Howie Seago

Watching Howie Seago drop his dark gray felt hat onto his strawberry blond curls, there was no question he was an actor. He didn't just put on his hat. He did it with style and purpose. Seago has had to be more purposeful than most of his acting colleagues. He is deaf, which limits job possibilities. "I have made the work myself by my own perseverance," he said in an interview at Los Angeles International Airport the other day, where he had a couple of hours to spare between planes.

Watching Howie Seago drop his dark gray felt hat onto his strawberry blond curls, there was no question he was an actor. He didn't just put on his hat. He did it with style and purpose. Seago has had to be more purposeful than most of his acting colleagues. He is deaf, which limits job possibilities. "I have made the work myself by my own perseverance," he said in an interview at Los Angeles International Airport the other day, where he had a couple of hours to spare between planes.

Whatever else Peter Sellars may not be, he is loyal: To his artists, his ideas, his politics. He is less loyal to playwrights, especially dead ones. Take the American premiere of "The Persians," a modern adaptation of the play by Aeschylus that opened Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum. Two of its actors were in Sellars' production of Sophocles' "Ajax," seen at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1986. On the "Ajax" team were James F.

Caroline Link's highly accomplished and engrossing Oscar-nominated German film "Beyond Silence" has the look of an idyll. An attractive couple, Martin and Kai Bischoff (Howie Seago, Emmanuelle Laborit), live with their beautiful 8-year-old daughter (Tatjana Trieb) in a lovely 19th century farmhouse in the Bavarian countryside. When it snows the place is as inviting as an old-fashioned Christmas card.

Acoalition of organizations for the deaf and hearing-impaired has launched a letter-writing campaign to block the airing of an episode of CBS-TV's "The Equalizer" in which a hearing actress portrays a hearing-impaired character. "We are all sick and tired of this particular form of discrimination," Tony Award-winning actress Phyllis Frelich says in editorials airing on the Silent Network, a basic-cable service for the deaf.

The unanswered question about Peter Sellars is: Is he just playing theater games, or does he mean it? In "Ajax" at the La Jolla Playhouse, I think he means it. This was probably the show that led Sellars' bosses at the Kennedy Center to decide that they had better give him a "sabbatical" from the American National Theatre while there was still some money left in the bank. Sellars' production of Sophocles' tragedy is not a grabber.

Good reviews from London for Donald Freed's political thriller "Circe and Bravo," first seen at Los Angeles' MET Theater in 1984. Faye Dunaway stars in the London production, at the Hampstead Theatre, and naturally the critics focused on her. Michael Billington of the Guardian found her "vivid and expressive" in the role of "an American First Lady going off her trolley at Camp David." And Rosalie Horner of the Daily Express found her "compelling."

In this age of enlightenment, what's a playwright for? Convenience. He's there to provide a skeleton on which a director can display his wares. Do his own thing. Naturally, the deader the playwright, the better. As "The Tempest" at the La Jolla Playhouse goes to some lengths (and widths and heights) to prove, who needs Shakespeare when we can have the nightmare visions of Robert Woodruff?

At last week's annual meeting of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra Assn., one middle-aged board member sadly shook her head. "I never thought I would live to see this day," she said, walking past picketing musicians. A few days later principal harpist Sheila Sterling stood with her sign outside Symphony Hall, handing out leaflets critical of the association's management. She, too, was astonished at the turn of events: "They never told us at Juilliard that we would be doing this."

Not surprisingly, the highlight of the opening weekend of the American Cinematheque's New Films From Germany series at Raleigh Studios is a one-hour documentary from the ever-venturesome Werner Herzog. It's called "Gesualdo--Death for Five Voices"(Saturday at 9:30 p.m. and Jan. 18, 9:30 p.m.), an elegant inquiry into the turbulent life and complex music of Carlo Gesualdo (1560 or 61-1613), the Neapolitan Count of Venosa.