Q&A; WITH MARLO THOMAS : ‘In the Prime of My Craft Now’

Marlo Thomas comes bounding down the stairs of her Beverly Hills hotel suite in a sleek black catsuit, the only color visible in red suede loafers and burnished-auburn flyaway hair. At 48, “That Girl”--remember her popular ABC-TV series (1966-71) in which she played a young, independent, hard - working actress?--is trim and fit, something she also works at. Spanning the sweep of a front window is a huge rented treadmill on which she exercises every afternoon at 3, watching “Donahue.” The actress and talk - show host Phil Donahue, who live in New York , have been “together 15 years,” and married for the past 12 1/2 years.

Now Danny Thomas’ daughter is back home.

Six evenings and two matinees a week at the Doolittle in Hollywood --three matinees beginning Nov. 12-- she is featured as Ouisa Kittredge in “Six Degrees of Separation,” John Guare’s dramatic comedy about a rich, lightweight, middle-aged Manhattan woman who meets up with a strange young man who is passing himself off as Sidney Poitier’s son Paul (Ntare Mwine). The play, which won the 1991 New York Drama Critics Award for Best Play, also explores homelessness, homophobia and the racial divide.

In a voice ranging from crackly alto to velvety whisper, Thomas , who has won four Emmys starring in television movies, talks about her life, career, some politics--while here she did radio talk shows as a Bill Clinton surrogate--and her father, who died in February, 1991.

Theater has bracketed Thomas’ career. It was launched in the late 1960s in the London production of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park,” directed by Mike Nichols. Thomas has been on Broadway twice, in Herb Gardner’s “Thieves” and in “Social Security,” directed by Nichols . After “Six Degrees” finishes its run Dec. 27, the play, Thomas and that treadmill, travel to San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington and Boston.

Question: So, how does it feel to be home?

Answer: It’s great. It’s kind of like “This Is Your Life” because my family’s here and I went to grammar school (Marymount) and high school (Marymount) and college. . . . I graduated from USC as an English teacher, English Lit. in the ‘60s. It’s weird to be back though and not have my dad here. He would have so enjoyed this, made this like the family store, bringing all his pals. The last play he saw me in was “The Effect of Gamma Rays (on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds)” at the Cleveland Playhouse two years ago. He always saw me in everything. . . .

Q: What attracted you to the role of Ouisa?

A: Well, I love her. She does the thing that’s the most important any of us can do, she takes a journey, and she changes. Ouisa is a person in the beginning of the play who is sort of brushing aside the parts of her life that don’t work. She has no relationship with her children. Her relationship in her marriage is one that she invites friends over to get money from them. And that’s her job sort of, (to) raise money from friends (so her husband can) buy paintings. She’s an anecdoter who trivializes life by making jokes about it. . . .

And (meeting Paul) also is an anecdote until this young man touches her in a way that her children have not been able to, that her husband has not. He doesn’t touch her in a sexual way. He touches her in a way that she starts to see that in fact her imagination has died. The most wonderful line in the play is when Paul says: “What is paralysis but the death of the imagination?” Whenever we feel paralyzed in our lives, it’s only because we can’t imagine ourselves out of it. And Ouisa’s imagination becomes alive because of Paul’s imagination. He sparks hers, and she then sees the way out of her own shallow life . . . and at the end sees life as a Sistine Chapel. She becomes her own work of art.

Q: Toward the end of the play, you sit on the rim of the stage and deliver a line that gives the play its title, about six people who separate us all from the rest of humanity. What is the line, and what does it mean to you?

A: She says, “There are six degrees of separation between us and everybody else on this planet,” that in fact from the President of the United States to the gondolier in Venice you just fill in the names and it will take six people to connect you. But the big thing is finding the right six people.

Q: Do we assume Paul is one of those people?

A: Paul is indeed. . . . It’s more than just physically finding, being connected to somebody, like getting them on the phone. This kid, this con man, this black young man from a whole other culture, from a whole other part of the city, has somehow found this white sort of upper-crust shallow woman and he’s brought her soul. That shows us we can reach out and touch each other across cultures, across race, across class--all that bars us from each other.

Q: I read that when you first saw “Six Degrees” at Lincoln Center, you wondered why you were not offered the role?

A: Yes.

Q: Why do you think it was offered to Stockard Channing and not to you?

A: I don’t know but never again!

Q: How did she do?

A: Oh, she was great, she was wonderful. . . .

Q: What do you mean, “Never again”?

A: Well, I mean she can’t be offered them ALL!

Q: The Times’ Sylvie Drake said: “Thomas goes only for the brittleness in Ouisa, which works superficially in the play’s early lighter scenes. But she’s out of her depth in the final ones settling for line readings when we should feel emotion.” Does a negative review bother you or do you just say other reviews are positive?

A: All I can do is tell you what the writer (Guare) and the director (Jerry Zaks) said: “It’s wrong. Totally incorrect.” Nobody ever gets 100%. It’s like the election. . . . So when John Guare came backstage opening night, picked me up and said, “Marlo, You’re 10 feet tall”-- that’s the review I’m looking for.

Q: How do you see your career going?

A: My career is about work, it’s about growing as an artist, and that’s the journey that I’ve been on for the last 20 years--to become a deeper and better actress. That was my choice.

Q: As opposed to?

A: As opposed to doing the same thing.

Q: More TV sitcoms?

A: Or the same person over and over, which is when you’ve had success at a particular thing which is light comedy, that’s pretty much what people are comfortable putting you in. And so (after “That Girl”) I went to New York to study (at the Actors Studio) to see what else there was of me as a person, as an actor.

Q: Yet despite the Emmys and other awards your highest profile may have been as “That Girl.”

A: It isn’t to me. Life is so cumulative. There’s me, the radical feminist. . . . There’s me and “Nobody’s Child” me and “Free to Be” (TV specials for children). I don’t see myself as one thing. I loved “That Girl.” It was wonderful fun. . . . “Nobody’s Child” (1986), which Lee Grant directed, was another landmark because I was seen as a dramatic actress--(as) Marie Balter. She was incarcerated for 20 years with panic disorder and depression and she fought her way back, and now works at the same institution in Massachusetts.

Q: Are there roles out there for women, good roles, as they grow older?

A: My journey has been going on before getting older. I’m not so affected by what’s happening externally than by what’s happening internally for me. What do I want, what do I want to do with my one and only life?

Q: In other words, life is no dress rehearsal?

A: Yeah. I mean where else can I do “Gamma Rays” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in the same season? On TV? Not really. “Virginia Woolf” was at the Hartford Stage, which won the (1989) Tony as the best regional theater. . . . My father used to always say, “You have to have places to fail.” And what he really meant was: You have to have places to try things. . . . I want to do everything. I want to do plays and movies and TV movies and I’d like to work in every single medium. I’m kind of in the prime of my craft now.