Choosing, Not Just Following a Path

The Belasco Theatre has a ghost. Stanley Tucci has a friend who swears he observed her wafting about. Edie Falco, wandering around the old Broadway house, “got completely creeped out in a stairwell just knowing about the possibility of running into something.”

Falco and Tucci are starring in the revival of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” and on this day of rehearsals she’s brought along her dog, Marley, a yellow Lab-German shepherd mix, who seems a bit edgy, sniffing and pacing about the dressing room. “Marley gets freaked out by thunderstorms,” Falco explains, referring to the weather and deftly turning the conversation to the realm of the explicable.

It’s something that Falco, whose life has been full of surprising turns, is good at doing. Fingernails blunt and unpolished, thick blond hair cropped in a shag--neither in keeping with the super-glam persona of Carmela Soprano, the mob boss’ wife who’s been Falco’s vehicle to stardom in the HBO hit--the actress looks at the world with a gimlet eye. Two very big, blue ones.

Seemingly effortlessly, Falco moves among stage, film and television, insisting she has no preference for one over another. “The one thing I know is that I love acting, and I’ll take any opportunity to do a piece I find inspiring. It used to be I’d take just any opportunity.” She smiles, as aware as anyone of her chosen profession’s fickle nature. Take her current role as Frankie, the hash-slinging waitress opposite Johnny, the short-order fry cook, in Terrence McNally’s play about a romantic relationship. It’s in previews and opens Thursday. Members of the producing Araca Group, whose credits include “Urinetown,” contacted her agent in hopes of producing a play Falco wanted to do.

“That,” reports Falco, “is the kind of thing you dream about.” As is the fact that director John Sayles supposedly had her in mind when he wrote Marly, the character she plays in the film “Sunshine State.” He sent a handwritten invitation. “That, and having coincidentally named her Marly”--never mind the spelling deviation from her pet’s name--”unbelievable!”

Once the “Frankie and Johnny” revival was settled upon, Tucci was invited to make up the other half of the cast. Director Joe Mantello, a fan since Falco’s “Side Man” days off and then on Broadway, also signed on. “She’s someone who acts without acting,” he says admiringly.

Waitressing isn’t exactly unfamiliar territory for the actress, who spent a decade or so supporting herself in this manner. The play is set in Frankie’s studio apartment, which, on stage, is actually larger than the fifth-floor “teensy walk-up I lived in for years,” Falco says. “She’s a woman in middle age living as a single person. Right now, I’m significant other-less.”

But right now, rationalizes Falco, who’s 39, “this feels right. I’ve spent a lot of time in relationships with men, feeling neglectful, when the truth is I’ve worked my whole life toward this sort of exciting, challenging career when I’m busy, have choices.

“What I want to be doing right now,” she continues, “is to be at this theater working on this show” and--when the limited run ends in late December--be back on the set to film the fifth season of “The Sopranos.” The success of the series is responsible for the fact that Falco now has a house in Greenwich Village--and a place in the Catskills--instead of that studio walk-up. The show’s much-anticipated fourth season begins Sept. 15.

Addressing the fame that’s come her way with “The Sopranos,” Falco says, “I’ve had to prepare myself for all kinds of stuff I didn’t know would be coming.”

The actress had been hanging around casting offices for a long time before Carmela appeared on the horizon. Falco had done television roles--including a couple of seasons as Officer Diane Whittlesey in the HBO series “Oz”--as well as a number of independent films dating to her senior year in college when she was cast in 1987’s “Sweet Lorraine” with Maureen Stapleton.

“I thought it was going to be a piece of cake,” says Falco, snapping her fingers. “Then, I didn’t work for four years, fell into waitressing and became seriously depressed.”

Classmates Hal Hartley, Nick Gomez and Eric Mendelsohn also cast her in a couple of their films (she played the title role in Mendelsohn’s 1999 “Judy Berlin,” which was set on Long Island). “I’ve been thinking about some funny titles if I ever write my autobiography,” Falco says, “and one of them would be ‘When This Movie Comes Out.’ ... If I had a nickel for every time those words were said to me and turned out to be completely irrelevant to the real truth: Nothing happened!”

“Side Man,” which opened in 1998, “was kind of my first play,” Falco says. “I had to get my Equity card. I’d only done a lot of one-acts and showcase stuff. The truth is, I never thought it would go beyond a workshop.” In the end, she says, she’s figured she played the role of Terry, the jazz musician’s tragic alcoholic, suicidal wife, “about 800 times,” and “if I had a favorite, it would have to be her. The experience was just so profound.”

Enter, in 1999, “The Sopranos.”

After the London production of “Side Man” opened two years ago, fans who gathered at the stage door often greeted Falco with cries of “Carmela!”

That “concerned and saddened me,” Falco says. “If I were another person, maybe I’d be nothing but flattered, but part of me was heartbroken.” Terry, the role she’d created, was based on a real person (the mother of playwright Warren Leight), “and for people to come from a performance where they’d just seen her and say, ‘Hey, Carmela.’ ... “

For although “The Sopranos” “has been a spectacular job experience, I’d hoped to work with many different writers and directors over the years, each with a story to tell. I’m really nothing more than a conduit for them to do things, and I hope this doesn’t limit the audiences’ experiences of the stories because they’re too clouded by Carmela.”

In other roles, she’s taken care to steer clear of the many Carmela types she’s been offered.

“The truth is you’re responsible for shaping your own career. I have a friend who complains she always plays the girlfriend--and that’s because she always accepts that kind of role.” Being selective, however, Falco says, “is scary business because acting work is often not easy to come by.”

Even her preparation has had to change: “Whatever I do when I’m working on a role--I hate the word ‘research’; things feed me in ways I don’t know--I’m somewhat hampered now by the way I’m recognized. I can’t wander the streets anymore, which is what I’ve always done to imagine what it was like to be other people. Now people no longer behave naturally around me.”

This, even though in real life, Falco insists her own appearance is the antithesis of Carmela. “I’ve always felt like a tomboy. I’ve never been much of a girlie dresser, and if anything I’ve gone more in that direction. At a certain point midseason I realized I was dressing as such a slob: giant men’s T-shirts, sneakers, a baseball cap turned backward. I’m most comfortable in that place.”

On her ever-growing resume, Falco still has only one big-budget Hollywood film--1999’s “Random Hearts,” with Harrison Ford, whose humongous trailer impressed her almost more than her own part. One of the decided advantages of Life With Carmela is that what Falco does now “has gotta be something that interests me, that makes my heart pound.”