On View : The Bright Side of Their ‘Dark Side’

Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney were restless after performing their off-Broadway hit “The Kathy and Mo Show: Parallel Lives” for six years. After taping the Obie Award-winning “Parallel Lives” for HBO in 1991, the San Diego natives went solo.

“Toward the end of the ‘Kathy and Mo’ run, around the time of the HBO special, we had been doing it for many, many years,” Najimy says. “Thirty-seven thousand years,” Gaffney quips.

“We were ready to be finished,” Najimy continues. “Taking this time off apart was really great because we got to go off and do our separate things.”

Najimy found success in the movies, appearing in “Soapdish,” “Sister Act” and “Sister Act II,” as the fun-loving nun with happy feet and an even happier face. Gaffney hosted and co-produced Comedy Central’s talk show “Women Aloud,” as well as her syndicated daytime talk show “The Mo Show.” She also was featured in the cult British comedy series “Absolutely Fabulous” and “The Full Wax.”

But as much as she enjoyed her acting career, Najimy says she really missed “the process of doing material I’m passionate about, and that’s original material. I just did the opening number for the Oscars. It was fun and everything, but after it was over, ‘I thought, I can’t wait to put all that energy into performing something that I really believe in.’ ”

Thus, the duo is together again for an “HBO Comedy Hour” special, “Kathy and Mo: The Dark Side,” premiering Saturday on the cable network. Taped in May at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, the one-hour special features Najimy and Gaffney revisiting their “Parallel Lives” pals, Maddie and Syvvie, as well as introducing some new characters: an anti-choice picketer who gets trapped in the cross-fire at an abortion clinic and a neurotic singer and bartender at a gay piano bar in New York.

“I was really excited about doing this project,” says Najimy, lunching with Gaffney in the green room at a Hollywood sound stage. Their morning was spent doing back-to-back TV interviews for “The Dark Side.” The duo is just as funny and topical offstage as on. The one-liners fly fast and furiously.

With “The Dark Side,” Najimy says, “we actually had a trouble-free time. I had a great time. We really loved our director Dean Parisot and producer Paula Mazur. It’s very rare when all of the elements come together so quickly. We put this together in two weeks.”

This time out the two were in charge of the show. “Kathy was the executive producer and I was co-executive producer,” Gaffney says. “That made it a billion times better. No one told her she had to wear her jacket like they did on the last special. A lot of things made it better. I think we are just peppier people.”

Some of the material in “The Dark Side,” Najimy says, was leftover material from “Parallel Lives” that didn’t make it into the CableAce-winning special. “It seemed that all the material that wasn’t in the first one had something in common, which it was a tiny bit darker,” she says. “We wrote a couple of new pieces: Mo’s monologue at the abortion clinic, my AIDS monologue and Maddie and Syvvie’s opening the show as ushers.” Also new is a dead-on funny bit about two self-absorbed acting students discussing their teacher.

“We updated some pieces and edited them,” Najimy adds. “So there are very few untouched.”

Ideas for their sketches, Gaffney says, can come “from an idea for a character, an issue we want to address. Kathy was walking behind some actresses in New York and heard them saying this actors’ speak, so we started to improvise that a long time ago.”

“Dark Side” also gave Gaffney a chance to act again. “I have been off doing the talk-show stuff,” she says. “I got to express myself about the issues, but I didn’t get to perform like an actress. Just to work with Kathy again was really fun, just to have that kind of feeling of freedom with somebody. You know what I mean? I never worry when I am acting with her.”

They both wanted “The Dark Side” to address the “huge” backlash they perceive against feminism. “We feel very strongly that women aren’t given much space and encouragement to be just who they are,” Najimy says. “We spend so much time worrying about who we are and trying to change who we are, that takes all of our energy.”

Of course, Najimy adds, there are very focused points of feminism “that we can’t let go of, like choice--the choice to do what we want with our body, to have an abortion or not, to get married or not. Those are things I think are, like, political emergencies. They are very important and we have to make a yes/no decision and stay with it and be very loud about it.”

“Kathy and Mo: The Dark Side” airs Saturday at 10 p.m. on HBO.