‘GEORGE’ PUTS PETERS IN TOUCH WITH HERSELF

Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” was cited as a breakthrough for the Broadway musical when awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. Apparently, the musical also provided a breakthrough for one of its stars, Bernadette Peters.

“I think this show touches people’s subconscious feelings about their life and work . . . it’s certainly touched me in different ways,” Peters said .

The musical, inspired by Georges Seurat’s French neo-Impressionist painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte,” is based loosely on Seurat’s own life and career.

Peters originated the role of Dot, Seurat’s neglected mistress, on Broadway and repeated the role in the production restaged for television and scheduled for broadcast on PBS Monday night as part of the “American Playhouse” series (8 p.m. Channel 50, 9 p.m. Channel 28). Mandy Patinkin, who originated the Seurat role on Broadway, also stars in the telecast.

For Peters, the telecast is timely, coming two weeks after winning a Tony Award as best actress for her performance in the current Broadway musical “Song and Dance.”

In both the Sondheim musical and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Song and Dance,” Peters plays a young woman whose consciousness raises her up to the point where she comes into her own. Her current character, Emma, is a British working-class immigrant who sets out and succeeds to make it in America. The actress says she can identify with both roles, now that she has arrived at a state of “being conscious.”

“It’s amazing that I’ve achieved as much as I have,” Peters said the other day in her sublet Central Park apartment, as she looked back over her career. “Until just a couple of years ago, I think I was really unconscious of life, of this business, of everything. I think it was my way of turning myself off to the possibility of being hurt in any way.”

She did not elaborate, but she said that it was through talking with friends, reading Jungian psychology, and, more recently, playing her last two demanding roles that she has “started to see what’s going on.”

“You dig up a lot of emotional stuff and find out much more about yourself, repeating roles like these on stage night after night,” she said.

“Now, I feel I bring much more to my work. I enjoy it more. And I must be better, because I’m there all the time.”

Peters, whose full, frizzy hair and expressive lips are now a part of her persona, spoke unguardedly about her conscious effort to look for the kind of “really good and interesting work” that she said has led her to more self-knowledge. This was in large part due to a good working experience on Herbert Ross’ 1982 musical movie “Pennies From Heaven,” in which she co-starred with her one-time companion Steve Martin. “I just wish I could make that movie again, now that I’m conscious,” she said, good-humoredly.

She recalled returning to New York, where she started performing on stage at age 3 and where she made a name for herself in Broadway musicals such as “George M.,” “Dames at Sea,” and “Mack and Mabel,” before settling for several years in Los Angeles.

After a brief engagement in an off-Broadway play, she went back to Los Angeles to perform on an Oscar ceremony, and it was that TV appearance that caught the eye of Sondheim’s collaborator on “Sunday in the Park With George,” writer James Lapine.

The musical was developed during a two-month workshop at off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizon, prior to opening on Broadway in May, 1984. It was during the workshop that Peters said her character and “the woman’s point of view” were developed as well.

“Before we started working on it, it was written more from the man’s point of view--toward his work, his life, his relationships. But you have to know about the woman , too, about her reactions, her strength, her life,” Peters continued.

“I think people find the show uplifting because of his self-knowledge and her understanding and forgiveness of the way he has treated her,” Peters said in explaining the evolution of both Georges and Dot in the Sondheim-Lapine musical.

She described her current character as a person who evolves too, from “an unformed, naive, sweet girl who closes herself off from feelings, into one who decides to simply be herself. Of course, this is the only way we should be,” she said.