Theater Work Takes Getting Used to for Lori Loughlin of ‘Full House’

Lori Loughlin is “excited, nervous, scared.”

The reason is her Los Angeles stage debut in Howard Korder’s “Boys’ Life” (opening Friday at the St. Genesius Theatre), an ensemble battle-of-the-sexes comedy in which Loughlin plays a romance-scarred woman who runs into her old lover at a party. “I feel like I’m eight steps behind everyone else, because I haven’t done a lot of theater,” admits the actress, who plays John Stamos’ wife, Rebecca, on ABC’s “Full House.”

It’s not that five years on a TV series hasn’t served her well, says Loughlin, who’s also co-starred in the movies “Amityville 3,” “Secret Admirer” and “Back to the Beach.”

“But in film or TV, you do a take--or a series of takes--and at some point you get it; you don’t have to think about it again. In theater, you have to keep re-creating. So that’s new for me. And new is hard. We tape ‘Full House’ in front of a live audience, and if you mess up, the audience just laughs--they love it. On stage, there’s no room to screw up.”

If the Long Island native is new to the stage, she’s certainly no novice in front of a camera. At age 11, she signed with the children’s division of the Ford Modeling Agency, later segueing into commercial work, and then to a three-year stint on the soap opera “The Edge of Night.” She spent her first year on “Full House” commuting from New York, and finally resettled in Los Angeles in 1988.

While she awaits the series’ start-up later this month, the actress busies herself with home improvements on her “very old house” in West Hollywood, which she shares with her investment banker husband (they met seven years ago when he introduced himself at a tennis tournament) and a noisy cocker spaniel named Molly. “She barks and barks and barks--thinks she’s really tough,” Loughlin says. “Then when people walk toward her, she cowers. She’s really a big chicken.”