WHILE publicizing his recent video-and-chocolate-sauce version of Molière’s “Misanthrope” at the New York Theater Workshop, the Flemish director Ivo van Hove recalled auditioning the production’s star, Bill Camp, for two previous plays he directed there — “More Stately Mansions” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” — but not casting him until he auditioned for the Molière play.

Mr. Camp — who will open on Tuesday in his second consecutive production at the workshop, “Beckett Shorts,” four Beckett one-acts directed by JoAnne Akalaitis — smiles when he hears this story. He then quietly sets the record straight: He has never auditioned for Mr. van Hove; even Alceste, “The Misanthrope” role, was offered to him outright. Prior to that performance he’d only met Mr. van Hove through Elizabeth Marvel, Mr. Camp’s wife and a favorite actress of Mr. van Hove’s.

This misunderstanding is entirely believable, and not because, as Ms. Marvel says, this avant-garde director tends to stare at his shoes during auditions. Mr. Camp possesses a craggy — not exactly handsome but not unhandsome — profile, fit for the crowd not Mount Rushmore. He’s an everyman, with a face and physique that would fit on a barstool in any workingman’s bar in America.

“Bill’s not showy,” said James C. Nicola, artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, where Mr. Camp has frequently worked. “I always think of his work being a consequence of his New England background — that stereotype we have of the New Englander as sort of stoic, decent. I think he’s like Jimmy Stewart: a warm, decent guy, with a lot of stuff going on inside. But he’s not going to trouble you with his drama.”

Lately, however, the anonymous, dependable Mr. Camp, 43, is being singled out a lot. In his review of “The Misanthrope” in The New York Times Ben Brantley called him brilliant and “an Off Broadway veteran who just gets better every year.” The Boston Globe called his 2005 work in Edward Bond’s “Olly’s Prison” “awe-inducing.” Mr. Camp has always received respectable notices, but this is something different.

Eschewing false modesty, Bill Camp agrees with his critics; he has become a better actor. And he knows why too. It’s because he stopped acting.

In 2002 the talent agency that represented him suddenly went under, and he was asked to come and pick up his headshots. Other agents expressed an interest in taking him on, but he declined. “I needed to stop,” he recalled. “I wasn’t enjoying acting the way I do now. It became about getting the next job, thinking too much about that. It’s hard to stay away from that as an actor. The vitality of striving, the joy of making something was starting to wane. I needed to know that I can do other stuff, that I can live not being an actor.”

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At the time he and Ms. Marvel were in California, where she was acting in the television series “The District.” Mr. Camp took a series of nontheater jobs. He cooked in a restaurant, worked as a landscaper and a night watchman; he repaired cars.

Ms. Marvel, who met Mr. Camp at Juilliard in the late 1980s, supported her husband’s decision. “It’s always up for debate whether we should keep doing this or not,” she said. “You’re really in a boxing ring taking blow after blow, and it’s really a matter of whether you can keep standing. Also, I think it’s important for an artist to live in the world.”

Mr. Camp, as the son of a Massachusetts headmaster, is not the type to talk about himself or overanalyze his emotions. He admitted, however, that the break did him good. “I got to spend more time with me, if that makes sense without sounding self-centered, although I’m sure it does.”

A chance to recreate his Obie-winning performance as a drug-addicted English expatriate living in Afghanistan in Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angleles, and then at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, lured him back to the stage. Invitations from the directors Robert Woodruff and Mark Wing-Davey kept him interested. With the 2006-7 season productions of “Heartbreak House” and “Coram Boy” he won his first new Broadway roles in a decade. The current season quickly filled up with provocative forays into the experimental, beginning with “The Misanthrope,” in which Mr. Camp dived head first into Mr. van Hove’s conceptual stew of live video, sidewalk performance and accessorizing condiments.

“I got quicker and quicker at getting clean,” said Mr. Camp, who, during each performance, coated himself in various sauces and syrups. “I literally would leave the stage and be taking my jacket off as I turned right. I’d peel off the T-shirt, which was completely besmirched with hour-old chocolate syrup, and take a shower. At first it took a half-hour to wash up.”

He is now acting opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov in Ms. Akalaitis’s production of “Beckett Shorts.” In February he will inhabit the title role in Sarah Ruhl’s “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” at Playwrights Horizons. Staging the piece is Anne Bogart, yet another of the adventuresome directors to whom Mr. Camp seems drawn.

Mr. Camp’s life has completely changed since his two-year, self-imposed exile, and not only in career terms. After many years of dating, he and Ms. Marvel finally married on Sept. 5, 2004. Shortly before the ceremony his father died. And in June 2006 Ms. Marvel gave birth to a son, Silas. That too has fed Mr. Camp’s acting, his wife said. “It makes you a better human being, doesn’t it?” she said. “Anytime we can make ourselves and our art less precious, it improves.”

Some things, however, don’t change. Ms. Marvel said that Mr. Camp remained his unpretentious self, the quintessential “feet up with crossword puzzle backstage” sort of performer. “He just shows up and goes onstage. I’m one of those neurotic freaks that comes two hours early and does huge vocal preparation. You wouldn’t guess he was an actor if you met him.”