Return Engagement

COSTA MESA —  “Tenacity comes before talent” in Debbie Grattan’s dictionary. “Talent is good to have,” the svelte, blond, hazel-eyed actor said. “You need it for the bottom line. But talent doesn’t get you in the door.”

Her tale--hometown gal makes good--has a different plot line from those of Diane Keaton or Michelle Pfeiffer, whose success took them out of Orange County to Hollywood: Grattan is making good in her hometown.

She is starring at South Coast Repertory in her Mainstage debut as Lady Chiltern in “An Ideal Husband,” the masterful Oscar Wilde comedy that has opened the SCR season.

“I went up to L.A. for a while, thinking I’ll break into the theater there. I had this naive idea that I had to go get a night job so my days would be free for auditions. I was younger,” Grattan, who grew up in Costa Mesa and Irvine, said recently over lunch. “I didn’t have the savvy that I do now. You don’t start getting auditions just like that.”

She ended up working in a restaurant. After 18 months she was back in Orange County visiting friends. “I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I wasn’t getting anywhere in the industry. I wasn’t even getting out. I can be a cocktail waitress anywhere. I don’t have to live in L.A. to do that.”

Feeling embittered--”The whole atmosphere made me cynical, clouded my vision”--Grattan returned to the county, got a real estate license and began selling homes. In fact, a note of congratulations came backstage the other night from her first client, the SCR house manager, who was surprised to see her up onstage.

But real estate was just a job; theater was a calling. And a day hasn’t gone by during the last decade when she wasn’t trying to make a go of acting.

SCR artistic director Martin Benson, who staged the season opener, recalled in a separate interview being bowled over by her audition.

“She did a helluva Mabel,” Martin said. He was referring to the play’s comic ingenue.

“I stopped her and said, ‘Let’s go for the gold here.’ I asked her to go out in the lobby and take a look at the part of Lady Chiltern. She did and came back and did it for me, and it was really great. I even said to her, ‘Where have you been?’ ”

Grattan, spearing her salad with a fork, recalls replying, “I’ve been around. I’ve been here.”

She says, “I would send my reviews from the local shows. I never heard anything back. That was the dynamic of it. I think that had a lot to do with the fact that SCR is definitely several rungs above every other theater in this area.

“So even though I was playing leading roles and getting nice reviews and doing something that was meaningful, I somehow didn’t compare to the regional theater people or actors with Broadway experience.

“I would have stood in the back and carried drinks,” she says. “And that’s what I thought I’d be relegated to. I don’t have an MFA in theater. I didn’t go to Yale. I mean, I look at the cast and I think, ‘What am I doing here with these people?’ ”

Grattan, who got her bachelor’s degree in theater at UC Irvine, has played throughout the county since the mid-’80s: the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach, Mystery Cafe in Newport Beach, the Theatre-on-the-Green at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center and the Vanguard Theatre, both in Fullerton, the Drama Lab at Orange Coast College and the Newport Theatre Arts Center.

Her Marquise de Merteuil in Christopher Hampton’s “Dangerous Liaisons” adaptation and her Titania, Queen of the Night, in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” drew raves from Times reviewers who spoke of her glittering line readings, her luminosity and the unexpected depth of her acting.

“I knew I could do this role,” Grattan says of Lady Chiltern, a woman with high ideals who discovers that life requires compromise as well as principles.

“I’ve done so much British stuff in the last five years. About 80% of the shows required a British accent. And this particular style and period is something I feel comfortable in. It’s my forte. Sam Shepard and some contemporary stuff is probably not my niche.”

But if not for the fact that a British actor she’d worked with locally, George Pelling, had dropped a note about her to Benson, Grattan might not have got the audition at all. Pelling, who’d long ago been in the Benson-directed “Galileo” at SCR, suggested her for the ingenue role.

Called to prepare a scene as Mabel, Grattan, who is 30-ish, came in wearing “a very sweet little dress with my hair up, trying to be as ingenue as I could at my age,” she says. “I thought, ‘Well, big stage, they won’t see the lines.’ ”

Grattan is either exaggerating or she’s the world’s greatest makeup artist. In the clear light of day and within arm’s reach, you can’t see even the suggestion of a line, let alone a real one. Grattan has the fresh, light tan of a native Californian who apparently knows how to beat the sun.

“Martin was the kindest person to audition for,” she continues. “This was an intimidating thing for me. Reading for the artistic director of SCR after so many years living and working here? The stakes were definitely high for me.”

Grattan had hoped to read for Lady Chiltern in the first place. The role calls for a young woman, but it’s meatier and more complicated than Mabel. Though often played as a stuffy, even bitchy, character, Lady Chiltern seemed to Grattan sympathetic and vulnerable.

Benson, thinking along those lines himself, has used her interpretation to deepen the texture of the comedy by giving her the emotional focus of the production.

Before her callback, though, Benson remembers, he couldn’t help second-guessing himself and wondering whether he had gone overboard in rating her so highly.

“I’d seen the British production,” he explains, a reference to the recent hit revival of “An Ideal Husband” that transferred from London to Broadway. “So I’d seen its leading ladies. I thought, ‘Now reality will set in. We’ll see the feet of clay.’

“But she blew me out of the water--again. The funny thing is that as I helped her off the stage, I told her ‘You’re extraordinary,’ and I think she took that to mean she hadn’t gotten the part.”

Indeed, until SCR phoned a half-hour later with the formal offer of the role, Grattan says, she believed that Benson was just being nice to her. “I thought, ‘Why are they going to cast some little nobody from Orange County?’ Directors always have to say something nice.

“I sort of brushed it off. He stopped me. He said, ‘No, no. I really mean it.’ But that still didn’t mean anything to me about getting the role. That just meant I did a good job, and he liked me.”

It’s only in the last year or so, Grattan says, that she has been able to make her living in the entertainment industry without an outside job. But she is making up ground rather quickly.

These days, Grattan has four agents and needs a pager with her at all times to keep up with her studio work. “An answering machine is not good enough,” she says. “They want an immediate response.”

So Grattan has been dashing out of SCR, regularly running up to Los Angeles to make voice-overs or down to San Diego to do commercials. Benson kids her about her pager, but he’s thoroughly impressed--and not just by her workaholic ways.

Recalling the play’s rehearsals, he says, “When you have a large cast, you go through a scene and you know you’re going to have to deal with egos. Well, every time there was a scene with Debbie in it, my heart would lift. I knew it would be fun. She gives you what you want.”

So what’s next for her? New York or London?

She grins.

“A friend of mine said the same thing. I’ve never had any aspirations of going to New York. If someone offered me a role, sure I’d go. But New York is hard. I’m a California girl. I’m used to the niceties of living here.”

Besides, she concludes, “I know lots of people here. I know how to get around. And the people I work with know how long I’ve been performing. They know what a pinnacle this is.”

* “An Ideal Husband,” South Coast Repertory Mainstage, 655 Town Center Drive., Costa Mesa. Tue.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat. 2:30 and 8 p.m..; Sun., 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Through Oct. 6. $28-$41. (714) 957-4033.