Theater : When Opposites Attract : The warm and openhearted Mariette Hartley plays the repressed Sara Goode in ‘Sisters Rosensweig’ and finds her hard to do. ‘There are parts of (Sara) that I am so afraid of,’ says actress

For actress Mariette Hartley, playing Sara Goode in “The Sisters Rosensweig” is just like “squeezing into a sausage skin.”

Hartley, a nonstop talker, emoter and nurturer, is the author of a revealing autobiography about her family. Sara Goode enjoys living in London, where feelings are “openly repressed.”

When we meet Sara, she is what Hartley calls “a hard like.” Managing director of the Hong Kong/Shanghai Bank Europe, Sara has twice been on the cover of Fortune magazine. She shares her tasteful home in Queen Anne’s Gate with her daughter, Tess, named for Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

But long, long ago, Londoner Sara Goode was Sadie Rosensweig of Brooklyn. And that’s what people keep reminding her of in Wendy Wasserstein’s hit play, due to open July 14 at Hollywood’s Doolittle Theatre.

Sara, radio therapist Gorgeous (Caroline Aaron) and travel writer Pfeni (Joan McMurtrey) gather in Sara’s London home to celebrate her 54th birthday with their assorted loved ones, memories and neuroses. Moving the enterprise along are such revelers as Sara’s proper British beau (an MP with a penchant for teen-age girls), Pfeni’s bisexual lover, Tess’ radical boyfriend and the mystery guest--a maker of fake furs.

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The three Rosensweig sisters bear more than a passing resemblance to Wasserstein, author of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Heidi Chronicles,” and her own two sisters. And the playwright packs in plenty of epiphanies along with her one-liners.

“Sisters Rosensweig” is a play about “the warming of Sara,” says Hartley. “Everywhere she turns, there is someone who reminds her of where she’s been and where she doesn’t want to be. She cannot turn without being reminded of her life. Her soul. Her roots. And Sara has no tools for that. She has no way of getting to that stuff.”

Her sisters can help her, explains Hartley, but only to a point. And then, from out of nowhere, comes furrier Mervyn Kant (Charles Cioffi), “a man of passion and intelligence who is sexy as hell--and she runs for dear life.”

When Sara connects with Kant, who readily admits he is “both a little too lively and a little too Jewish,” Hartley calls the connection “a spiritual awakening. . . . She’s been opened, and not just sexually. I think what Sara does is go back to her soul--she’s been running from it for years.”

Neither Hartley, who has been playing Sara on tour since January, nor National Endowment for the Arts chair Jane Alexander, who originated the role on Broadway last year, are Jewish, but Hartley doesn’t think it matters. “It’s not just a play for Jews,” says Hartley. “It’s obviously about that. But it’s a play for anybody who’s been trying to get away from his soul and can’t.”

That obviously includes Hartley, a woman who spent much of her life hiding from herself. In Hartley’s best-selling 1990 autobiography, “Breaking the Silence,” written with her longtime friend, playwright Anne Commire, the actress relates again and again the price she paid for denying her feelings.

Hartley’s “no holds barred” book chronicles everything from a drunken meal of Purina Cat Chow to beatings by her first husband. Along the way she notes her father’s suicide, her mother’s suicide attempts, her own suicide attempt (at 15, when she thought she was pregnant). In keeping quiet, she writes, she stifled not just the painful parts of her past but her true self.

So along comes this play, prodding her to climb back into emotional armor. “When I (as Sara) first see Gorgeous, my instinct is to hug her, kiss her, roll around on the ground with her, give her a full body hug. But I can’t. Instead I turn it off.”

“Mariette is determined to connect, and Sara is determined not to,” observes Wasserstein. “They share that determination.”

Director Daniel Sullivan helped her integrate Sara, Hartley explains. “There are parts of her that I am so afraid of--that coldness, going into my mother’s skin in a sense. It was very threatening to me. Every ounce of instinct I have is to touch people. And Sara can’t.”

Neither did Hartley’s mother. Daughter of John Watson, who founded the psychological school of behaviorism, Mary Watson Hartley was taught that children were to be trained, not touched or nurtured. It is her mother that Hartley plays back in her mind as she introduces us to Sara, hugging her sisters “the way mother used to do, hug and pat, hug and pat.”

Cioffi says that in playing Kant he has observed that Hartley “can’t wait until she gets to the end of the first act, when you see a much warmer side.”

“I found her tough to do, tough to get inside of,” says Hartley. “I was like a contortionist, because my life is committed to completely the opposite of where Sara is. I’m impulsive, spontaneous; I have a joy in my life today that doesn’t quit.”

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Her warm Encino home reflects her upbeat attitude toward life these days. There, reciting lines from the play, leaning in to make a point, she is as animated in her living room as if she were onstage somewhere. Her household of animals is so numerous she refers to them as her “menagerie,” and she even recently added one more cat--Mervyn the Fur--during the “Sisters” tour.

Hartley is 54 now, playing Wasserstein’s 54-year-old Sara Goode much as, at 14, she played Shakespeare’s 14-year-old Juliet at the White Barn Theatre near her parents’ Weston, Conn., home.

“Mariette is very beautiful and graceful,” says Wasserstein. “She’s 54, but I think a furrier or anyone else would walk into a room and fall in love with her. She’s an object of desire. And she’s fun.”

The fun side is evident to anyone who remembers the many Polaroid commercials she did with James Garner in the 1970s and ‘80s. Hartley became so well known for those commercials, which won her three Clio Awards, that the actress even started wearing a T-shirt that said she wasn’t Mrs. James Garner.

Hartley brought a great sense of timing and humor to the Polaroid ads, recalls Garner. “We worked so well together in those things, it was like playing Ping-Pong. Back and forth, back and forth. She’s really a fine actress--more than people give her credit for.”

She has been doing it long enough. Encouraged by the legendary stage actress, teacher and producer Eva La Gallienne when she was just 14, Hartley made her film debut in Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” in 1962.

She has appeared in other films, but is probably better known for her decades of episodic TV, miniseries and movies of the week and, in 1987, a brief stint hosting CBS’ “Morning Program.” She has been nominated for six Emmy Awards over the years, and won one in 1979, playing the bride of “The Incredible Hulk.”

Hartley has also done plenty of theater in Los Angeles and elsewhere. In recent years, she has performed her “An Evening with Mariette Hartley,” including at the Pasadena Playhouse and other local venues. When the script for “Sisters” came in, she says, it was age-appropriate and “used every ounce of experience I’d had.”

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Hartley’s tour contract includes two visits per month for husband Patrick Boyriven or another family member, she says. Their son Sean is in college now, but daughter Justine, 15, still lives at home in Encino, and Hartley says “it’s hard to be a long-distance mother. I don’t want this kid shut out of any part of my life now. It’s just too damaging.”

Family matters a great deal to Hartley, increasingly as a result of being in this play. The relationships among the Rosensweig sisters prompted her realization that siblings are so important, she says, particularly after parents die.

Hartley contacted her younger brother Tony, a dream therapist in Seattle. “We have so much to give to one another,” she says, “and my brother and I had been slightly estranged. I called him and said I want to work on this relationship if we can.”

Life often imitates art for Hartley. She joined Mothers Against Drunk Drivers after playing that organization’s founder, Candy Lightner on NBC’s “M.A.D.D.: Mothers Against Drivers” in 1983. Her research and work as the mother of a suicide victim in CBS’s “Silence of the Heart” in 1984 was what she calls “the galvanizing force” in her decision to speak about her father’s suicide.

“The Sisters Rosensweig” is about denial on all levels, says Hartley, and that is also something she knows well because of the secrecy that long surrounded her father’s suicide. “I was sworn to silence by my mother. I kept quiet. I almost died with the secret. My first thing with other survivors is to just start talking and know you are not alone.”

She encouraged activities at chapters of the American Suicide Foundation in two cities where “Sisters” toured, and she’s helping organize two related fund-raisers when the show plays here. She says she often speaks with other people who have lost family or friends to suicide, and she is also a lay facilitator for the Institute for Suicide Prevention, which is currently setting up workshops around Los Angeles.

Her mother died four years ago of emphysema, and Hartley expects that death to figure prominently in either another book or possibly a documentary. She taped “the entire passing,” she says, on both audio and video, contrasting her father’s violent unexpected death by suicide two decades ago to her mother’s “gentle” death.

Hartley’s performance is dedicated to her mother who, she says, “is so much in this performance. It was the integration of the two sides of me--who I am today--which is who I am in the final scene. And that is the result of my mother.” *

* “The Sisters Rosensweig,” UCLA James A. Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Previews begin Tuesday, $15-$36. Performances July 14-Sept. 18: Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m.; $15-$46. Additional performances Sundays, 7 p.m., on July 17, 24 and 31 and Aug. 7; Thursdays, 2 p.m., on Aug. 11, 18 and 25, Sept. 1, 8 and 15. Tickets are available at the Doolittle, the Mark Taper Forum and Ticketmaster locations. Charge by phone at (213) 365-3500 or (714) 740-2000.