THEATER:A man of many words

Someday in the not-too-distant future, community theater groups across America may be mounting productions of plays written by the valedictorian of Costa Mesa High School’s class of 2001.

So will Orange Coast College, but it’ll be nothing new, since OCC has been doing it for several years now.

When Costa Mesa’s Sean Engard graduated from Costa Mesa High and moved across the street to OCC five years ago, he brought with him not only his acting and directing talents honed in school productions but his way with words as well.

Before long, Engard was writing one-act plays for the college’s original-plays programs, then creating longer and more involved projects. His most recent playlet was “Nobody Loves a Telemarketer,” running over an hour and based on his own experiences in that line of work.

“I started out writing monologues,” the soft-spoken, 23-year-old Engard said. “Then I’d write scenes for certain actors. In 2002 I started writing longer plays and full-length scripts. My ideas just seemed to turn into scenes.”

Although Engard has an impressive acting resume — his most recent accomplishment was playing the selfincarcerated captive in OCC’s “The Cage” — it’s clearly writing that drives him. He had an unsuccessful audition at Juilliard as an actor last year, and he’s planning to return next year to take a shot at the prestigious school’s script-writing program.

In addition to his studies (voice and articulation, theater arts, improvisation) at Orange Coast, Engard has trained extensively at South Coast Repertory, both at SCR’s Young Conservatory and the advanced Professional Conservatory. This led to his playing the down-on-his-luck Thomas Shelley in a production of the theater’s annual holiday epic, “A Christmas Carol.”

“I liked it [the SCR program] so much that I didn’t want to leave,” Engard said. “So I stuck around and worked on their telemarketing program — which gave me the idea for ‘Nobody Loves a Telemarketer.’ ”

He didn’t want to leave OCC right away either, so after picking up his associate’s degree in theater arts, he stayed on to work as a college guide, showing prospective students around the campus.

Engard is also a member of the Orange County Playwrights Alliance and was on the dean’s list for Phi Theta Kappa — those in the top 1% of 3,000 U.S. colleges — in 2004 and 2005. He’s performed in such vehicles as “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Twelfth Night” and “Into the Woods,” both for OCC and local theater groups, including the Newport Theater Arts Center, where he played Leo in “The Little Foxes.”

Describing writing as, “the best way for me to organize my thoughts,” Engard usually has two or three possible play ideas on his personal back burner, including a few inspired by other playwrights. He’d like to write a sequel to Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” for instance (“I really love Miller’s works”) and a prequel to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” from the viewpoint of the play’s nearly catatonic character, Ruckley.

For the moment, however — or at least until he hears from Juilliard in February — Sean Engard will be acting, directing and, most assuredly, writing at OCC, though his words are, more than likely, destined to be heard far beyond the Costa Mesa campus.