Helmond Stages a One-Woman Detour

Katherine Helmond is not zany. Or ribald. Or chirpy, ditzy or blue-blood-born--any of the qualities she’s played so convincingly on television in the last decade, first on “Soap,” and now on “Who’s the Boss?”

There is a delicacy and gentility to Helmond in person. She is a beautiful 58. Though the handshake and voice are firm, the features are soft. She is soft.

Dressed in a black silk skirt and emerald jacket, auburn hair falling around her shoulders, Helmond moves easily and articulately from subject to subject: a recent house remodel, her Texas family, director Terry Gilliam (who cast her in “Time Bandits” and “Brazil”), travel, fans, TV roles--and now, her upcoming stage detour.

On Sunday, the actress opens at the Pasadena Playhouse’s Balcony Theatre, playing legendary diva Sarah Bernhardt in Ruth Wolff’s one-woman “Sarah in America,” a period piece spanning 1886-1916.

“I’ve been looking for a one-person show to do for a long time,” noted Helmond. “I thought it would be stimulating. I also wanted the autonomy of it: to own it, do it when I wanted to, find a time when I could schedule it (around “Boss”). Of course, doing a one-person show is twice--maybe three times--as hard because there’s nobody but you, and no place to rest. Your mind is racing the whole time.”

A few years back, she tried to put together a piece on Dorothy Parker, but couldn’t get the rights from Parker’s estate. The same with evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman’s family. Then Helmond found this play--and fell in love with Sarah.

“If she’d lived today,” said the actress, “she’d probably be a rock star, someone like Madonna: with an entourage, setting styles, being flamboyant. She was the first person to use publicity stunts. There were things like Sarah Perfume, Sarah Soap, Sarah Stockings.”

Although she had her own Paris-based repertory theater, Bernhardt (daughter of a Dutch courtesan) was often on the move. “At the time,” Helmond explained, “there was no radio, no film, no television--so she (and her 50-member company) toured the world. About every five years she would come to the United States, tour from New York to California and back--and play every place: beer halls, school auditoriums. Four thousand people used to come across the prairie to watch her perform in a tent.”

Near the end of her life, an onstage fall crushed Bernhardt’s leg. “They packed it in ether to deaden it, did all sorts of quack things. But she kept wearing armor, playing Joan of Arc, going down on her knee. Finally, they cut off her leg--when she was 72. The next year, she came back to America and toured 91 cities. When she died in 1923, she had made some recordings and was doing a film; they actually moved a camera into her home. She worked until the last few hours before she died.”

Helmond shook her head. “She got out there and lived life, you know. She put her head on the chopping block. I admire that. Because I don’t think one stands still in life. Either you’re growing or slipping back. That’s another reason I wanted to do this project: because it’s risky. All that dialogue, all those non sequiturs. I wanted to be a little scared, a little brave.”

She realizes that many who’ll come to the play will be coming specifically to see her . “It means they have expectations of Katherine Helmond to be pretty good,” she admitted. “When you pay the price of tickets today and drive all the way to Pasadena, you expect a good show. The nice thing is, I feel the audience is disposed towards me in a very friendly way--and if I don’t fail them,” she laughed, “they’ll keep on liking me.”

Though it’s been in television that she’s found her biggest fame, Helmond comes from a long and successful stage career. After regional work in Texas and running her own repertory theater in Upstate New York, she received a Tony nomination in 1973 for “Great God Brown.” In 1972, she won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for her performance as Bananas in “The House of Blue Leaves,” and local producers started calling. In 1979, she was cast as the daffy Jessica Tate on “Soap.”

Through it all, there’s been a constant in Helmond’s life: artist husband David Christian. They met in summer stock in New England; he was the “mature, very serious” 19-year-old set designer, she was the 10-years-older leading lady.

“It was a summer romance that we’ve extended 29 years,” she said. “We lived together 12 years before we got married--at a time when it was not nice or chic or clever or ‘in’ or anything to live together.”

Recently, Christian has started dabbling in his wife’s world. After writing a script for “Bankrupt,” a film Helmond directed for the American Film Institute, Christian is now writing a piece for her (adapted from “Plain Jane” by Somerset Maugham), which they’ll produce together. “He’s bringing it up to date,” Helmond said, “taking it out of England and putting it in Texas, and adding more and more of me to the (main) character.”

Expressing some of herself clearly appeals to the actress.

“I think with Mona, I get a chance to be more open to what’s happening in the world today,” she said of her “Boss” role. “I can be serious and I can be funny and vulnerable and blunt and brutal and loving. Yeah, a contemporary woman. I wanted to show a woman my age who doesn’t fulfill the expectations (held) of grandmother and mother and nice lady in Connecticut--but someone who’s in life, not outside looking in.

“I’d really like to show women my age--who’ve had children grow up or lost husbands or retired after working all their lives--that there are options. There are choices. We don’t have to just sit around and be invisible. Women have been brought up to be passive, accepting, not come forward and play a major role in life. And with age, there’s a tendency to revert to that--to pull back, recede. I don’t think it’s advisable or admirable.”