Behind Every Big Star Is an Expert ‘Player’ : Entertainment: The Famous People Players, who will perform in Orange County, don’t advertise their disabilities, and the puppeteers have dazzled critics with their expertise.

Ever since she started her black-light puppet theater 16 years ago, Diane Dupuy has been working to include the developmentally disabled in her troupe. But she always has looked at the company, the Famous People Players, as a professional one, never as a therapy group.

“I was too young to even think about therapy,” says Dupuy, now 41. “I thought of it as a professional company, and it became a professional company.”

The Famous People Players made it on Dupuy’s terms: They worked as an opening act for Liberace in Las Vegas on and off for 10 years. They pulled off a successful five-week stint of their own on Broadway, and they continue to tour eight months out of the year. They bring their show “Colors in the Dark” to the Plummer Auditorium in Fullerton on Friday and to Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa on Sunday and Monday.

The 15 puppeteers--all but three of whom are disabled--are never seen during the production. Dressed all in black and working against a black background, they manipulate life-size fluorescently painted puppets that glow under ultraviolet lights. The “famous people” portrayed tend toward the glitzy: Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Liza Minnelli and others, including Liberace himself.

Dupuy, reached by phone at her Toronto home, said she feels some kinship with the developmentally disabled in that she was a slow learner. She “really disliked school immensely” and dropped out before high school, she said. She began doing puppet shows and in 1971 was asked to perform for a group of retarded youngsters. Though reluctant at first, she took the gig and was inspired by the experience to work with retarded young adults.

In 1974, she received a three-month, $15,000 Canadian government grant to start up the Famous People Players. The group spent a year perfecting its first routine, a five-minute Liberace bit. Dupuy hounded Liberace’s management to get an audience with the entertainer and finally landed one in 1975.

Liberace was not told right away that the performers were disabled. “We wanted to be judged on the merits of our performance,” Dupuy said. “We didn’t want anything out of sympathy.” Liberace liked the troupe so much that he signed it on as an opening act.

Dupuy says she didn’t advertise the “inspirational” side, as she puts it, of the Famous People Players’ story, but slowly the word got out. The troupe became the subject of newspaper and magazine features, an Emmy-winning documentary and a 1984 TV movie called “Special People.”

All the attention was terrific, Dupuy said, but much of it was patronizing, praising the show as “wonderful work by handicapped people.” Dupuy, intense and driven as always, decided that she had something further to prove and set the company a new goal--Broadway.

She had little idea how to get there. At one point, to raise money, she ordered 1 million Famous People Players buttons for the troupe to sell. “You have no idea what a million buttons coming off a truck looks like,” she says now, laughing. “I had nightmares of buttons chasing me down the street.”

But with help from actor Paul Newman, the players lined up five weeks at the Lyceum Theatre in 1986. They drew strong reviews from the notoriously tough New York critics. “No praise is too high for the visual art effects, the lighting and the dazzling expertise of the unseen performers,” wrote Clive Barnes in the New York Post. Richard F. Shepard of the New York Times called it an “iridescent spectacle that drenches the senses in sight and sound.”

“If we could win rave reviews from critics, then no one could call us ‘retarded’ anymore,” Dupuy said. “It just goes to show you that you can accomplish anything. The word ‘impossible’ just means it’s going to take a little longer.”

The troupe is working to establish a permanent home in Toronto with a 500-seat theater, restaurants and a toy-repair shop. Currently, “our home base is a bus traveling Route 66,” said Dupuy, who hopes to have the new facility open in 1992.

The Famous People Players perform Friday at 8 p.m. at the Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave. in Fullerton (admission: $10 to $15; information: (714) 773-3371) and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. in the Robert B. Moore Theatre at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road in Costa Mesa (tickets: $5.50 to $11; information: (714) 432-5880). A performance at OCC Monday morning for children is sold out.