Taking a more vulnerable turn

SOME people would consider S. Epatha Merkerson the most fortunate kind of celebrity there is -- an anonymous one.

The “Law & Order” star can ride the New York subway next to junkies of NBC’s long-running and seemingly ubiquitous procedural crime show, and even though they know that they know her, they may not know why. “Hi, there,” they say. “Hey,” she says back. Two days later, it hits them that they’ve had a brush with intrepid police Lt. Anita Van Buren.

So it was remarkable when Merkerson was pelted with pointed hellos during a recent trip to New Orleans to shoot “Girl, Positive,” a Lifetime film about teens with HIV. As she and a producer crossed the French Quarter on their way to the wrap party, a steady stream of police officers shouted out to her, “Van Buren!”

Then the pair passed several women standing in a doorway. “They were like, ‘Stop, it’s Van Buren!’ I said, ‘Hey, girls, what’s happening?’ I get recognized by ho’s,” Merkerson, 54, throws back her head and guffaws. “It makes you realize how many people watch the show and from what varied kinds of professions.”

The veteran actress’ vibrant and earthy sense of humor sets her apart from her dour screen counterpart, but both women are strong presences who could coexist comfortably. Not so the incarnation of Merkerson who will take the stage of the Kirk Douglas Theatre today as the aging, disillusioned Lola of William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba.” Lola is trapped in a long, airless marriage to the alcoholic Doc, played by Alan Rosenberg. Jenna Gavigan appears as Marie, the young boarder whose nubile presence challenges their fragile relationship.

“The character is diametrically opposed to me so I wanted to see if there was that kind of character in me,” she says. Merkerson has just emerged from a long day of rehearsal. She’s casually dressed in a teal silk blouse and a new pair of jeans, the denim laurels of losing the 40 pounds she gained on national television after she stopped smoking in 1993. Under her conservative, short-cropped “Law & Order” wig, she sports a flurry of dreads that makes her look much younger than her small-screen alter ego. Still, she has Van Buren to thank for being there. “Sheba” director Michael Pressman asked Merkerson to take the role after they worked together on an episode of “L&O;” two winters ago.

“When Michael brought it up, at first I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can play this part,’ ” says Merkerson, who had seen the 1952 film with Shirley Booth in the Oscar-winning role. “I wasn’t certain where this person was. Is she slow? Has there been arrested development in this character? Van Buren is so sure of herself and Epatha is sure of herself, and this character isn’t. Will I be able to find the parts of myself that are like this character to make it come alive?”

Later, Pressman explains how Merkerson impressed him when he directed a rare episode that featured her character -- the detectives’ boss who’s usually stuck back at the station -- out in the streets solving a crime. “She so elevated the material in her work,” he says. “There was a kind of profound emotional depth that I have not seen with many actresses. Soon after that I did a reading of ‘Sheba’ in New York. The big problem was, who do you get to play the part of Lola? What actress has the range and depth and naked honesty to pull off a role that is a tour de force onstage for two hours? I thought of Epatha.”

He e-mailed her asking if she wanted the part. She e-mailed back: “Hell, yeah.”

In casting the best people for the two leads, Pressman’s colorblind production adds a new dimension to the play -- a racially mixed marriage. (Bruce Davison, initially cast as Doc, withdrew because of a scheduling conflict.) But the director says he didn’t intend to make a comment on race.

“Michael just thought it would be a good role for me to play, but we did have lots of conversations,” Merkerson says. “Should Doc be white? Should Doc be black? Should Marie be white or black? He said, ‘Leave me alone. Let me cast it.’ It will take whoever sits in the audience to decide if they’re going to accept who we are as characters, as a man and a woman who are struggling in their relationship, who are trying to hold onto each other, who need each other, who are afraid of the future.”

Storming the award scene

FOR a while last year, Merkerson seemed to be everywhere. Her bravura performance as the uber-mom to a boarding house full of lost souls in the 2005 HBO film “Lackawanna Blues” led to a breathless run of awards, including a Golden Globe and an NAACP Image Award (she also won one for “L&O;”). When she picked up her Emmy that year, the acceptance speech she’d tucked in her bra was plastered to her chest. “I’d had so many hot flashes by the time we got into that room that my undergarments were soaked,” she recalls with a howl.

When she won a Screen Actors Guild award in 2006, she seemed on the verge of tears. “There’s nothing in my bra. There is nothing in my head. It’s all in my heart,” she told the crowd. Then in a jolt of pure, straight-from-the-hip Merkerson, she publicly thanked “the man who made the most impact on my life last year -- my divorce lawyer. He saved me a lot of money,” she recalls later.

It was a sweet, sweet cap to more than three decades as a working actress. So she was surprised when no one other than the NAACP asked her to present any of this year’s awards.

“There’s still a little anonymity that comes with being a woman in your 50s and getting recognition at this age,” she says. “Now it doesn’t bother me, but I will admit that I was hurt when the Emmys didn’t ask me to present because that was a huge deal for me. I just thought that it was naturally what happened: You won one year and you presented the next. It just broke my heart. And it was on NBC, which made it even worse.

“I remember talking to my mother one night, and she said, ‘Where’s that Emmy?’ I said, ‘It’s in my library.’ She said, ‘They can’t take that away from you. To me, that’s the point.’ ”

Life meets art on ‘L&O;’

BACK in New York, most offices won’t open their doors for another hour, but on the “L&O;” set at the Chelsea Piers, Van Buren and Executive District Attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) are already parsing the indignities suffered by a defendant -- a homeless Iraq vet who’d been ground up and tossed out by a hapless and heartless military hospital back home. It’s early April, and the cameras are closing in on Merkerson as she shows Waterston dismal hospital photos.

“Kicking broken kids out of the Army, kids like David Kreidel, just to save a buck,” she says solemnly. “You wouldn’t treat a dog like that.”

The cameras stop, and Merkerson and Waterston break into huge smiles. Merkerson starts belting out the Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain” because outside it is raining and she wishes it wouldn’t. He compliments her on her recent weight loss. Director Gus Makris calls out “action” and the two quickly downshift, replaying the tragic scene inspired by the headlines about Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Indeed, life on the “L&O;” set is lived in parallel universes -- fact and fiction. But the distinction sometimes blurs for regulars because the story lines borrow so much from fact. Back in her dressing room, Merkerson recalls that actresses on the show were barred from riding with police because the streets were getting too dangerous -- but she can’t remember whether that was part of a script.

Over the years, Merkerson’s fact and Van Buren’s fiction have overlapped more and more. When Van Buren made her debut 14 years ago, she was buttoned up and schoolmarmish. Some of her necklines have gradually relaxed, and she has even shown flashes of humor.

“One thing that’s tried and true with Van Buren is she’s the person of authority in the precinct,” says the actress, who is both “L&O;’s” longest-running cast member and the longest-running African American woman on a television drama. “She doesn’t suffer fools lightly, but she’s also fair. And I like it that she’s a woman who steps to it and speaks her mind. And that’s me. That’s definitely me.”

In her homey dressing room, Merkerson is surrounded by dozens of photographs of the many “L&O;” cast and crew members she’s known over the years. But one picture in particular draws her eye -- a portrait of herself arm-in-arm with costars Jesse Martin, whom she calls “my little brother,” and Jerry Orbach, who died of prostate cancer in 2004. The photo was taken during Orbach’s last day on the set, and in it he’s wearing a huge smile. Not so his cast mates.

“That’s when I realized Jerry was really sick,” she says thoughtfully. “You can see it in my face. He’d been fighting it for 10 years. Jerry never would have left this show. I was just about ready to cry. You can see it in Jesse’s face too. I think we both really got it that day that he wasn’t coming back.”

Merkerson had appeared on television as Reba the Mail Lady on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” but it was in the theater that “L&O;” discovered her. Producer Joe Stern invited her to audition for a guest spot after seeing her in the 1990 Broadway production of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Piano Lesson,” which earned her a Tony nomination. That episode eventually led to her metamorphosis into Van Buren: The producers had been instructed by NBC to add women to the mix of the heavily male show, and Merkerson was happy to stay close to the New York theater world. She’d been deeply enmeshed in it ever since she graduated from Wayne State University with a BFA in theater arts. She’d grown up in Detroit, the youngest of five artistically gifted kids raised by a single mother who worked for the post office.

In the late ‘70s and ‘80s, she was active in New York’s black theater scene. She appeared in the first national tour of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” and costarred with Morgan Freeman in a musical, “The Apollo, Just Like Magic,” directed by George Faison. In 1999, she won a Helen Hayes award for her work in a Washington, D.C., production of John Henry Redwood’s “The Old Settler.” Four years later, she starred in Suzan-Lori Parks’ “F****** A.”

Merkerson says she feels most comfortable on the stage. “It’s so immediate. You get the reaction at the time it’s happening. You’re without a net, so you have to call on everything you’ve learned to sustain yourself.”

But her work in television has given her the clout to pursue another goal -- producing. She has a two-picture deal with HBO films, which is developing a script about the country’s first black female millionaire, Madam C.J. Walker, who made her fortune marketing hair-care products for black women. The opportunity to produce is key for black women over 50 in Hollywood, she says.

“That’s the only way you can get your image the way you want it to be seen as opposed to [playing a role created by] someone who doesn’t know the nuances of what it is to be black or what it is to be a woman,” she says. “Because I think this country still doesn’t understand. Roles are few and far between for actresses in my age range and older. It was lovely to see Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren up there last year, these women who are over 50 and sensuous and beautiful and doing lovely work, and I think it’s incumbent upon us to continue to look for those strong stories that talk about us.”

And when Merkerson needs a break from fighting the good fight, she can go home to the theater. As Pressman says, “It’s always tough for a woman who’s not 25, but the great thing about the theater is there are so many wonderful roles for older women. I think she’s paid her dues, she’s worked hard and she deserves this moment.”

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‘Come Back, Little Sheba’

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 (4 p.m. today)

Ends: July 15

Price: $20 to $50

Contact: (213) 628-2772