She’s Still Got Her ‘Personality,’ but Ellen Ratner Has Changed a Bit

Ellen Ratner figures she’s just a sitcom kind of girl.

“Situation comedies and I get along really well,” says the actress, whose TV credits include “Anything But Love,” “Seinfeld,” “Molly Dodd” and “Night Court.” One of the reasons for the affinity, she thinks, is the energy the TV form shares with theater: “You rehearse all week, then one night you go for it in front of a live audience.”

Not that she’s lacking for a real theater outlet. The actress--a graduate of New York’s High School for the Performing Arts--currently boasts a “mini-Ellen Ratner festival” at the Odyssey Theatre, where she appears in Steven Berkoff’s long-running comedy “Kvetch” on Saturdays and Sundays, and in the solo show “Personality” on Fridays.

Co-written in 1986 with longtime pal Gina Wendkos, “Personality” (which originally ran at the Odyssey from 1987-90) offers Ratner a memorable gallery of characters--most notably 30-ish insecure, unmarried Heather and her “Jewish mother from hell,” Lorette. Ratner, who’s currently trying her hand at sitcom-writing, explains Lorette’s motto: “Who needs to be happy as long as you look happy?”

Although the mother figure was based on a neighbor Ratner observed as a child, she concedes that Heather bears some autobiographical resemblances.

“When Gina and I conceived and wrote it, it was definitely coming from our voice then: being single, broke, doing performance art Off Broadway. Now I’ve got a dog, a boyfriend, a house. And I hardly ever go back to New York.” Nor does she smoke like Lorette--at least, not much. “I don’t buy cigarettes anymore, though I do borrow them,” Ratner admits. “Onstage I just light them, then put ‘em out. It’s all an illusion.”