 48 West 21st Street in what is partly an audition, partly a rehearsal, partly an acting class, partly a group therapy session.

That too goes back to the ’50s and way earlier — Stanislavsky had nothing on the Greeks — but it is always a fertile subject for those who have a lifelong love affair with theater.

Of its very nature, if you haven’t seen a script (and I haven’t), it is hard to tell if “Splatter” is a written play in part or in whole, is improvised in part or in whole, or a little or a lot of both. That, of course, is the whole idea. In any event, the program calls this “a new play by Charles Cissel,” and sure enough, it is Charles Cissel who appears in “Splatter” as Harry, the writer who — wielding a broom as the evening opens — proclaims: “I wasted time, now time must waste me” as he struggles to achieve rewrites that his fellow actors will be able to play without feeling that he, Harry, has betrayed their own inner secrets and anxieties.

“We all have a right to our secrets,” one of the two acting teachers advises just before she storms out of the room for (to me) inexplicable reasons, only to return just as inexplicably. She is played by Terese Hayden’s longtime associate Jacqueline Brookes, while Terry Hayden herself plays the other teacher, at certain moments handing out such commonsensical advice as: “You should stop being a narrator, and be a little more an actor.”

She also delightfully recalls seeing Zero Mostel at Café Society Downtown in 1940, doing four or five minutes of “Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, but also had the feeling that you wanted to stay?” — “ambivalence indeed,” Ms. Hayden remarks. I loved her for it, even if I do believe Zero was swiping Jimmy Durante’s act without credit.

The two intermissionless hours of “Splatter” wander in and out, desultorily, though not without dramatic pressures. At one point two young women fall into key scenes from “The Seagull” (“You can’t know what it is to know you’re acting badly”) and “Uncle Vanya” (“She’s so good and generous, too bad she’s not pretty”).

Without more precise identification I can’t tell you who plays what, but here they all are: John Bale, Jacqueline Brookes, Charles Cissel, Terese Hayden, Roger Kovary, Robin Long, Jacqueline Jacobus, Roberta MacIvor, Ayanna Siveris, James Stevenson.

It is Mr. Stevenson, another longtime associate of Ms. Hayden, who delivers, with strength, Tennessee Williams’s call to arms: “Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.” And it is Mr. Cissel who pushes the voyage a few inches farther along with: “To be an actor is not for fame and glory, but knowing how to endure.”

That goes for audiences too.

SPLATTER. By Charles Cissel. Directed by Terese Hayden. Through Sunday, October 14, at Center Stage, 48 West 21st Street, 4th floor (there is an elevator), (212) 472-1789.