‘Scream, Shout’ Co-Star Has Little Patience for Talk About Roles as Unpleasant Persons : Stage: Dana Ivey makes it clear she doesn’t care for interviews, either, or the people who conduct them.

Discussing “the sacred mysteries” of the theater, as she put it, seemed less appetizing to Dana Ivey than her lunch of cottage cheese and chocolate milk.

“I really don’t see any point in talking about them,” she said, spooning her main course from a plastic container during a recent interview at South Coast Repertory.

The actress’s grumpy declaration, not really surprising in view of her general distaste for interviews, came toward the end of a conversation that had begun on a similar note.

Ivey was asked whether her role as the stern mother in Sharman MacDonald’s “When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout . . . ,” which is playing on the SCR Second Stage, was one more in a line of “nasty” or at least “less-than-likable” characters for which she has gained acclaim on and off Broadway.

The question, the first of the interview, offended her.

“I really have trouble with that definition,” Ivey said. “I never recognize the characters that I play when other people describe them back to me. I don’t see them as being mean or ugly or nasty at all.

“I think trying to pigeonhole people with one or two words like that is a very dangerous thing,” she added. “I mean, if I said you’re a nosy person and that’s all I left it at you probably wouldn’t be too happy about it. I think trying to characterize people with one or two words is a really stupid thing to do.”

Furthermore, she concluded in a huff: “I will not accommodate you by talking about these people as a genre of people because I don’t see it that way and I don’t agree with you, and I think it’s very anti-art and I think it’s very anti-theater and I don’t think it’s helpful at all.”

Being called nosy and stupid is one of the hazards of journalism. But being called anti-art, anti-theater and unhelpful, too? Gee whiz.

Perhaps it would have been pro-art, pro-theater and of infinitely more help to have noted that the offending definition was borrowed from her friend, the playwright Alfred Uhry, who is among the actress’s most devoted professional admirers.

Uhry once explained to a New York Times reporter that Ivey was cast as Miss Daisy in his 1988 Pulitzer Prize play, “Driving Miss Daisy,” because he could depend on her to be unpleasant. “I knew that she wouldn’t be sentimental or afraid to be mean and nasty,” he said. “She had always played parts where she wasn’t afraid to have the audience not like the character.”

Ivey also seemed to have forgotten her own description of Miss Daisy, probably her best-known role, as “dour,” “prickly,” “self-centered” and “contrary”--all of which might be applied with a fair degree of accuracy to her current portrayal of Morag in “Scream and Shout.”

This is not to say that Ivey’s stage creations are generic nasties. They run a broad gamut.

She has played the snooty Yvonne in “Sunday in the Park With George” and the rigidly conventional Lady Utterword in “Heartbreak House,” both Tony-nominated roles; a tart-tongued secretary in “Present Laughter”; a lonely misfit in “Quartermaine’s Terms,” a cruel nursemaid in “Baby With the Bathwater” and, more recently, multiple roles from apathetic bureaucrat to savage drunk in “Wenceslas Square.”

“I contain within me all people, all points of view, all possible relationships,” Ivey contended. “That’s the job of being an actor. And it’s a question of using the ones that are appropriate for the character and the situation.”

Even to suggest a common thread running through her roles was to oversimplify, she maintained, particularly with plays that are “complex and truthful.” As for the qualities that set Morag apart from her other roles, Ivey preferred not to describe them because she is “still exploring the character.”

There wasn’t much left to discuss, it seemed. The sacred mysteries were off limits. The role in “Scream and Shout” was pretty much out. So the actress was asked about her background.

Softening her tone but not for a moment the intense gaze of her huge brown eyes, Ivey said that interviews troubled her largely “because I want to be known for my work, not for who I am. I don’t think who I am is pertinent. I think it puts the emphasis on the wrong things.”

Nevertheless, the Atlanta-born actress recounted some personal details. Her childhood was immersed in theater, she said, so much so that she always knew she wanted to make a career of it. As the daughter of an actress--”I dare say my mother was the queen of Atlanta theater”--Ivey never aspired to film stardom. “I had dreams about becoming a stage star in a company where I could play all different kinds of people,” she remembered. Because repertory training was relatively unavailable in this country during the ‘60s, Ivey said, she studied in England at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts on a Fulbright scholarship after graduating from Rollins College in Florida.

The actress hesitated to cite “cause and effect” in her career. But she acknowledged that her successful struggle against Guillain-Barre syndrome--a viral disease that paralyzed her for months at a time in 1969 and 1973--”was a turning point” that deepened her commitment to a life in the theater.

“When you’re lying on your back and you have no idea whether you’re going to be a vegetable for the rest of your life, you do a lot of soul-searching,” she said.

Ivey, who is single and has lived in New York since the late ‘70s, finds working at SCR “very comfortable” but holds no brief for Orange County.

“It’s very unreal,” she explained. “It feels like a phony, man-made environment. I was thinking this morning it’s like it’s always being prepared for a (film) shoot.”

Still, she was “quite happy” about the proximity of so many shopping malls. They are her “favorite thing in the world,” she said.

Well, almost. Surely the sacred mysteries come first.

Sharman MacDonald’s “When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout . . . “ continues on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory through Dec. 10. Curtain times Tuesdays to Saturdays are at 8:30 p.m.; Sundays at 8 p.m.; matinees on Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets $20-$27. Information: (714) 957-4033.