Inspired by a Fellow Activist

Valerie Harper has always mixed activism and art.

The actress has worked to alleviate worldwide hunger and channeled her energies into feminist issues, such as abortion and rape. She’s boycotted grapes, participated in the Poor People’s March on Washington and demonstrated against targets ranging from General Motors to racism.

So while, at first glance, it may seem strange that the woman best known for playing lovable, Bronx-bred Rhoda on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and the hit spinoff “Rhoda,” is starring in a one-woman play about Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck, it’s really a natural fit.

Buck, the daughter of missionaries, spent the first half of her life in China and set up a foundation to find homes for abandoned Amerasian children. She spoke out against Japanese American internment in World War II, was a lifelong member of the NAACP, and locked horns with Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover.

“Pearl was a proponent of international respect, honoring each other as human beings,” says Harper, who is sporting a gold ribbon in support of the striking members of the Screen Actors Guild. “She believed that all humanity is one family--and not a fighting one.”

Dyke Garrison, who co-wrote “All Under Heaven” with the actress, draws parallels between the author and the person playing her on stage.

“Both have a world vision and are unafraid to stick their neck out,” he says. “And from what I hear, Buck, like Valerie, had a high charisma quotient.”

The four-time Emmy winner spent three years developing the project, which begins a 3 1/2-week run at Hollywood’s Ivar Theatre on Oct. 13. She and husband Tony Cacciotti have invested nearly $800,000 in the piece, in which Harper portrays a dozen characters ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to Sinclair Lewis. Playing off-Broadway before heading to Florida, it left a trail of positive reviews.

“If you only know Valerie Harper as TV’s Rhoda, you will be astonished to discover that she’s a versatile actress with a wide range,” said the New York Daily News. “An intelligent and often witty one-woman show,” concluded the New York Times.

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The seeds of “All Under Heaven” were planted in 1997, when Harper was appearing off-Broadway in “Death Defying Acts,” a triple bill of plays by David Mamet, Elaine May and Woody Allen.

Looking ahead to her next project, she recalls, Cacciotti came up with an idea: Instead of waiting for a lucrative TV deal, why not produce a play of their own?

The arrival of a Pearl S. Buck Foundation holiday card from family friend Carol DeLuise, wife of Dom and a major supporter of the group, set the project in motion. Adding impetus to the notion was Peter Conn’s “Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography,” which had been published a year earlier.

“Buck, I discovered, is the most translated American author, a writer whose ‘Good Earth’ was at the top of the best-seller list for 21 months--and that was pre-Oprah,” says Harper. “A blond, blue-eyed girl in China at a time when women’s feet were bound, she experienced warfare, raised a retarded daughter and looked senators in the eye. Her life is an embarrassment of riches, enough to sustain 10 plays.”

Conn’s book became the basis for the first incarnation of the play, written by Marty Martin. It was performed in Milford, N.H., Chicago and Hartford, Conn., after which Rob Ruggiero, associate artistic director of Hartford’s TheaterWorks, suggested scrapping the script and starting from scratch.

“That version was a collection of wonderful pieces but had no spine, no through-line,” he explains.

Ruggiero, who went on to direct the current production, brought in Garrison, a San Francisco-based playwright. Although the playwright did the bulk of the writing, Harper contributed some humorous passages. Delving into Buck’s archives and interviewing her family, she also identified areas of particular interest. Of the author’s 106 books, Harper says, she’s read nearly 70.

Garrison would create a scene, and the star would reshape it. Between them, they settled on a seminal event around which the play would be built: Buck’s return to the land of her youth after Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China. The goal, they agreed, was to capture the humanity of the woman. “All Under Heaven” opened in August 1998, at Buck’s alma mater--Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Va.--and off-Broadway shortly thereafter.

Harper defends the co-writing credit but puts it in perspective. “I wrote some comedy sketches with my first husband, Richard Schaal, and have been told I have a nice sense of dialogue,” she says. “But writers work too damn hard and long for me to say that I’m one.”

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As a child, the Suffern, N.Y.-born actress was enthralled by dance. If she were to take a “half-empty” view of her life, Harper says, blue eyes twinkling, she’d call herself a “failed ballerina.” At 17, she landed a job with Radio City Music Hall’s corps de ballet for a hefty $67 a week. She went on to appear in the chorus of five Broadway musicals--including “L’il Abner,” “Take Me Along,” and “Subways Are for Sleeping”--that financed her acting classes.

In 1964, she met and married Schaal, an actor in Paul Sills’ famed Second City. She too joined the Chicago-based troupe, learning improvisational skills from Sills and his mother, Viola Spolin.

“Improvisational theater gave me great freedom, experience in the use of imaginary objects, and helped me get focused in a scene,” she says of the multitude of characters she creates during the course of an evening. “Doing a sitcom also developed my muscles. It was like summer stock, doing a different play before 300 live people each week.”

In 1970, Harper appeared at the Mark Taper Forum in Sills’ “Story Theatre”--a comic retelling of 10 Grimm’s fairy tales that later moved to Broadway. That year, she also auditioned for and won the part of Rhoda--which was to dominate her life for the next nine years.

“I don’t know how many roles I lost because I was associated with ‘Rhoda’ and frankly don’t care,” she says. “That role has been the wind in my sails.”

So was Cacciotti, a physical trainer who helped her get in shape for a bathing suit scene in Neil Simon’s movie “Chapter Two.” He has since become Harper’s business and producing partner. The two met in 1978, just after her divorce from Schaal, and married in 1986 after they adopted a daughter, Cristina, now 17.

During the 1980s and ‘90s, the actress appeared in more than a dozen TV movies as well as shows such as “Melrose Place,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Sex and the City.” Not since a 1985 performance in “Sills & Company” at the Heliotrope Theatre, however, has she appeared on the Los Angeles stage.

Ruggiero says it’s “typical Tony and Valerie” to choose the recently resuscitated Ivar as the site of her return. An old-time Hollywood theater-turned strip joint, it was salvaged by designer Pierre Cardin, who renovated the venue last spring when he brought in a play from Paris. Two hundred eighty-four red velvet seats have been installed--a gift from the Nederlander’s Pantages, which was refurbished for “The Lion King.”

“They could have done the play far more commercially--and with a more experienced director,” Ruggiero says. “ ‘All Under Heaven’ was my off-Broadway debut. We’ve all cut our fees, and Valerie is working for Equity minimum. She even gave me a cut of her writer’s royalties.”

The $400,000 down payment for the theater came from federal funds for at-risk youth funneled through the Community Development Department. The Ivar is being converted into the permanent home of Jack Nakano’s California Youth Theatre. The group, which owns the venue, aims to bring activities to young people and is receiving all the proceeds from the run.

For a third of the year, the house will be used by for-profit, rent-paying productions. Another third is for shows by and for the California Youth Theatre. The rest of the time, the space is reserved for other community groups in need of a stage. From now on, Harper says, the venue will be known as the Hollywood Youth Arts Center, in addition to the Ivar Theatre.

Cacciotti and Harper have spoken with a few writer-producers about the possibility of creating a half-hour TV comedy and are developing an ABC movie on the life of Buck. Also upcoming is the May publication of “Now I Am a Ma’am,” a comedic take on female aging that the 60-year-old actress wrote with Catherine Whitney.

“It’s hard not to be crippled by what we see and read,” says Harper, who points with pride to her lack of cosmetic surgery (“This is all Mommy and Daddy!”).

“You turn on ‘Sex and the City’ and see four women over 30 sitting around a table in sleeveless dresses--without a centimeter of arm flap. How real is that?”

Because Buck was 80 when she died in 1973, Ruggiero says, Harper can play her for many more years.

“In fact, Val’s young for the role,” he says. “And she can pick up the play between projects. ‘All Under Heaven’ could become her trademark piece--like ‘Mark Twain Tonight’ was for Hal Holbrook.”

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“ALL UNDER HEAVEN,” Ivar Theatre, 1605 N. Ivar Ave., Hollywood. Dates: Opens Oct. 13. Regular dates: Thursdays and Fridays at 8; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Closes Nov. 5. Prices: $32.50-$40. Phone: (323) 461-7300 or (213) 365-3500.