TALKING THINGS OVER WITH KAREN AUSTIN

Present-day New York: Struggling actress Marlene and struggling playwright Jeremy have just bumped into each other in the park. Marlene and Jeremy were a very hot item three years ago. Now he’s writing a play about their relationship. And oh yes, he’s getting a little help from a new friend, Anton Chekhov.

That’s the setting for “Talking Things Over With Chekhov,” a romantic comedy by John Ford Noonan (“A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking”), opening Thursday at the Victory Theatre in Burbank.

“Chekhov is very present,” said actress Karen Austin, who’s playing Marlene. “He’s just offstage. Maybe he’s someone who said he was Chekhov, and Jeremy--out of a need to have someone teach him how to write--believes him. What if he is Chekhov? What if Jeremy’s slightly schizophrenic? What if Chekhov is his higher self?” She laughed. “I’m not being coy with you. I just don’t have to make a decision about that.”

Austin (a 1982 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle winner for her performance in “Nuts” at the Beverly Hills Playhouse and L.A. Stage Company) has her hands full figuring out her own character.

“This is a world premiere,” she said, “and it’s the first time I’ve ever done anything from scratch. The difference is that it hasn’t been mounted; it doesn’t have someone else’s stamp on it. And Marlene is not necessarily very clear on the page. So we’ve had to make a lot of decisions: ‘Who is this woman, what does she want, what does she really feel about Jeremy, what was their previous relationship like?’ We had to work that out, develop a whole history for ourselves.

“I guess the theme is, ‘If you’re going to have pain, you might as well turn it into art.’ And these people use pain like a trampoline: They bounce off it, not stay in it. But I knew I wanted to do this because of one of Marlene’s lines: She’s reading a speech in the play Jeremy’s written and it touches her in places that are very painful. After feeling that pain, she says, ‘Doing this eight times a week is gonna be a lot of fun’--at the same time realizing what it’s going to cost her and relishing the effect it will have on the audience.”

It’s a dichotomy Austin understands well: “As actors, we pretend that we’re creating characters--when, in actuality, all we’re doing is (being) a prism: turning a side of ourselves through which the light can pass. There’s never anything that an actor plays that he doesn’t own in some portion of himself. When you’re playing a killer, it’s just coming to terms with the part of yourself that can, under the right circumstances, kill.”

Obviously, it was something she dipped into for her “Nuts” role, a law student/hooker who murders one of her clients. Yet after that yearlong stint, Austin stayed away from the stage, unable to find anything equally “consuming, challenging and noble.” Also, she said without apology, she was working a lot: in films--”Summer Rental” and “Jagged Edge”--and on television--recurring roles on “St. Elsewhere,” “Hill Street Blues” and “L.A. Law.” “It’s very hard to say, ‘No, I’ll step outside the fiscal arena for a while.’ ”

But this play felt right. The theater felt right. Director Maria Gobetti “is the most nurturing director I’ve ever worked with.” And co-star David Clennon is an old friend: “We met on my first episodic television shot. I was playing a psychotic killer cheerleader and he played the owner of the football team--and together we plotted to kill all the cheerleaders.”

The actress laughed good-naturedly. She can afford to; the business has been good to her, if not perfect: Austin could only watch from the sideline when “Nuts” made the move to feature film without her. (After years of studio mind-changing and a revolving-door routine of directors and scripts, Barbra Streisand is set to produce and star). Said a philosophical Austin: “I got so much, not only personally but professionally, out of that play. It would’ve been greedy to long for more.”

Born in West Virginia and reared in Florida, Austin studied at Oxford University before receiving her master’s degree at Northwestern. “I was going to be a theater history professor, but I didn’t fit in with the program very well and left. I’d always acted, yet I was terrified of it. Even for people who are lucky, it’s such a precarious profession. But I was a lousy cocktail waitress and a lousy secretary, so there was nothing else to do.”

It’s a profession Austin doesn’t take lightly. “I’m sure I fool myself about the extent of my ego,” she said, “but I like to think I keep doing this out of a need to contribute. I’m a very serious person. I find I care so much. I’m so earnest, that it can become deadening. After all, we’re not curing cancer here. But for me, it is a way to give.”