Enjoying ‘Rotten Life’

The last time local audiences saw Susan Tyrrell on stage, she was dead--playing a ghost in John Guare’s ultra-dark comedy “Landscape of the Body” at the Court Theatre, 1987. In her new one-woman show, “My Rotten Life: A Bitter Operetta,” Tyrrell is again deceased. “I think I have a heavy death wish,” she cackles. “When I wrote this show, I was really at the end of my rope. The rifle was loaded and so was I.”

The hypo-realistic, semi-autobiographical musical, in which Tyrrell appears with an all-black orchestra and her dog Willy (“a pathetic poodle, extremely unattractive and untalented”) will take her to Amsterdam this Christmas.

Next year, the actress hopes to bring it to Los Angeles. Says she: “I just hope it’s bawdy enough that it’ll keep everyone horrified and entertained.”

Her projects tend to do that. As vampy Hanna in Tom Eyen’s “Why Hanna’s Skirt Won’t Stay Down” (at the Coast, 1986), “I felt like a burnt-out match, a French fry, a freak.” She’s a bit less freaky in Marlane Meyer’s “The Geography of Luck,” playing through Oct. 15 at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. “I’m a showgirl in the first act; I get to show my butt,” she says proudly. “Then in the second act, I’m an Ann-Margret type predator who picks up boys in gas stations.”

The actress, who describes herself as a “flaming old Tinkerbell,” is newly returned from Baltimore, where--in a cast featuring Johnny Depp, Traci Lords, Polly Bergen and Patty Hearst--she and Iggy Pop play parents to a fertile hillbilly family in John Waters’ “Cry Baby” (due in February).

“It was the biggest party,” sighs Tyrrell, whose film credits include “Andy Warhol’s Bad,” John Huston’s “Fat City” and the vigilante “Angel” series.

“The wild life , which I love. This is after being locked up in the house for years, being the good little girl--well, good for me--just painting and sculpting, going to bed at 9 and getting up at 7. It’s true! You can ask my neighbors.”