Dana Elcar: SPTC founder, noted character actor, director passes away

Dana also was a mainstay of the 1960s Golden Age of Off-Broadway, and was acclaimed for his portrayals in the works of Thornton Wilder, Harold Pinter, Dylan Thomas and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” a role he recreated in the 1990s at the Santa Paula Theater Center. It was a tour de force for the actor, who had gone blind in the early 1990s. For “Waiting for Godot” Dana ordered a foot friendly lip lining the stage floor just above the audience: “I want to crush them with good acting, nothing more,” he joked to a reporter.His film debut was in the classic 1964 “Fail Safe” and his movie credits eventually included everything from “The Sting” to “The Nude Bomb.” Dana told a reporter that an actor that turned down roles was rare, as “You never know, never, when the phone might stop ringing.”Dana’s phone always rang. He guest starred on numerous TV series throughout his career, juggling such roles with films and theater appearances. But it was the Santa Paula Theater Center that he founded with William Lucking in the late 1980s that became Dana’s passion, an artistic extension of the community activism that Dana was so deeply committed to. A member of the Optimist Club, Dana tirelessly promoted SPTC and served as its artistic director until the early 1990s.In 1991, Dana was co-starring in “MacGyver” - then in its fourth season - when his failing sight became an issue. But blindness did not deter him: the producers incorporated his condition into the show and he became a champion of glaucoma prevention, research and education.In the early 1990s, Dana addressed the National Confederation of the Blind, “I do not like it, but it is a fact...when I began to lose my vision, I thought, ‘This is going to be another problem. How am I going to do this? I can’t even see the stage. How can I possibly choose plays and choose directors and choose designers and then go and judge whether the work is good enough and proceed as the artistic director’” of the SPTC. “Well, you know, I chose to see if I could do it. And you want to know something? I’m still doing it.”Dana was affable - albeit with an occasional tense edge and a rare towering rage, quickly defused and always deeply regretted - and determined, refusing to stay home or stay put. With his beloved companion, Thelma Garcia, Dana was always out and about, walking around the Oaks neighborhood where he lived, shopping at area stores, donating money to local charities and indulging his insatiable curiosity about all things, whether international or his own neighborhood.Dana was devoted to his children, loved dogs and chirping birds, telling a reporter that since the onset of blindness sounds - laughter, a cat’s meow, quiet breezes - are “my eyes...and I never stop looking.”