A Real ‘Lulu’ of a Learning Experience

Elizabeth Berridge’s title role in “Lulu,” a risque turn-of-the-century play at the La Jolla Playhouse, makes Jane Fonda’s Workout look easy.

In the course of this erotic drama by controversial German playwright Frank Wedekind, which runs through Aug. 7, Berridge must hold the motionless pose of an artist’s model, make constant costume changes, run up and down a circular three-story staircase and negotiate an inclined stage.

“It’s like you’re on the roller coaster and that’s it,” the petite, self-described “exercise nut” said as she applied makeup in her dressing room before a recent performance. “There’s no getting off or thinking about anything except (the play). I’ve had sleeping problems in the past, but (since the play opened) I’ve slept like a rock. I get home and just fall dead to the world.”

The demands of the role transcend physical effort. Lulu, a bewitching young femme fatale who leads four lovers to their graves, is a complex character--combining the exploited and the exploiter, the vulnerable and the viper. The 26-year-old Berridge, with big brown eyes and long brown curls, in three acts must play the role of beguiling wife to three men who don’t understand her, transform herself into a cynical, adulterous lover and recall her Gypsy origins when people from her past reappear.

Berridge may look a little dazed or lapse into exhausted giggles after a performance, but she isn’t complaining about the challenges of the role. Indeed, they’ve given her new confidence.

“I feel that I could tackle anything now. I feel like, if Dukakis hadn’t found a running mate, maybe I’d give him a call,” she laughed, crinkling her nose. “The amount of work and the costume changes alone--never mind the acting and carrying the play, which I don’t really do since I’m surrounded by such great actors--it’s giving me a little more of a fearless outlook.”

Berridge, who grew up in New York’s affluent Westchester County, may not share Lulu’s hard-luck life or Gypsy origins. Her father is an attorney and her mother a social worker. But she finds it easy to identify with the character.

“I think everybody can,” she said in a voice grown husky since rehearsals began. “I’m on the outside, like she is. It’s sort of hard to lead a normal life. I don’t have as good an excuse as she does. I was raised in a normal, happy environment, but I think her quest to see through, not to accept things at face value when she’s told about things, to keep her impressions of the system, is something I sort of need to do in order to go on in life, and (it’s something) I respect in other people.”

Berridge has often portrayed the outsider. Off Broadway, she played a teen-age drug addict in “Vampires,” a punk groupie in “The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers” and a teen-age dreamer who wants to be a country and Western star in “Outside Waco.” Among her film roles, she’s played the envious sibling of a blossoming sister in “Smooth Talk” and Wolfgang Mozart’s domineering wife in the Oscar-winning “Amadeus.”

But Berridge said she sees “Lulu” as more than a tale of an outsider, and she disagrees with those critics who have labeled the play either misogynist or feminist.

“It might be easy to see how this play can speak to us as 20th-Century people--and women,” she said, “but I think it goes a lot beyond feminist issues. It’s about male and female and those powers . . . what happens when society doesn’t allow those forces to live out in the open and they grow too destructive.”

Berridge doesn’t consider herself a feminist.

“I enjoy being a woman,” she said, adding that she appreciates the passion of women who have fought for the rights she now enjoys. “I’m sure a lot of people would say that’s sort of an irresponsible thing to say, that I’m not a feminist, but it’s just not . . . no.”

Still, growing accustomed to the revealing costumes that range from a translucent negligee to G-string panties has been a slow process for Berridge, who acknowledges being self-conscious on stage.

“Everybody in the audience is aware that there’s somebody in the room there with them naked, and you’re wondering what they’re thinking.”

Berridge won the role of Lulu during auditions this spring.

“I auditioned with a bunch of other people, and actually . . . they gave the role to somebody else and she couldn’t do it.”

Berridge is reluctant to name the other actress. “Should I say this?” she laughs, then thinks better of it. “I don’t know. Then people are gonna come and say, ‘ She would have been better.’ ”

Berridge, who describes herself as “extremely self-conscious and awkward,” said she enjoyed the audition but thought it had flopped.

“It was fun sitting in the hallway as Lulu,” she said. “You have to get on a certain aura, wear a dress that was very . . . you know . . . you can imagine what, but yes, it was tough. I never in a million years thought I would get it.”

Since getting the part, Berridge has become more comfortable as Lulu.

“It’s a very odd thing. When you’re out there so long and you have so much to do, you go through all kinds of things.

“Sometimes you’re completely comfortable in the skin of this person and there’s a merging that’s going on. Then sometimes it’s gone and . . . it’s like, ‘Put your hand down, what is it doing there? Everybody’s looking at your hand.’ That’s happening less and less.”

Berridge, who has appeared in plays since she was an infant, said she finds that years of technical training are falling into place as she gains experience on stage. Discovered by an acting teacher who lived next door to her family, she got an agent at 14 and took a number of acting classes, primarily at the Lee Strasberg Institute of the Theater in New York.

“I had done so much theory, but I didn’t really have a clue,” she said. “Since I’ve sort of learned what I’m doing, since I’m more aware of what’s involved in acting and as a person, I’ve really gotten a lot out of it.”

Despite her role in “Amadeus,” set in the 18th Century, Berridge said, working in period pieces remains a challenge to her.

“I think at first I didn’t have the ability to give life to anything that was not 1980s,” she said. “That’s something I never wanted to do until lately, but there’s a lot of theater stuff now and I can focus on that.”

Berridge said she is an avid reader of books on philosophy and psychology, and that she is more interested in interpreting the present than the past. She said the past allows actors to escape reality, but that’s not what she wants from her career.

“I think there are a lot of actors that like to escape reality, to find a prettier reality than their life offers them. I’m sort of the opposite,” she said. “I’m interested in finding out truth. That’s what has meaning for my life.

“Sometimes I envy those people, because they have a lot more fun.”