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Going deep, rising high

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Times Staff Writer

WHEN Frances Conroy ended the Broadway run of Arthur Miller’s “The Ride Down Mt. Morgan” in July 2000, she hardly thought it would be six whirligig years before she would tread the boards again.

What kept her away (for those in a premium-cable dead zone) was an HBO series with a rather unlikely premise -- an evening soap revolving around a mortuary business run by a family whose eccentric personalities revealed, episode after episode, the wide latitude in the meaning of “normal.”

Conroy recalled the charmed sequence of events as though it were a movie flashing before her: “The day after we closed in New York, I flew back to L.A., and the day after that I was shooting the pilot for ‘Six Feet Under.’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m Alice in Wonderland.’ ”

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It’s not that Conroy -- a Juilliard-trained veteran with an Obie, a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination to her credit -- had wanted to take a hiatus from the stage. But given the chance to emerge from its relative obscurity, how could she not allow herself an extended sabbatical?

Still, to hear her talk about her role in “Pyrenees,” which opens next Sunday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, is to know that, whatever success befalls her in TV or film, returning to the theater will always be a kind of homecoming for her.

Bear in mind, however, that a homecoming isn’t the same thing as living at home. How often Conroy will return to the theater is unclear, least of all to her. Wrapped in the posthumous glow of “Six Feet Under,” she’s keeping her options open. But she’ll trust her instincts -- rather than her “people” -- to guide her.

“I just thought this was a beautiful play,” she says of Scottish playwright David Greig’s 2005 drama, now receiving its American premiere. “I was offered something in New York within the last couple of months that everyone thought I should do. But I didn’t care what anyone else said. I knew I’d be absolutely miserable doing that other play. I didn’t really think there was a human being talking. You can’t hate a part -- you have to live in the person.”

She describes “Pyrenees,” which revolves around an amnesiac man found in the mountains trying to recover his lost identity, as a “chamber piece.” Not to give too much away, Conroy plays a woman from his past who has been searching for him for quite some time.

“What attracted me most was the sense of tiny figures against a vast landscape,” Conroy says. “There’s an awareness of mortality and a sense that you’ve left everything behind and are in a state of suspension.”

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Sitting in a stark room with bad overhead lighting just before a long rehearsal day at Center Theatre Group’s downtown headquarters, Conroy looks younger than Ruth, the frowsy mother she played on “Six Feet Under.” Dressed in a brown sundress, she wears her long, pale red hair down (as was her custom when her character was in one of her more sensual moods). Her watery blue eyes lend an impression of sincere attention, though there’s a subtle reserve in her manner. Friendly but not effusive, she’s anything but an open book.

“Warmly aloof” is one way to describe Conroy’s intriguing appeal, which informs her roles as much as it does her interview style. To give an example, she spoke at length about her early exposure to theater as a child, the Long Island high school that encouraged her to challenge herself as a dramatic actress, and her parents’ embrace of her theatrical interests, which led to her taking Saturday classes as a teen at the legendary Neighborhood Playhouse in Manhattan.

It’s only when she speaks of her college years that she mentions, almost incidentally, that her father died when she was in high school and that she was “mixed up,” worried about money and not sure what to do with her life.

Her musings about the way teachers can open up new worlds came from her heart, but her painful early loss was skirted. And because she’s otherwise so forthcoming, it seems wrong to pry. Conroy projects a respect for the unspoken pathos of the characters she plays, and it’s hard not to follow suit when grappling with her own.

The suggestion of a sadness capped within herself is surely one of the qualities that has led her to be cast in the American premieres of plays by Miller, Edward Albee, Richard Nelson and David Hare -- a list that shows Conroy had quite a respectable career before Alan Ball, the creator of “Six Feet Under,” entered her life.

True, she was the kind of actress -- not unlike her slightly older peer Mary Beth Hurt -- whose talent outstripped her stardom. Fortunately for Conroy, the measure for success has been steady work, and on that score she’s been outstanding.

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Movie-wise, her resume may be no great shakes -- a trio of small parts in Woody Allen films, one memorable indie (“Rocket Gibraltar”) and numerous appearances in bigger-budget fare in which she was often the supporting cast’s supporting cast.

But she was a regular figure on and off-Broadway throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. For 12 years, beginning with a major revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” in 1988, she would appear on Broadway 10 times -- clear proof (as though any were needed) of her serious commitment to the stage.

And New York wasn’t the only place she was doing theater. Conroy first came out to California in 1985 at the invitation of John Houseman, her former teacher from Juilliard, who was directing “Richard III” at San Diego’s Old Globe. She stayed for two years, renting an apartment over a garage in Silver Lake that she admits to having had a sentimental attachment to and only recently gave up.

“I fell into some brilliant theater work when I came out here,” she said. “They moved ‘Romance Language,’ which I had done at Playwrights Horizons in New York, to the Mark Taper Forum. That gave me a base of doing something familiar. And then I did a few more things at the Taper and was going to theater as much as I could. I liked hanging out in L.A., even though I was totally broke. I didn’t want to leave.”

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Drawn to the big screen

ONE of Conroy’s earliest memories of the local theater scene involves the man who would eventually become her husband, actor Jan Munroe. “Jan was doing this incredible performance art work with David Schweizer, John Fleck, Tony Abatemarco and all these people who had worked together at the Olympic Arts Festival in ‘84,” she says. “I went to these things and thought, ‘This is really wild stuff,’ which I didn’t expect because you never hear about theater in L.A.”

Still, like most actors who move here, she wasn’t setting her sights on the stage. “Once the casting people know you’re out here, they bring you in for TV projects, and you land this guest spot or that. Then I got this role in a sweet film being shot up in Montana -- ‘Amazing Grace and Chuck,’ with Gregory Peck and Jamie Lee Curtis. Michael Greif and Bill Irwin had just cast me in a commedia play at La Jolla Playhouse, and I was a bad girl -- I got out of it to do the movie. It was a very hard decision because it was an extraordinary play, but I was just offered a movie and I didn’t come out to L.A. to do theater.”

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“Rocket Gibraltar,” which was filmed in the Hamptons, brought her back East, though she kept her place in Silver Lake -- a sign that she wanted to find that elusive balance between theater and camerawork that British actors (who don’t have to trek continent-long distances between jobs) seem to have an easier time with.

It was at the end of 1988 that Conroy entered her richest theatrical period to date, appearing in “Our Town,” “The Secret Rapture,” “Two Shakespearean Actors,” “Some Americans Abroad” and, perhaps most memorably, the 1993 Lincoln Center revival of Jane Bowles’ “In the Summer House.”

Neel Keller, the director of “Pyrenees,” recalls living in New York as a young college grad back then and being amazed by the quality of Conroy’s work. “I must have seen Frances give five performances that I’ll never forget,” he says. “Some in plays I loved, some in plays I was lukewarm about. But she was always staggering.”

From my memory of that remarkable Broadway span, what stands out is the lucidity of her characterizations. Somehow she always managed to find the logical thread of her roles, making even the knottiest neurotics seem theatrically sane.

What grounds her is the discipline of her training. She credits Juilliard with developing her “focus” and providing “an underpinning of technique” as well as offering her models of professionalism.

Marian Seldes, who was one of Conroy’s teachers at Juilliard and who acted with her in the Lincoln Center production of “Ring Round the Moon” and off-Broadway in Tony Kushner’s “A Bright Room Called Day,” says that her talent was obvious from the beginning. “When you are in a class with a student like Frances, you almost feel hesitant to suggest things,” she says. “You want to see what she will do, because what she brings is so interesting.

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“I think Frances is one of our most original actresses. She is unique in every way -- how she looks, how she speaks and how she inhabits a character. Even if you’ve never seen her onstage, you know what a great stage actress she must be from the depth of her character work in ‘Six Feet Under.’ ”

Conroy finds something peaceful in becoming another person. She’s not given to psychoanalytical chatter, preferring to honor the mystery of whom she’s playing rather than over-interpreting it. Her approach is quietly interior. On the set of her old show, she used to hole up in her trailer to be with her character’s thoughts.

“It’s actually meditative to sit in a character for an extended period of time, realizing what your relationship is to who you’re playing and then letting go, just being there,” she says.

The practice was honed through years of long rehearsal days and extended theatrical runs, but she says it has come in handy in her TV work when she has to repeat lines for multiple takes.

She recalls a moment with Lauren Ambrose when they were filming the scene in the final episode of “Six Feet Under” in which Ruth breaks down after discovering a teddy bear that’s stuck between the refrigerator and the wall. “Lauren asked, and it was sweet of her to ask, how I could keep going there for six or eight takes,” Conroy said. “But that’s where you go eight times a week doing a play. You find a way to go there and it just triggers.”

For an actress who readily plunges into difficult emotional weather, she seems free of what’s euphemistically called “temperament.” “The character she plays is complicated, but her process isn’t,” Keller says. “It’s seamless. She can slide in and out of her role.”

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Conroy says she’s still astonished by the strangers who feel an intimacy from having followed Ruth’s journey for five seasons. She appreciates the connection women in particular have to the TV widow who discovered her identity beyond being a wife and mother, but she says not much has changed in her private life.

“I guess you’re happy if you have some kind of balance in you,” she says. “I’m a human being. I have days when I feel paralyzed, days when I feel like a slug. Then I have days when I have good energy, I’ve read the newspaper and I’ve done different things. Now I’ve got the focus of memorizing lines and being with this family that we have for the next two months.”

Does she have any fear about stepping out in front of an audience after such a long absence? True to form, she replies, “I’ll find out by doing it what it feels like again.”

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‘Pyrenees’

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Call for exceptions during the holiday week.

Ends: July 30

Price: $20 to $40

Contact: (213) 628-2772

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