Role of a Busy Woman : Stage: Rosina Widdowson-Reynolds, one of San Diego’s most frequently hired actresses, is undertaking her biggest challenge yet.

SAN DIEGO — Ten years ago it was almost impossible to be a full-time actress and live in San Diego.

The Old Globe was the only professional theater in town, and it was professional only during the summer season. So Rosina Widdowson-Reynolds left in 1980, not long after she earned her Actors Equity union card. And she didn’t come back until 1987, when she quickly became one of the busiest professional actresses living and working in San Diego.

She stars in the West Coast premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s “Woman in Mind,” opening tonight at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company.

It will be her largest and most challenging part to date. As Susan, she’s on stage almost the entire play, portraying a woman who moves between a drab real-life family and a happier fantasy one. Until, that is, the two collide.

Audiences accustomed to seeing her play such heavies as the king’s wife in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of “Cymbeline” and the manipulative schoolteacher in “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur”--parts, she says with a smile, that “come to me quite well”--will get a chance to see her try a more vulnerable character.

“Susan is an open wound. There’s a protection in being sophisticated,” Widdowson-Reynolds said this week. “Susan isn’t controlled, she’s falling apart at the seams. I was unbearable to live with when I was doing ‘Creve Coeur.’ My family didn’t like Helena (the schoolteacher), who was very imploded and would snarl. My daughter and I had a pact that, if I was behaving strangely, it was because I was being Helena. But there’s a protection in being sophisticated and hard. Now that I’m playing Susan, I’ll cry at anything.”

The tall, auburn-haired, London-born actress said she had no idea what was in store back in 1977 when she and her Wisconsin-born husband came across a San Diego magazine that included an article on the Old Globe Theatre.

The two had met in Panama, where she was a bartender and he was an American serviceman. They married in Phoenix on April Fool’s Day, and when they saw the article they were in Wisconsin, staying with Reynolds’ family.

On the basis of the story and what the couple had heard about the climate (“We’re both sun bunnies,” she said), they decided to move here.

At first, life in San Diego looked promising. Widdowson-Reynolds called up the Old Globe and quickly snagged a part in “The Misanthrope.” A young actress named Kit Goldman (who later co-founded the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre) spotted her and recruited her for a show she was producing, “Uncommon Women and Others,” in 1979, and followed up during the same year by casting her in “The Night of the Tribades.” It starred Sam Woodhouse (one of the co-founders of the San Diego Repertory Theatre) as August Strindberg, and Goldman as Strindberg’s wife. Widdowson-Reynolds played Goldman’s gay lover.

The acting scene was primitive in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Widdowson-Reynolds took a day job at the front desk at the Travelodge on Harbor Island, and, like the rest of the non-union actors in San Diego, she would rehearse from 7 to 11 at night--after working all day--for six to eight weeks at a time.

It was not long before the busy actress earned her Equity card during a professional production of “Any Wednesday” at the now-defunct Fiesta Dinner Theatre.

But that professional card, which meant so much at the time,left her “rather limited” in San Diego, she said.

The Old Globe Theatre did not become a year-round professional company until 1982. The La Jolla Playhouse did not

reopen as a professional company until 1983. The San Diego Repertory Theatre did not go Equity until 1984, the Gaslamp until 1987 and the Bowery Theatre until 1989.

So she leaped at the chance to play a part in a television pilot titled “96” in Los Angeles. She and her husband, a businessman, stayed in Los Angeles for five years. She played parts in the soap opera “General Hospital” and landed roles at the Ahmanson Theatre. In 1983, she returned briefly to San Diego to take a small part in “The Skin of Our Teeth” at the Old Globe

But “I hated L.A.,” she said. “There was no sense of theater community. The money is great, and what it affords you is great. But TV isn’t satisfying. It’s a lot of sitting around and waiting.”

Eventually, she found an excuse to leave. She and her husband decided to have a baby, so they left L.A. for Wisconsin in 1985, then returned to San Diego two years later.

She quickly got back to work with “A Taste of Honey” in the newly professional Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company. In 1988 she picked up a San Diego Critics Circle Award for Best Actress for her work in the Gaslamp’s “Private Lives,” and that same year she did work that was at least as impressive in the Gaslamp production of “Betrayal.” The next year she opened the San Diego Rep season as Bette in “The Marriage of Bette and Boo.”

Returning to the Gaslamp brings back warm memories of a long associations, she said.

“I did the first play in the small theater,” said Widdowson-Reynolds softly. “I saw this theater be built, and I saw it grow. It is like a home base. It’s the comfort of being in a family environment.”

But, because of last year’s internal shake-up at the Gaslamp, during which co-founder-artistic director Will Simpson and co-founder-resident designer Robert Earl were fired, working at the Gaslamp evokes a sadness as well.

She equates the feeling to being like the child of divorced parents.

“I’ve known Kit and Willie and Bobby a long time. My heart goes out to both sides. I see both sides, and I care about both sides. All you can do is maintain a relationship with both sides. All you can say is that you love all three.”

She acknowledges a feeling of responsibility as she takes on the leading role in the closing show of the 1990-’91 season as the Gaslamp heads into the 1991-’92 season with a crippling deficit approaching $1 million.

But, she says, it is enough for now to concentrate on the demands of the play--which are great.

“The other day, I was feeling bad because the emotional position I was in with Susan was making me like an exposed nerve. And I thought, ‘Why do we put ourselves through this?’ Because there’s something really exciting about being able to hang it all out on the stage. I guess it’s the exhibitionist in me. I hope to get further and further out on a limb to see how far I can go. It’s an exhilarating feeling.”