Another Roll of the Dice

From the program for “Small Prey,” Nora Dunn’s new one-woman show at Santa Monica’s Powerhouse Theatre, a few notes from Dunn’s impressive biography:

“An Irish Catholic who squanders her money, Nora is fond of whirligigs, hobos, and convenience stores. She is seen often at the Fernwood Market in Topanga Canyon, where she buys overpriced cookies. Prone to spot unidentified flying objects, Ms. Dunn has no hobbies.”

Actually, Nora Dunn’s program bio also contains a few of her better-known credits: Dunn is five-year veteran of the cast of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” She joined the cast in 1984 and left in 1989, shortly after her highly publicized refusal to appear on the show with legendary misogynist and gay-basher Andrew Dice Clay. Scheduled guest star Sinead O’Connor also refused to perform.

For better or worse, her stance served to brand Dunn as a feminist comic. And she’s OK with that--provided it’s understood that feminists can also be funny.

“As much maligned as the word ‘feminist’ is, of course I will always be one,” Dunn muses during a conversation on the patio of her rustic Topanga Canyon home. “There is no other choice. For me, it means equality--not in relationships, but in a world-view sense, just equal pay for equal work, respect, things like that.”

In “Small Prey,” Dunn says, one of her favorite lines is a character’s wry observation about the pope: “He travels the world, bossing other people around and telling people what to do with their lives. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a woman’s job.”

Like her tongue-in-cheek bio, a chat with Dunn blends serious discourse with a running monologue on the absurdity of it all. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference as Dunn deadpans her way through her discourse with the distinctive inflections of her native Chicago, with vowels as flat as a squirrel on the Indiana turnpike.

Today, Dunn is talking about “Small Prey,” which plays Thursday through Sunday at the Powerhouse until Aug. 24. The hourlong show, written by Dunn, features her as eight different characters: Alma Turkel, a cigar-smoking sophisticate who has leaped from the Algonquin round table of the ‘30s into modern society; Ashley Glenn Ashly, a self-centered actress who named her daughter after her favorite green, Arugula; Estelle, eccentric artist whose best friend is her chihuahua, Peanut; embittered West Virginia housewife June Rae Klotty; the 6-year-old Joann; Lily Tremont, the grandmother Dunn never knew; vacuous model-turned-talk-show-host Pat Stevens, and an unnamed woman described only as a friend of a busy serial killer named Dwayne, murderer of 50 women.

The title, she says, alludes to the notion that all of her characters, in one way or another, represent the smaller, weaker animal doing battle with a stronger one. The drawing on the front of the program: a chihuahua smack in the middle of a bull’s-eye.

Dunn honed the characters of Pat Stevens and Ashley Glenn Ashly on “Saturday Night Live” (another notable SNL character of hers was Liz Sweeney, one-half of a popular lounge-singing duo). She performed them again in 1991 in another solo program, called “Nobody’s Rib.” Other characters are based on friends, relatives and acquaintances--none, she says, are wholly based on fantasy. One character is based on a grandmother she never knew; her 6-year-old is the personification of a doll she owned as a child. Still another reincarnates her ex-mother-in-law, who carried a coffee mug bearing the words: “I’m surrounded by idiots.”

Dunn recently completed work on a movie for Warren Beatty, who directs and stars in the as-yet-untitled black comedy. Dunn portrays a reporter who dogs Beatty’s character in pursuit of a hot story. “I wasn’t always real happy with my character, because she had to be sort of an angry feminist,” she says. “I kept saying, ‘Those two things don’t necessarily go together.’ She was kind of obnoxious. But she was fun to play.”

During her audition for the movie, Beatty encouraged her to put all of her characters together in a show, rather than continuing to workshop them around town.

“[Beatty said] if you don’t put it together, you are never going to finish it, you are never going to go on to anything else,” Dunn said. “He told me I had a disease, and that he had the same disease, and that it causes you not to work too often, because you are too busy worrying about perfection, and being judged.

“And, actually, once this show was up on opening night, I have been thinking about writing new characters, new material, so he is right about it.”

Dunn remains devoted to creative workshops, having cut her teeth on cabaret theater and improvisation, rather than stand-up, in Chicago. A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago who also studied at San Francisco’s Jean Sheldon Acting Workshop, Dunn never joined Chicago’s legendary Second City comedy troupe, but rather worked with performers who had defected from Second City in Chicago in the years before visiting SNL casting directors tapped her for the show.

On Thursday nights after “Small Prey,” Dunn scoots over to Creativity, an arts center in Santa Monica, to participate in “Free Speech,” a “sociopolitical comedy forum” in which participants concoct monologues on assigned topics such as death, God, and gay marriage and adoption.

In “Small Prey,” Dunn says she is struggling to stick to her script, rather than falling back to her improv roots. “I consider myself a writer first,” she says. She continues to write collections of short fiction and published a volume of stories in 1992. Her hope is to take the show to New York, off-Broadway, and she wants to direct a film from a script she has written.

“I don’t think any of the characters in [“Small Prey”] will translate into the wacky neighbor in a sitcom,” Dunn muses. “It’s not a showcase, [it is] a theater piece. It is not meant to be parlayed into my own TV show.”

Speaking of TV, Dunn’s feelings about her “Saturday Night Live” experiences remain decidedly mixed. “I don’t think about feminism as much as I used to when I was on SNL, because I was in a very male-dominated environment--it was like, you’re in a college dorm, make sure you laugh at their jokes first,” she recalls. “Now I know what a struggle it was for the original cast, for the women in the cast. It was really Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin and especially Laraine Newman who were my role models, they were the first girls that I saw that I went, ‘Wow, they have my sense of humor.’

“It [SNL] follows me around, but it doesn’t haunt me,” Dunn reflects. “Even the Andrew Dice Clay incident doesn’t haunt me, because it defined me in a very honest way, and I never had a moment’s regret. And it happened to be a very slow news week--it was the story in New York. I couldn’t go anywhere without a camera in my face.

“But I was a little heroine in my community, because I lived in the West Village; we had instances there after Andrew Dice Clay would play at the Garden where his disciples would come down to ‘beat up queers’. They would really come down, just like Nazi storm troopers. That’s what was so infuriating to me: Why are you giving him a national arena? Why?”

Despite the locker room atmosphere of the “Saturday Night Live” set, Dunn observes that the men in the cast were more supportive of her refusal to perform with Clay than the women. “The women were far more emotional, they felt that they were made to appear un-feminist by my actions. But it was a good thing. It was a very good thing.”

Dunn acknowledges that, despite inroads made by female comics on “Saturday Night Live” and elsewhere, being an attractive female comic remains problematic.

“I think when I first started doing comedy, I remember one guy saying, ‘Yeah, what do you know about rejection?’ ” she says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, next time I’ll bring my therapist in and we’ll talk about it.’

“I’m glad that women have gotten away from, you have to be fat, you have to get up and talk about being fat, you have to have this sort of self-deprecating kind of humor.”

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“SMALL PREY,” Powerhouse Theatre, 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica. Dates: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 24. Price: $15. Phone: (213) 658-4040.