STAGE : ‘Lost’ and Found : Brooke Adams, appearing in Neil Simon’s ‘Lost in Yonkers,’ is exactly where she wants to be--personally and professionally

“This is soooo much fun. I never get to do this anymore,” says Brooke Adams, who is playing an adult version of hooky on a bright Bay Area afternoon. Strolling among the perfumed aisles of I. Magnin, she has the pent-up excitement of a kid in a candy store. It’s one of the few free moments that Adams has had for herself lately, what with her nine-shows-a-week schedule as Bella in Neil Simon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Lost in Yonkers”; her starring role in the upcoming independent film “Gas Food Lodging”; her recent marriage to actor Tony Shalhoub, and her devotion to 3 1/2-year-old Josie, who has accompanied her mother during most of the “Yonkers” road tour.

“I go through periods where I don’t shop at all, and then I go crazy and buy everything in sight,” Adams confides, splurging on a pricey bottle of perfume as a gift for Josie’s nanny. “I never know what to wear, and I’m at my worst before an audition. I pull everything out of the closet, throw it on my bed. I’ll get entirely dressed and then take it all off again until I’m in a kind of frenzy.”

It’s hard to imagine that an actress with so many credits--ranging from the rapturous “Days of Heaven,” in which she, Richard Gere and Sam Shepard made their names, to her starring role on Broadway in “The Heidi Chronicles”--would be so unsure of herself. But it is probably the trait that makes her an exacting professional.

She went after the role of Bella with characteristic determination after being initially less than overwhelmed when her agent called her L.A. home to suggest she audition for the “Yonkers” national tour. “I thought, ‘A tour? I don’t want to do a tour. I have a young child and a man I’m in love with; I don’t want to leave them,’ ” Adams recalls. “But he said, ‘Oh, it’s only six months, and three of the months are in L.A.’ ”

That turned out not to be the case. The tour is now in its ninth month and finally moves next to Los Angeles (previews begin Tuesday; the show opens July 9 and continues through Sept. 27 at the Doolittle Theatre). But Adams agreed to read the script and had an immediate change of heart. “I wept when I read it because I loved the part so much,” she says. “So I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to get this.’ ”

Adams flew to New York on her own money to see the production and memorized the script from beginning to end before auditioning in a makeshift costume she had created from a borrowed thrift-shop dress, red lipstick and a pair of ‘40s shoes.

The actress had never worked with Simon before. “I’d met him a couple of times at parties, but I’m sure he didn’t remember,” she says. “At the audition he was kind of scary, actually. He interrupted me after I’d started and said, ‘She never acts like a victim.’ ” When Adams continued, Simon didn’t interrupt anymore, and by the time she had finished the audition, he and director Gene Saks offered her the part on the spot.

The playwright’s point about Bella was well taken. Although at first glance “Lost in Yonkers” seems to be about a pair of adolescent brothers forced to come to terms with their often difficult Jewish family--a familiar subject for Simon--the play’s central character is not either of the brothers but their maiden aunt, Bella. She is an apparently feebleminded woman who has been emotionally frozen into perpetual childhood by her domineering mother, played by Mercedes McCambridge. It is Bella’s demands for respect as an equal human being that give the play its momentum.

Adams jokes that when she first went to the show to see Mercedes Ruehl, who had originated the part of Bella and later won a Tony for her performance, she was hoping “to rip her off.”

“I didn’t know how I would approach a character like this, because I had never really done a character part,” Adams says. “But after seeing it, I just decided I really couldn’t do it the way (Ruehl) was doing it. I had a friend who was brought up by a difficult mother and didn’t speak for the first five years. He had a lazy tongue, a kind of speech impediment, and they sent him to a special school for slightly retarded children. I thought, ‘Hmmm . . . that’s kind of like Bella.’ So I decided to try to do the lazy tongue, and it gave me a key to the character.”

Her daughter was another source of inspiration: “Josie’s always trying to be a grown-up, and that’s the way Bella is. One of the things she does that really cracks me up is acting really appalled by someone’s behavior. I use that for Bella. The other thing I’ve noticed is that when Josie wants to cry to get what she wants, she can make herself cry just by going ‘boo-hoo-hoo-hoo.’ I tried it and it works. When you take away the kind of censorship that you have as an adult, it’s easy.”

Since adopting Josie more than three years ago, Adams has been separated from her for only two nights. She sees nothing strange about having brought her daughter on the road because she was practically born in a suitcase herself. Her mother, Rosalyn Gould Adams, was an actress, and her father, Robert Adams, was a radio executive who became a theatrical producer and director. Every summer the family would migrate from New York to Flint, Mich., where Brooke’s father produced summer stock.

“He had a big tent and did all the old musicals,” she recalls. “It was magical, like the best sort of camp. My sister and I absolutely fell in love with theater. We watched every rehearsal, we knew every line, every lyric, every dance step, every piece of blocking, for every show. All we wanted to do was watch the rehearsals, and each year we’d develop crushes on different actors and actresses we thought were just so glamorous.”

At home, a brownstone on Manhattan’s East Side, the piano was in the girls’ room, so auditions were held there. “Sometimes Pop wouldn’t even bother to wake us up,” Adams says, sighing. “Lynne and I would be jolted out of a nap by someone singing ‘Oklahoma!’

“And my father would do anything to get an audience. One summer we were doing ‘West Side Story,’ and I was in the chorus. After the show a bunch of us chorus kids went to a pizza shop somewhere near Flint, and this gang attacked us, I guess because in our costumes we looked tough. They came after us with tire irons and chains and things. When we finally got back and told my father, the horror of it was that he said, ‘What a great publicity stunt! We’re going to invite those gang members for free.’ That was all he could think of.”

Adams made her first appearance on stage at age 6, in a summer stock production of “Brigadoon.” By 14, she guest-starred in the television series “East Side, West Side” with George C. Scott. At 15 she was in L.A. with a regular role in “O.K. Crackerby”, and by 17 she was burnt out enough to want to move as far from the limelight as possible. She landed in Madrid, where she lived in self-imposed exile for four years.

It was the first, but not the only, time that Adams would flee success. After returning from Spain, she gradually resumed her career. It reached a peak in the late ‘70s when “Days of Heaven” and a much-admired remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which she also starred, came out at the same time.

“Suddenly I was hot,” Adams recalls. “A snazzy agent from CAA wooed me away from this great agent that I never should have left,” she says, referring to the powerful Creative Artists Agency. “I was in the big time, and suddenly it’s a cold business. I had wanted to be a movie star and had thought I would be a movie star since I was very little. It was just something I saw in my future. But somehow when it happened, I wasn’t ready for it.”

But Adams’ hot career cooled. Although parts continued to be offered, their quality gradually seemed to diminish, with the exception of bright spots like her 1979 starring role opposite Sean Connery in “Cuba.”

“Two years ago I was ready to quit the business,” she says, “because the jobs, the women’s roles, were so sort of generic. I had just gotten to the point where auditioning for parts in Hollywood, I had no confidence that I would be what they wanted. It was because most of the movie roles for women aren’t really fleshed out. They could have been anything, and you knew that in the world of Hollywood that if they could have anything, they’d probably go for a young, beautiful woman. They aren’t going to go for a slightly offbeat good actor. Plus, I’d started losing touch with being a good actor. I didn’t really know what there was that I could do that a lot of other people couldn’t do.”

That was when Wendy Wasserstein, the author of “The Heidi Chronicles,” phoned and asked Adams to do the title role. Adams packed up Josie and the nanny and caught the next plane to New York.

Although she did not originate Heidi, she made the part her own. “I felt that not everybody could do what I did with that play,” she says. “It put me back in touch with the whole concept of being of service to the production, of having a craft that you’re good at. It plugged me into what it is that I care about, what I can take pride in being a successful actress. Being successful because you’ve got the right look and you’re in the right place and you happen to be hot or lucky that moment--which is what so much of it is in Hollywood--just doesn’t really give you any kind of satisfaction. It gives you a lot of fear, actually.

“In films, you are a commodity. You are a look, something that the camera really likes, something that has struck an audience in a certain way. It’s not really so much about transforming yourself the way actors do onstage. I think there’s a difference between the skill of acting in movies and onstage. For a trained actor, I believe, acting in movies is much more difficult. It is like sight-reading music, while acting in plays is like being with a band that you’ve played with before and you know all the music and then going off on a riff.”

To combat the Hollywood syndrome, Adams has taken on movie roles in independent productions like “Gas Food Lodging” (directed by Allison Anders), which garnered attention at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals. The film opens in New York on July 31 and in Los Angeles in August.

“It was another case where I felt like I was being of service,” Adams says. “It wasn’t a glamorous role, or a very showy role, but making the film was a great experience. I play the single mother of two girls in a dusty little Southwestern town. I’m pretty downtrodden--living in a trailer, working in a truck stop. It’s about these three women’s struggle to find men, but it’s not about how men are going to make it better, it’s about how women think they will.”

Adams’ other recent movie, a Roger Corman-produced 1991 horror epic called “The Unborn,” was a pleasant surprise for her. She laughs, explaining the plot in which she leads a group of women who have unknowingly been impregnated with superhuman babies by an evil doctor.

“Corman has carved a niche that’s really his own and given a huge number of people their breaks. That’s where Ron Howard started directing, where Jack Nicholson started acting. I would like to direct, so I’m thinking of maybe taking him an idea for an ‘Unborn II’ and asking him, ‘If I would be willing to star in it, could I direct it?’ ”

Not that she’ll give up acting. As far as that goes, Adams says “Lost in Yonkers” has made her grow. “Playing Bella is very liberating because it’s a character role,” she says. “Parts like that are all I really want to do now. I’m 43, so the likelihood of my playing just the romantic lead is not very great. For a long time I really mourned that. More than getting older in my life, I mourned, you know, that I’m not going to have these great romances on screen. No Sean Connerys, no Richard Geres . . . but then I got Tony. Tony’s the real thing.”

Tony Shalhoub is best known as Antonio in the television series “Wings” and for his hilarious take on a taxi driver who invents his own language in the Bill Murray film “Quick Change.” He and Adams met while they were acting in “The Heidi Chronicles,” and for her, at least, it was love at first sight. “I immediately got this huge crush on him . . . but he had a girlfriend and he was really not prepared to dump her for me,” she says with a shrug.

Adams and Shalhoub finally got together last July just as she was hired for “Lost in Yonkers.” Shalhoub has been co-starring with Judd Hirsch in the Broadway production of “Conversations With My Father,” and the couple’s conflicting schedules turned their love affair into a cross-country game of tag. They finally managed to get married in late April (at a house overlooking the Hudson in Smeden’s Landing, N.Y.), but they have had only one night together since mid-May.

“Isn’t that awful?” Adams says, rolling her eyes tragicomically. “But once his play is finished in August, we’ll be together in Los Angeles.”

The actress says she doesn’t have much to complain about: “Actually, my life has gotten so much better since I turned 40. I’ve gotten Josie, I’ve gotten my career where I want it to be, I’ve got my romantic life really solid, and just in myself I feel better about everything. I could lose almost everything--I couldn’t lose Josie, I don’t think--but I could lose almost everything and still be OK with myself now. I’ve never felt that way before.”