Staging Her Return

Paula Poundstone went back to work over the weekend, performing Friday night at a place called the Rio Theatre, an old movie house that looked more likely to offer a Hitchcock double bill than a comic reemerging from crisis. The theater, used now for live concerts in this liberal town, seats around 700 and was nearly full. Poundstone, performing for the first time since she pleaded no contest to felony child endangerment and a misdemeanor charge of inflicting injury upon a child, wore a trademark suit-and-tie ensemble and downed several Diet Cokes during a two-hour show.

“This is my first night performing since I’ve been a criminal,” was one of the first things she said. The audience roared. Then she talked about being incarcerated. “Jail is just like the cop shows,” she said. “I got one phone call, and I called Dick Van Dyke.” As she explained, she’s always been a big fan of his work. Comedians have an advantage when it comes to lightening the dark tones of scandal--who better to turn pain into the well-timed zinger? Although Poundstone had been an accomplished comic for many years before her arrest in June, her image as an unfit celebrity mother, albeit of the B-list variety, became burnished in people’s minds on that day. Poundstone did the perp walk on national TV, and the shorthand of that moment told viewers that Poundstone must be guilty, of something, though at the same time she seemed an overwhelmed victim herself.

As it unfolded, Poundstone initially lost her career and her kids, successfully completed alcohol rehabilitation at Promises, a live-in drug and alcohol rehab facility in Malibu, and was sentenced to five years’ probation. Her no-contest plea, on Sept. 12, barely registered a blip on the media radar. By then, show business stories like hers were not supposed to matter. In exchange for her plea, prosecutors dropped three counts of lewd acts upon a child.

Under the conditions of her probation, Poundstone, 41, cannot be a foster mother, but she can, and does, see her three adopted children every day, though the visits are supervised for the time being, her attorney, Steven Cron, said. She also has to notify her probation officer of out-of-town performances.

On Friday, Poundstone’s wit immediately put the audience at ease. “It’s kind of strange to see this many seats not in a circle,” she said, a reference to her stay in rehab.

To see Poundstone onstage is to understand why she might relate well to kids, and vice versa--she has a child’s petulant attitude toward authority figures and a kid’s fascination with food items like Butterfingers and Pop Tarts. There is also a vulnerability. The most memorable anecdote during her concert Friday was this one: At Santa Monica Jail, when police asked her to empty her pockets, out came ... pingpong balls. Onstage, she was morbidly amused at her fate, able to hit the right notes as she lampooned herself; under court order not to leave Promises, Poundstone nevertheless ran into her judge at the gym, where the rehab center has memberships for those in recovery, she said.

Poundstone’s arrest shattered the somewhat quiet life she had built for herself-one in which she yearly earned in the six figures on the road, and at home, in Santa Monica, took in a growing number of hard-luck children (one with cerebral palsy, another born addicted to crack) as both an adoptive and foster parent. At the time of her arrest, Poundstone had three adopted children and two foster children, ages 2 to 12. A restraining order prohibits the principles from discussing the facts of the case, onstage or off, Cron said last week. But the attorney has previously said that the child endangerment charge stemmed from an incident June 6 when Poundstone drove her children to get ice cream while she was drunk.

“I drank little cheap white wines and went for an ice cream on the wrong ... day,” was how Poundstone put it during her act. The future of Poundstone’s career remains entangled in her legal woes. Will they turn off potential buyers or stoke renewed interest? Friday night, she did about 20 minutes on her public nightmare, then returned to existing material and what has been her trademark--banter with the audience, wherein she asks someone where they’re from or what they do and plays around with them for 10 or 15 minutes.

Poundstone’s team-her manager, Bonnie Burns, and her William Morris personal appearance agent, David Snyder-are trying to put together what they hope is a full lineup of 2002 dates, or at least a return to the steady business Poundstone did before her arrest. There are performances scheduled for February, including one at the Sun Theatre in Anaheim and another in San Francisco, and a few more in March. Poundstone, it should be noted, no longer performs in the comedy clubs that gave her her start in the 1980s, places that tend to give comics exposure but not pay. Rather, Poundstone, who performs for two hours, is used to filling 1,000-seat performing arts center halls, thanks to a loyal following and appearances on TV (“To Tell the Truth,” “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” and HBO specials).

The need to keep justifying these dates is not to be taken lightly, given that Poundstone, after a failed variety show on ABC in 1993, called “The Paula Poundstone Show,” isn’t likely to achieve TV stardom. And post-Sept. 11, corporate dates, an important source of income for many comics, have dried up, as businesses cut back on such fringe expenses amid a downturn in the economy. “It’s going to be fine,” Snyder says of Poundstone’s ability to earn money. “The question is, how soon is it going to be fine?” Good news came Friday night: People waited in the cold to see her perform, and a long line formed outside the theater.

Some were fans of her old HBO specials, folks willing to give Poundstone the benefit of the doubt. “Rehab happens to a lot of people,” said Kip Nead, 43, of Santa Cruz, who described himself only as self-employed. Of Poundstone choosing Santa Cruz for her first show, Nead said, “This is a notoriously welcoming crowd for anyone.” Indeed, Poundstone evidently chose Santa Cruz to debut herself because she’d played there in years past, at the now-defunct comedy club Palookaville, and because audiences there figured not to judge her harshly.

Perhaps more important, “Dateline NBC” needed fresh footage of her performing for a profile piece scheduled to air Jan. 22. Poundstone has already sat down with “Dateline’s” Maria Shriver. Poundstone planned to do one of these high-impact network confessionals, but, meanwhile, the rest of her public relations strategy seems to be a work in progress. This is in keeping with a person described by many as shy, and hardly equipped to give one rousing Clintonian performance to put her image problems to rest.

What is planned, apparently, is for Poundstone to grant interviews city by city, as a means of promoting dates. Thus, Poundstone did an interview last week with Metro Santa Cruz, a local weekly newspaper here, but through Burns, her manager, declined an interview with The Times. Ultimately, what she says in the press is apt to be less revelatory than what she does onstage, anyway. For it is with an audience of strangers that Poundstone seems best able to open up. And so, at the end of her set at the Rio, there she was, lying flat on her back onstage, ticking off idle, stupid thoughts. She wondered, for instance, why certain overhead lights were on and others weren’t. There wasn’t a great joke there, but Poundstone, you sensed, had earned this moment.

Times staff writer Steve Berry contributed to this report.