Bringing Up ‘Baby’

“I don’t wear the bright lights well,” Stephanie Zimbalist says matter-of-factly. When she’s not working, says the former “Remington Steele” star, she’s just like any other actor. “I travel a bit, I organize my clothes. I hang in there. Sure, I worry about the next job. There are so many gifted people that should be working and aren’t. So you have to try to create your own jobs. You can’t just sit on your hands and expect it to come to you.”

True to her words, the New York native is in previews in Jane Anderson’s “The Baby Dance” (at the Pasadena Playhouse’s Balcony Theatre), a collaboration between the playwright, Playhouse artistic director Suzie Dietz and co-star Linda Purl. “I thought it’d be interesting to (mix) people from different backgrounds,” says Zimbalist, “and Linda brought the idea of making babies--because she was trying to make babies.”

The result is a five-character piece in which Zimbalist plays an upscale Angeleno seeking to adopt the unborn baby of Southerner Purl. “It’s a lot about power,” says Zimbalist, who toured in “Carousel” in 1988 and “My One and Only” in 1987. “I have the money, but she has the ability to have babies. There’s also the idea that classes can attempt to find a meeting place. And they’re successful--up to a point.”

If working onstage means acting to 100 people rather than 10 million, Zimbalist swears she doesn’t miss the series life. “I never played at being a star,” she says, “but it was such a responsibility being in a series. You relate differently to the world, the world relates differently to you. The funny thing is, I’ve done 19 movies-of-the-week--and people are never aware of my doing anything else. Still, I’m proud of what we did. It was a good series.”

Not that the actress has any basis for comparison. “I don’t watch television,” she says lightly. “I never get around to it.”