He played many diverse roles throughout college and at the American Conservatory Theatre, and is a founding member of the Pacific Resident Theatre Ensemble in 1985, which is a winner of the L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award for Continuous Achievement. He starred in the group’s productions of The Beggar’s Opera and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Literally, the week I arrived in Los Angeles, I got together with a group of people I had known at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts. (We have theatres in Santa Maria and Solvang and had been doing theatre up there for years) and a number of former ACT people (American Conservatory Theatre). We all ended up in Los Angeles seeking our fame and fortune in the film business, but we also decided we needed to do some theatre. (I found out after the fact that this is quite typical of a lot of university and conservatory trained actors. They end up in this town and there is nowhere for them to practice their profession.) If you are doing small roles in television and film when you first start out in L.A., you have to go somewhere to practice your craft. So we created our own company, as a survival tool, because we were dying to do theatre and no one was paying us to hone our skills in Los Angeles.
