Every season I’ve lived in a different apartment building in Waikiki. A lot of people would say I’m insane to live in Waikiki. The locals think Waikiki is like Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s a place they go only if they have to. It’s crowded, it’s full of tourists -- all the things they want to escape, but all the things I embrace, because I can’t sleep if it’s not noisy.

Where do you live in Manhattan?

The theater district. West 55th. Getting around in this town, you’d think, “Oh we’re in the middle of the Pacific. Life will be so much quieter and simpler.” Try the freeway out here. The H-1 is a parking lot at rush hour.

How far is work for you?

You can see Diamond Head down there. The studio sits on the shoulder of Diamond Head.

Does your wife come out here?

Yeah, she’s here sometimes. And I get a place big enough to accommodate guests, in the hope that I’ll have visitors. Some seasons, no one comes. This is the last season, so now everybody’s getting the idea: Strike now or give it up.

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Does any part of you feel like you got trapped too long in a single role?

I’m conscious of how it has occupied a long chapter of my working life -- all to the good. Everybody should have my set of problems. But being in the middle of the Pacific has kept me from doing all the things a New York actor does. I can’t do readings or workshops, can’t do voice-overs or commercials. This is the thing. I long to be somewhere where I can step outside and run into people who do what I do.

What was it like for you, when you were doing theater all those years in Florida and Alabama?

It was all I could do. It wasn’t a choice between two things. It was all I could do. Alabama Shakespeare Festival had an M.F.A. professional-actor training program, where you get a degree out of the University of Alabama, but you would never set foot in Tuscaloosa. We had our classes in the morning, and the rest of the time we were either rehearsing our own stuff or understudying and playing small parts on the main stage. It was just a way for me to make contact with the world of grown-up professional actors and directors. It was the closest I could get to New York and still be in the South, where I lived.

Are you from the South?

No, but it’s where I started acting. I ended up in the South by a fluke. An ill-considered marriage and divorce left me high and dry in St. Augustine, Florida. I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn’t figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.

You talked about that on Conan one night, and he showed some of your drawings.

I don’t know where he found them. That was insane! Those weren’t just from my former career; they were two of the first illustrations I did as a working illustrator; 1979 was the date of those drawings.

What magazines did you illustrate for?

Psychology Today, Business Week, Barron’s, New York Times. In those days, you’d see eager young men with black portfolios running around near Rockefeller Center. And in those four or five tall buildings were half the magazines on the planet. So every day I would wake up, put on clothes, go into town from Brooklyn, leave my portfolio at some magazine, and then go kill a couple hours, because they would look at them on their lunch breaks. Then the deal was trying to figure out if they had actually looked at it. The illustrators had these Holmesian tricks, like we would wrap a pale thread around two pages, and if those two pages had been separated by opening, the thread would fall away. But if the thread was still in place we would know no one had looked.