Sure, sure, the reporter thinks to himself: Anthony Zerbe and Josh Brolin. "Teaspoon" Hunter and "Wild Bill" Hickok on ABC's The Young Riders. Father figure and firebrand. Graying eminence and twenty something heartthrob. Old Pro and Young Turk. Piece of cake, the reporter smugly tells himself. Why, if every story had such a ready-made theme, this job would be as easy as peddling Stetsons at a steer-herders convention. But Whoaaaaaaaa! (as Teaspoon might say to his horse). Let's get one thing straight here, podnuh. This isn't some kind of metaphorical rodeo, it's GeVa Theatre's Reflections 90: A New Plays Festival.

True, Zerbe is directing Brolin in Forgiving Typhoid Mary, one of three works that will receive their world premieres at GeVa. And it was Zerbe who encouraged Brolin to audition for that part and another he'll play in Oh, The Innocents, making Brolin the only Equity actor who'll appear in two of the three new plays. (Like "Wild Bill" Hickok, GeVa apparently knows a good draw when it sees one.) But Zerbe wants it understood that he regards himself as just another hired hand here -- not a coach or a faculty adviser or a big brother -- although he admits he does sometimes wonder about Brolin's eating habits. And his smoking.

"His idea of eating right is, if the right side of his Cherokee is slowly filling with McDonald's wrappers," says Zerbe, slinging the gibe at his colleague. "I just kind of look askance at the McDonald's wrappers as I try to get in around and among them."

The wry smile that creeps around Brolin's mouth tells you something about the men's mutual esteem. So does the way Brolin listens to Zerbe, arms folded, eyes riveted.

Zerbe looking relaxed, wears a faded periwinkle polo shirt. Brolin, muscular and faintly tanned, wears a leather jacket and a T-shirt. Both sport shoulder-length ponytails, a reminder of their TV lives as Wild West roughnecks. On The Young Riders, Brolin plays one of six Pony Express couriers, trailing scattered glory across the post-Civil War plains. Zerbe plays the gang's grizzled guru.

"I talked to your mom," Zerbe tells Brolin.

"You did?"

"Yeah, she had some interesting news about a friend of yours. She called me last night."

Brolin nods, then pretends to lunge for this reporter's tape recorder.

"Turn this off while we talk my mom," he jokes and everybody laughs.

Let's take of this quickly: Yes, like most of us, Brolin has a mother and a father, and yes, his father is actor James Brolin, star of the long-running TV series Marcus Welby, MD and Hotel. But the soft-spoken young man, who says he's in his mid-20s, is also a poet, a husband, the father of a 22-month-old son and an actor who's about to test himself in relatively unknown waters.

His career includes stints in theater, movies (Steven Spielberg's 1985 adventure yarn The Goonies) and TV (including the short-lived Private Eye from a couple of seasons ago). Never before, however, has Brolin had to create two characters from scratch and play them, one after the other, night after night for a month -- the challenge he faces in GeVa's festival.

"I was scared at first," he admits, "but now that I did a (script) reading, it's great. It compensates for itself, the seriousness of one play and the comedy of another play; the exaggeration of one character and the intense reality of the other. I don't know how it's going to turn out when I have to do one performance one afternoon and the other play a performance that night. We'll see."

Brolin has at least one asset in this task. The characters he plays could hardly be more different. Ari Roth's Oh, The Innocents takes a contemporary look at love and fidelity as it concerns Jeremy, a musician, and Betsy, a singer. Brolin plays a sleazy, self-centered music studio owner. 

"The dialogue kind of carries the character," he says. "How Ari writes is just beautiful -- these knocked off, three-word sentences, digressing constantly into this and this and this."

The character Brolin plays is "pretty low, like a lot of guys that I've seen in Hollywood or something. He takes everything for himself. Anything that he can use for himself he'll try to manipulate in a way that makes him look like he's the good guy. And it's very obvious that he isn't but he thinks he is, and what he thinks is all that matters. He doesn't give a s**t about anybody else. But it's comical, it's not serious in that way, because it's so ridiculous, it's so exaggerated. Not the character himself, but just the way he does things."

Forgiving Typhoid Mary poses a very different set of demands for Brolin. Mark St. Germain's drama explores the checkered career of "Typhoid Mary" Mallon, the Irish-born cook who passed typhoid bacteria through a chain of American eateries early in this century. Brolin has been cast as a young Roman Catholic priest, fresh out of seminary school, who is assigned by his superior to wring a confession out of Mallon. Instead, the strong-willed woman leads the minister to re-examine his own beliefs.

"The question about God," Brolin says of the plays, "is always there."

Not so long ago, the actor spent an intense period re-examining his own vocation.

Growing up in the small Southern California town of Templeton, he'd started stage acting at age 16. After moving to Los Angeles, he got his first big break when he was hired to play one of the swashbuckling adolescent heroes of Spielberg's 1985 film, The Goonies. Although he thought the movie came out "confusing" -- Spielberg ended up remaking a good part of it -- Brolin says the experience was helpful.

"The movie was so family-oriented, it was a group. It was like wanting to go to school every day. Very good people, very nice. It wasn't any acting job, but it was a lot of fun."

Apparently poised for success, Brolin then spent several months waiting for offers that didn't come. Fed up with Hollywood he set off for a European backpacking trip. At times he thought of never returning home, but his travels came to a halt when two Italian boys tried to steal his passport. In the resulting fracas, Brolin's hand was slashed by a broken bottles.

Eventually, he made his way back to the United States. After a couple of false starts, he landed the role of Johnny Betts in NBC's Private Eye, a police drama set in Los Angeles during the dawn of rock n'roll in the mid-1950s. Betts was a ducktailed street hustler who worked for a cop-turned-private investigator. Private Eye started out song but faded quickly and was pulled after only a few episodes.

"It was very similar to Twin Peaks," Brolin says, referring to ABC's current cult mystery series, which after a hit premiere has seesawed in the Nielsen ratings. "Not the premise, just the way the show has gone. When the pilot came on, it was one of the highest-rated pilots in the history of all TV. It was No. 1 or No. 2 when it first came on. Then the next week it went down about 5 million people and then the week after that went down about 10 million people, just kind of dove. People want to watch Cosby. They want to be able to follow it."

The Great God Nielsen is never far from the set of The Young Riders, Brolin and Zerbe say. The show's producers are waiting to see the May ratings before deciding whether the series should bite the dust. Eve if it doesn't, Zerbe thinks The Young Riders needs to bite the bullet of serious drama. This season, he says it wasn't uncommon for the show's writers to fax in last-second rewrites that often weakened the stories. "I think our stories need to get a lot better," he says. "It seems like we're into a Hollywood format: Bad guy comes to town -- disguised -- dupes one of the young riders, and then we figure out who he is and chases at the end and death!"

Zerbe would like The Young Riders to suggest more analogies with the problems facing today's youth. "Isn't there a way that those kids had parallel problems with the young people of today?" he asks. Isn't there some way that they could contend with them or deal with them. I don't mean to moralize or anything; I mean just to find those things that are parallel."

Something else intends to change is the producers' perception that he should be some sort of avuncular presence to his co-workers. "I'm one of the actors," insists. "Occasionally I may see something that I could help somebody with or make a suggestions -- 'Why don't you stay a beat longer there?' or something like that. That's the way I want to be. There are obviously people who can think for themselves."

"We had a tussle with the producer one time and they guy calls up and says, 'Hey, you're the leader there, you're the veteran.' And I made it clear at the beginning of that talk, I said 'You may think of me as a leader but there are no followers in this room. This room is full of intelligent, bright people who are interested in making their own decisions about their own lives and very capable of it and very perceptive about things that go into those decisions. It's not a platoon of soldiers," he smiles.

The conversation takes another turn, and Brolin acknowledges that The Young Riders has "put me in a position to keep eating for a while," so he can afford to pursue some other projects.

He says he definitely plans to return more often to the stage. He wouldn't mind acting with his father again, although they haven't found a script that they both like since last year's made-for-TV movie, Finish Line.

"We have been offered a lot of things together. We've turned quite a few things down."

"He's a good guy," he says of his father.

Brolin has also written a number of poems that he'd like to get published. But he says he'd never really heard his own voice until one day during rehearsal when he asked -- who often gives staged poetry readings -- to read the poems aloud. "He has a voice that just makes sense of all words," Brolin says, as if a bit awe-struck. "He really gets into it. Now, as I'm writing, his voice is in my mind."

At this point, who has been listening intently, suddenly turns to the reporter. "Ultimately," he says, "Josh will speak his own poetry."

Source: Times-Union Author: Reed Johnson