Is That Really You, Ally?

Early in the fall of last year, Calista Flockhart went on a hunt for plays. She called friends for suggestions, she talked to directors, she rooted through the drama bookstore and the library. She considered “I Am a Camera” and “Miss Julie.” Her needs were specific: It had to be off-Broadway. (The stakes are lower, the houses more intimate than Broadway.) It had to fit an eight-week hole in her life. It had to be “simple and quick”--something on the level of “Romeo and Juliet” was out--but, of course, good.

She estimates that she read 100 plays, figuring she would find a play, like a character and then get a producer.

“People were coming to me when the buzz got out that I wanted to do a play,” she starts to explain, then chastises herself for blithely suggesting she could create such a thing. “Listen to me, that sounds--ugh.”

But the perk of being famous for playing Ally McBeal is the power to choose how not to be Ally during your hiatus. So “Bash, Latter Day Plays,” a work by playwright and screenwriter Neil LaBute--known for revealing the brutal side of sedate middle-class humanity--fell into her lap.

“I read it and I said, ‘This is the one I’m doing,’ ” she recalls. “I just saw an opportunity to play something so far from what I’ve been doing for the last two years.”

That, of course, would be the task of embodying one of the most iconographic television characters of the decade. In the space of two seasons, the Emmy Award-winning Fox show “Ally McBeal” pushed the envelope of the hybrid drama-comedy form and enshrined in the popular culture the provocative image of a professional woman who can be, in various turns, high-powered, goofy, hard-working and lustful. It made a household name out of its creator and executive producer, the prolific David E. Kelley but, most significant, the show catapulted Flockhart into the kind of limelight usually reserved for movie stars and the cast of “Friends.”

In two television seasons, she went from being a respected stage actress--known mostly among her colleagues--to being a Golden Globe-winning TV star whose appearance in a three-person off-Broadway play of monologues turned the show into a sell-out event last summer. No doubt, she’ll do the same here when the play opens at the Can~on Theatre this weekend for 16 performances.

Flockhart appears in two of the three one-act plays. In “A Gaggle of Saints” she is half of a young couple with Paul Rudd in side-by-side monologues, but it is the opening one-act, “Medea Redux,” that features her alone on stage talking to an unknown and unseen interrogator and allows her to “dig into a kind of pathological human psyche,” as she says.

“Probably at the moment there is no one who fits the image of America’s sweetheart better,” says playwright LaBute, who loved the idea of casting Flockhart as a seemingly benign character--with a troubled side.

Director Joe Mantello saw the effect that had during the New York run. “I heard people at intermission say, ‘This isn’t Ally McBeal,’ ” Mantello says with a chuckle.

New York critics raved about all three of the actors--Ron Eldard, Rudd and Flockhart--who are reprising their roles here. Flockhart says it’s to revisit characters she was just settling into playing at the end of the summer run.

“The wonderful thing is I have ‘Ally,’ so the other choices I make can really come from a labor of love situation,” she says.

“I don’t like to do things in terms of ‘this is good for my career, so I’ll do it.’ This is really about doing it for the love of doing it.”

*

Mid-afternoon fog is rolling up Montana Avenue in Santa Monica as Flockhart parks her black Lexus SUV and strolls the two blocks to a tiny outdoor cafe that is one of her favorite haunts. She wears black-framed sunglasses with pale pinkish lenses that she takes off at the restaurant. Up close, everything about her has a golden cast--her porcelain skin, hazel eyes, blondish hair. Even her brows are a kind of golden brown.

She is relaxed and gracious, chatting about her recent move to a new house in Brentwood and recounting how she worked on her birthday, Nov. 11, which prompted the cast and crew to make a big fuss with cake and flowers. (She famously refuses to say how old she is, but most counts have her now at 35.)

When her interviewer asks about Flockhart’s beloved terrier mix, Webster, and notes that he’s 9 years old, Flockhart starts to nod then gasps and laughs at the notion that information on her is so extensive it includes the age of her dog. “Ahh, that’s just frightening to me,” she says in the velvety voice now synonymous with Ally.

In the beginning of “Medea Redux,” the audience quickly knows the lone character is guarded and mysterious.

“I think Calista has this mystery about her. There is something a little guarded about her,” says Mantello, who has known Flockhart since their early days in the theater. “The character says at the beginning, ‘I was never, like, this major talker or anything . . . like to keep things to myself.’ I think that’s true of her. She likes to keep things to herself.”

That’s not been easy since she became a TV star. Although she has posed and pouted--she swears those lips are not collagen-enhanced--her way across numerous magazine covers, she loathes giving answers to the constant Calista questions, mostly about whom she’s dating and what she’s eating.

When she raised a bony arm to wave to fans at the 1998 Emmys, a moment immortalized in photos, she launched a flotilla of stories about her health and her looks that continues to sail.

“This is really still an issue?” she asks ruefully over the plate of roast turkey and slices of Brie that she is polishing off.

The question was whether Flockhart ever suffered from an eating disorder. Her costume of gray cargo pants, white T-shirt and nubby knit sweater with sleeves that rest at her knuckles can’t hide (not to imply that she’s trying) a thinness so stark it has an adolescent quality to it.

Does she think she’s too thin?

“Now? No,” she says. “I’ve always been thin. There was a time when I wanted to be voluptuous and could never be that. You know--the grass is always greener.”

She says she follows no diet--”if anything I have to be careful the other way”--and runs on the beach maybe once a week.

Being Thin Made Her a Media Topic

No other slender actress working today has become such a lightning rod for the culture’s contradictory attitudes toward thinness: On one hand, Flockhart is lambasted for looking as if she starves herself; on the other hand, she’s glorified on the covers of magazines as a beautiful woman. It made her so self-conscious for a while that she had trouble ordering food in restaurants.

“Anorexia is a very serious disease,” she says. “I believe the press--or whoever was talking about it--knew that I didn’t have a disease, because they couldn’t possibly make fun of me if I did.”

What Flockhart seems to fear the most is being reduced to just her weight. “It’s just not all of who I am,” she says quietly.

It has been extraordinary to be “pulled out of oblivion,” the actress says. “I wanted to be well-respected, I wanted people to say things like ‘She was divine in this play.’ Those were my dreams, my silly little fantasies, not that people would walk down the street and go, ‘Hey, aren’t you . . . ?’ ”

She claims not to notice people gawking at her. But photographers are another matter. She has radar for them. Walking from the restaurant, she glances at the cross street two-thirds of the way down the block and says nonchalantly, “There’s someone taking our picture. In that car.” Her companion is oblivious. Nearer the street, she says, “See the car now?” A blue Toyota with its back window rolled down drives away from the curb.

She doesn’t read gossip about her, but she knows what it is. The latest rumor has her romantically involved with actor Jason Gedrick, who portrayed her car wash inamorata in two episodes.

“That was in the tabloids. That’s very funny,” she says with a grin. Not true? “Not even remotely.”

Generally, she declines to affirm or deny rumors, including the one last year that had her involved with Jeffrey Kramer, a former producer on the show.

“I could easily deny it. Why? I just feel like it’s nobody’s business,” says Flockhart, who calls Kramer a friend.

Flockhart says she’s not dating anyone at the moment. “I’m not looking actively, I guess. But it would be nice to meet somebody.”

A graduate of Rutgers University with a degree in theater, Flockhart still can’t articulate why she became an actor. “I have no earthly idea,” she says with a little laugh. But when she did William Inge’s “Picnic” her sophomore year, she knew she had made the right choice. “I remember being on stage and thinking there’s nowhere in the world I would rather be.”

She was playing Natasha in “Three Sisters” on Broadway when Kelley asked her to audition for the role of Ally. She dismissed the invitation without even reading the script, until a writer friend in L.A. urged her to take a look. She did and she loved it. “I thought why am I not doing it?”

Not only did she get a great role, she went from being a struggling actress worried about the rent to a wealthy one who loves repaying friends’ past kindnesses by picking up the check. Although she won’t talk about her salary, industry sources say her “Ally” pay is slightly under $3 million. Consider that she is not only the star of “Ally McBeal” (one of Fox’s few ratings successes in an otherwise dismal season) but also the star of the repackaged half-hour “Ally” show-- thematically arranged highlights from past episodes--that also runs on Fox.

Now ensconced in her third season--and contracted for another three--Flockhart says it’s difficult to have any perspective on the character she has nurtured from its inception.

“The first time I watch an episode I usually have a very negative response, for whatever reason,” she confesses. “Then the second time I watch it--which I try to do--I’m much calmer in my reaction. But it’s very hard for me to have any kind of accurate judgment because I’m just too close to them.”

However, any longtime observer of Ally can see she’s changed. The first season, she pined after a former boyfriend, dreamed of marriage and hallucinated the babies she hoped to have. This season opened with Ally having sex with a handsome stranger under the water jets of a car wash. Two episodes later, she shared a lingering erotic kiss with a female colleague--just because she was curious. It’s as if Ally hung out over the summer with those racy girls from “Sex and the City.”

Flockhart agrees that Ally is different. “She’s less self-conscious perhaps,” the actress muses. “I think this year, she’s having more adventures and being riskier and doing things that she probably doesn’t think of herself usually doing. Having sex in a car wash was shocking to her and yet wonderful.”

Executive producer Kelley says we are seeing Ally going through a bolder period as part of her ongoing evolution. “Ally’s a character who wants what’s out there and isn’t sure what’s out there,” Kelley says. “There’s a constant grasping and exploring, and you’ll see evidence of that throughout the year.” Kelley says a serious relationship is also in her near future, but he’s not certain where in the season that story arc will come.

Flockhart points out that Ally is also stumbling and stuttering less, using fewer of the mannerisms the actress bestowed upon her character. She still feels inspired to make Ally talk giddily now and then but not as often. “When I came out to do Ally McBeal, I didn’t want her to be an ingenue. I think ingenues are dreadfully boring. I think they’re boring to watch and I think they’re boring to play.”

So far, Ally is none of those things for Flockhart. “I don’t get angry when people call me Ally. If people think that I am Ally and we have identical personalities--which couldn’t be further from the truth--that is in some way a tremendous compliment, saying that I’m making this character so real and believable that they think it’s a real person. On the other hand,” she adds, “I don’t want this to be the last part I ever play.”

Over the years, she has done some movie work. Her small but dryly funny turn as the fiancee in the 1996 movie “The Birdcage” was dwarfed by the bombastic Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. More recently, she was Helena in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and she’s one of an ensemble of well-known actresses in the upcoming “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her.”

“What I’m planning on doing is really trying to follow my heart,” says Flockhart, who dreams of playing Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” one day on the stage. “You don’t know what’s going to be a hit and what’s not going to be a hit. So I want to pick things I have an emotional attachment to. Then, at least, if it’s a big bomb, you’ve had the experience of doing something you love.”

BE THERE

“Bash, Latter Day Plays,” Can~on Theatre, 205 N. Can~on Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 859-2830. Previews Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Opening night is Sunday at 7 and continues through Dec. 19 on Saturdays at 3 and 8 p.m., Sundays at 3 and 7 p.m. The Dec. 4 performance is a gala benefit for the Human Rights Campaign, with post-show reception at Nic’s in Beverly Hills. Ends Dec. 19. $60 to $75; Dec. 4 benefit, $150.