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Young Goes West

"Evidently in Deadwood, there was a Chinatown," said Keone Young of the one-time South Dakota frontier town. Good for him, because it means this venerable stage and screen actor has landed a juicy recurring role as a Chinese godfather on David Milch's new HBO series, billed as a Western "Sopranos," and slated to debut next spring.

Young seems to prefer the term "survivor" to "gangster."

"He's a leader in the community," said Young. "It's turning out to be a wonderful part. It started out kinda slow, but my character has developed."

There's an undercurrent of criminal activity, of "people trying to get power" -- or, as "NYPD Blue" co-creator Milch has put it, it's a historic time in which "it was legitimate to explore the genesis of law. What interested me about Deadwood is that it was an outlaw settlement, on Indian territory, so the American law didn't apply; there were no laws at all."

At least part of what has interested HBO is the possibility for a grittily revisionist take on the Old West -- i.e., an R-rated show that doesn't shy away from nudity and moral ambiguity. Confirmed Young, "There's cussin' and everything. The whores are real whores. It's real hardcore stuff."

The wild West, indeed.

How Actors Are Like Enron Employees

Let's see, she's acted with Vanessa Redgrave and Lainie Kazan; played a Russian metalhead named Yitzak in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"; has a series of comic detective novels in the works; used to front an alternative rock band called Wench. Oh, and she recurred on "Star Trek: Voyager" as the first crew member to give birth in space.

Juilliard-trained Nancy Hower has a quirky resume indeed, and she's just added another hat to the mix: Director of the improv-created mockumentary "Memron," just announced as a Slamdance selection next January. She and producer Evie Peck, who also appears in the film, shot it on digital video in what Peck called "total guerrilla" style -- i.e., Peck would line up locations, and casting would often be done on the fly: "Why don't you call so-and-so?" is how Peck recalled. Then, Hower said, they would add, "Bring someone you love. Actors are the best casting directors you can find -- I was amazed by the talent that showed up."

Her sketch of an idea -- about how the former employees of now-bankrupt corporation not unlike Enron must put their lives back together -- was fleshed out scene by scene by a cast of seasoned improv actors, who worked sans script and often took the film in surprising directions. According to Peck, one day of shooting in a residential home ended with a screaming-match scene so realistic that a neighbor called 911. The arriving ambulances and fire trucks, unfortunately, weren't worked into the film.

The film, which portrays Memron's CEO keeping tabs on his former minions from behind the walls of a blue-collar prison, is less about the corporate scandals of recent than about, strangely enough, the lives of actors.

"Actors lead the lives of these Memron people to begin with," said Hower. "Every morning they wake up gong, What's my next job going to be? Where's the money going to come from? Where am I going to live?"

In Hower's case, it seems, the question has become: Which job to choose as my next?

Classic Clown Plus Classic Rock

He was repped by William Morris and he'd booked two pilots. Matt Walker's career was in full swing.

And then he had a dry year and he did the logical thing: He went to clown college and joined the circus.

"I spent a year living on a train, sharing a train car with 14 other clowns," recalled Walker. "You had to hide your cereal if you wanted to eat." The upside: "I got to play big venues like the Louisana Superdome, for audiences of 40,000."

That's a lot bigger than the small houses he plays with the Troubadour Theatre Company, an L.A.-based collective of physical comics and assorted clowns who've carved a unique niche with their adaptations of classic texts to classic rock soundtracks (a sampling: "A Midsummer Saturday Night's Fever Dream," Twelfth Dog Night," "Fleetwood Macbeth," "Romeo Hall & Juliet Oats," and the current holiday show, "It's a Stevie Wonderful Life"). But the Troubies' shtick has been going strong for some time, with no end in sight, and they've managed to book a May-to-December schedule at such berths as Garry Marshall's Falcon Theatre in Burbank, O.C. venues Grove Theatre Center and the Muckenthaler Auditorium, the Ojai Shakespeare Festival, and Santa Monica's Miles Memorial Playhouse. The gig pays enough that his regular troupe -- including such powerhouses as Beth Kennedy, Morgan Rusler, and Michelle Johnson -- regularly turn down other work to do the Troubie thing.

Walker's money gig is directing wraparound segments for TBS Superstation's movies, but he's always been interested in physical theatre, studying privately with masters Bill Irwin and Denis Lacombe, as well as with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

Eventually any conversation I've had with Walker degenerates into a name game: What classics/classic rock hybrids remain undone? There's "Much a Doobie About Nothing," "Merry Wives of Earth, Windsor, and Fire," "Little Richard III," "Pericles, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince of Tyre," "Queen Lear," and such holiday possibilities as "Santana Claus Is Coming To Town," "Smokey and the Miracles on 34th Street," and "Rudolf the Red Hot Chili Peppers Reindeer."

The money may not be as posh, but how can a few stray pilot gigs compare to making up such silly titles for a living?

Networks Network, Minorities Get Work

After the uproar from minority advocates about the notoriously lily-white fall 1999 season, networks have made strides to diversify their ensembles, with noticeable results if not groundbreaking imagination.

Among the ongoing legacies of that debacle is the phenomenon of "diversity showcases," cast and staged in clubs and theatre venues by networks to give a spotlight to undiscovered or underemployed actors of color. There have been showcases for African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans, in which theatre and actors' groups identified with each group (in these cases, respectively, the Robey Theatre, Nosotros and East West Players) have teamed with network exex to dig deeper into those talent pools. The audiences for these "scene nights" include casting directors, agents, managers and other assorted suits, and while no stars have emerged from these showcases, to my knowledge, actors have been signed and/or garnered auditions and gigs.

But what if a diversity showcase were diverse itself? Rather than put together a roster from any one particular under-represented group, last night's ABC Diversity Showcase at North Hollywood's El Portal Theatre mixed and matched 14 performers whose diversity wasn't just defined by ethnicity -- African-American, Korean, Native American -- but by age, which ranged from 18 to 80, and by disability.

Chinese American hottie Gwendoline Yeo, for instance, did a short two-character scene from Joseph Dougherty's "Digby" (no, not that one) opposite deaf actor Anthony Natale. Though the male role wasn't written for a signing actor, Yeo said the network just felt he was the best choice for the role, and was happy to add some ASL to the "special skills" line on her resume. Hers, by the way, includes formidable chops on a rather specialized instrument (sound clips offered, too).

Yeo (pronounced like the goombah greeting) has had success with these network showcases before -- one for Asian-American actors last year landed her 7 auditions and 2 jobs. Indeed, I've talked to some performers who've done a number of diversity showcases. Which raises the question: If networks keep "discovering" talent at these showcases, why do some of the same minority actors have to keep doing them?

Well, to borrow from a great philosopher/poet, there are known unknowns and then there are unknown unknowns. Yeo has guested on "The Lyon's Den," done tons of voiceover work, and tested for several sitcom pilots, so she's no stranger to Hollywood's casting offices. But she has yet to break through to casting directors' must-see lists. Showcases like this, as much as any acclaimed play or guest star spot, are just another way to chip away at the industry's vast indifference to unproven success -- a prevailing risk-aversion which knows no color.

Right Place, Right Time? Wrong Question.

The myth of Lana Turner's discovery at Schwab's Pharmacy, with its faint whiff of sexual predation, is ingrained in the public imagination -- particularly among the busloads of newcomers to L.A. who may have never heard of Lana Turner but think they've got to find the right parties to crash, the right gyms to join, the right bars to hang out at, to be similarly spotted.

It's a fantasy about as substantial as a movie-set façade, of course. It's true that connections, friendships and chance encounters play a crucial role in most actors' careers, but so do talent, experience, training and representation. And usually the surest way to be "discovered" by those seeking the next star, or at least the next highly employable actor, is to be caught in the act of acting, as Mercedes Reuhl once put it.

Los Angeles Magazine reporter Dave Gardetta recently got flamed, or at least well-crisped, by the righteous actors on the popular bulletin board Wolfesden.net. His offense? A long post asking Wolfesdenizens for stories about "the outrageous, the pathetic, the surefire, the questionable choices, the long-haul investments of time and the pratfalls that may or may not lead to discovery," as part of the magazine's February "Actor's Issue." Specifically, he wanted actors to name names of everything from industry-heavy dog parks to dance clubs, from temp jobs to yoga studios, that had been proven to be Schwab's-like in their discovery success rate. He even had the temerity to ask, "What dogs attract producers?"

Wolfedenizens weren't amused. "Getting discovered? Go read a book and learn how it's really done," snapped Eitan Loewenstein. "Your article would be interesting... perhaps in Ohio or Maine," wrote Brad Blaisdell. "The 'Old Hollywood' is dead... The things you're talking about are desperate, and being or appearing to be desperate in this town is the kiss of death. It gives off a stench that can be smelled for miles." Actor Assaf Cohen wrote Gardetta an "open letter" urging him "not to go forward with your sensationalist story about how to get 'discovered' in Hollywood. Besides being insulting to all the hard-working actors (yes, many of us work very hard at our profession), it further perpetuates the stereotype of the dumb actor who relies on blind luck to become a star."

For his part, Don Raymond corrected the famous myth: It was actually at the Top Hat Café that Turner ran into Billy Wilkerson, owner of The Hollywood Reporter, who recommended her to an agent he knew. And casting director Billy DaMota, who's seldom quiet about any controversy, lectured Gardetta on the "false hope" conveyed by the Lana Turner legend, tut-tutting, "Being an actor is a process, not a party. Even Lana Turner pounded the pavement, just as millions of actors have done since."

I should say that I enjoy Kit Rachlis' new, improved Los Angeles Magazine, particulary the cutting-edge reporting of Amy Wallace (though admittedly her cuts have come pretty close to the bone). And I admired their last special "Actor's Issue," which managed to be bigger on myth-busting than myth-peddling while remaining reasonably fun in the bargain. Here's hoping Gardetta can strike the right balance.

Hands Down, Career Up

Nashville native Jenny Rainwater tried out the L.A. acting market a few years back and didn't get very far: a few community theater productions she didn't even want to invite friends to.

Her subsequent move back to the Nashville area might have seemed like a retreat, but in fact it turned into another route back into the business. She was doing commercial and voiceover work in the Nashville market when she had "the most unstressful audition in the world": a hand model gig for a commercial for the U.S. military.

"I was so ho-hum about the whole deal," Jenny recalled. "I got to the set and saw that they had wardrobe and hair/makeup people. I thought, Hmmm, something's up."

Up indeed: A production manager came with her Taft-Hartley form to upgrade Jenny to an on-camera principal. (The Taft-Hartley waiver is just about the only legitimate way for non-union performers to work on a SAG project; they must join the guild on their next union job.) One job later, Jenny was a card-carrying guild member -- just before her return move to L.A.

It's almost as if this would-be hand model didn't have to lift a finger to get her break -- just move 2005.9 miles away.

Casting Out Loud

That which doesn't kill you gives you a great anecdote. In her early days as an actor, Barbara Bragg starved in the New York trenches with a young director named Richard LaGravanese, who went on to conspicuous success in the movies. Bragg didn't try to cash in her friends' success -- and the one time he apparently tried to help her, things went sour.

It was an audition for the film "Living Out Loud." The casting director was Margery Simkin. Recalled Bragg: "So her assistant calls me in the afternoon and tells me that the director wants me to come in, and how excited they all are to meet his friend, blah blah blah."

The part was a nightclub singer, so Bragg dressed "to the nines: fishnets, heels, lots of red lipstick. And I walked in and the casting director screamed, 'We're not looking for that!' " Worse, Simkin's assistant didn't remember placing the call to Bragg. Mortified, Bragg said she "ended up weeping in a broom closet." But she mustered the courage to walk back in tell Simkin she was an old friend of the director. "She looked like she had eaten several lemons," said Bragg of Simkin's reaction. Still, she did let Bragg put the audition on tape and leave with a shred of her dignity intact.

"It was the worst day of my life," Bragg said, with typical drama-queen hyperbole. "I did not get the part, but I did succeed at getting out of the broom closet and marching back into the room and finishing off the audition. After all, it took me four years to get into Yale -- and what could be harder than that?"

Maybe Yale should teach a course on auditioning. Bragg could do a master class.

Walla Be Good

"I'm in a loop group," actress Jessica Pennington told me, with the ebullient satisfaction of someone who'd just been accepted into a very exclusive club -- and that's not too far off the mark. "It's one of the hardest gigs to get," Pennington said, "because people hire their friends."

What's a loop group, you ask? No, it's not a term for a carpool in Chicago. Essentially a loop group does voiceover extra work: Pennington and around five other actors stand in a recording booth watching scenes with crowds or groups of passersby (on-camera extras are usually either silent or at least not recorded on a film set) and improvising appropriate conversations that match the setting. Pennington's group, headed by industry veteran Erin Donovan, works a trio of one-hour dramas, giving "ER" its medical chatter, "West Wing" its aura of backroom buzz, "Third Watch" a streetwise ambience. The industry term for this background talk is "walla." (No word on the term's origin -- Bollywood, perchance?)

Perhaps because it involves performing on mike, it garners the full SAG day rate rather than the relatively paltry extra day rate. And when I joked that Jessica and co. make a good living standing around murmuring and mumbling, she pointed out that a loop group's improvised dialogue is in fact performed and recorded at full conversational volume. It's the sound mixer's job to create the proper balance.

It makes me wish I could hear a walla-heavy mix of scenes from "ER" -- although, come to think of it, it would probably be as full of "stat" and "cc's" as the show's main dialogue.

Actors' Ovations, Quotable Lily

L.A.'s theatre scene is primarily actor-driven -- which is to say the town's glut of talent seeking work is the main reason there's so much theater here. Because of this, most folks assume that it's all showcase crap. But in any talent pool there are those that rise to the surface, and among L.A.'s stage-hopping actors and designers are some exceptional performers. Many local aficianados will tell you the best theater here is as good as the best anywhere.

Last week's Ovation awards -- the 10th annual peer-judged awards given by Theatre LA (oops, their new name is LA Stage Alliance) -- gave out its aqua-green lucite statues to a deserving batch of thesps at the Orpheum Theatre. Apart from directing and writing, acting is the only Ovation category in which actors in small 99-seat theaters compete with those appearing at the Taper or the Geffen. It may have seemed provincial of Ovation voters that this year they seemed to favor actors in small-theater productions. But only someone who hadn't seen, say, John O'Keefe's timely new work or Del Shores' latest tragicomic Southern-fried soap would make that assumption -- a misconception roughly equivalent to assuming that Broadway is the only district in New York to see real theatre.

Host Lily Tomlin opened with a few choice zingers about the world's second oldest profession. In the voice of laconic Midwesterner Judith Beasley, a character not from her popular multi-character show, Tomlin said: "I am not a professional actress. Unlike many of you, I am a real person." She riffed on Edwin Booth's famous analogy: "He said an actor is sculptor who carves in snow. So in L.A., we have an especially hard job." She repeated an exchange with her partner in writing and in life, Jane Wagner: "She says playwrights have a hard job -- they hang their guts out onstage. And I say, actors have the harder job: We have to suck in our guts." She quoted character actress Eileen Heckart, who said, "The longest run I ever had was on the unemployment line."

Most characteristically terse and sharp was Tomlin's report that California now spends the least dollars per capita on the arts of any state in the union. "But now that there's a fellow actor in Sacramento," she deadpanned, "I am confident things will change. Watch out, Idaho!"

Bobby Hill, World's Greatest Mom

Pamela S. Adlon won an Emmy last year, but not enough people seem to know it. Even some folks at the Television Academy appear to be in the dark about it.

"They never sent me my nameplate," said Adlon recently as her three young daughters rustled in the background. A friend offered to make her a 1970s hand-punch label for the nameless trophy that sits in her house and might as well say "World's Best Mom." (For the folks at home: Awardees at the major shows take home a blank statuette.)

But then Adlon (formerly Pamela Segall) is used to not being recognized for her work: She's in animation voiceover, and she's called in mostly "whenever they want somebody who can be a really natural boy." Adlon's Emmy came for her performance as one of the most natural, if loveably peculiar, boys on TV: scratchy-voiced dreamer Bobby Hill on the unassuming Fox mainstay "King of the Hill."

"When I got into voiceover 14 years ago, it hadn't exploded at that point -- it was the bastard stepchild of acting," she recalled. "It was assumed that if you did voiceover your face was too fucked up to be on camera." Now, she joked, "We are the gods -- we have achieved the quan," but there's still a divide between on-camera and voiceover talent. "When 'Will & Grace' did a 100th episode, they all got Porsches. When we did a 100th episode, we got AstroTurf coasters."

The second-class treatment also surfaces when producers of a successful animated show face contract talks with the talent -- as when cast members on Fox's other animated hit asked for more and the producers started holding auditions for replacements.

"When they renegotiated 'The Simpsons,' I told my agent, 'Don't even call me,' " said Adlon of this hardball tactic, which was also used with the cast of "The Powerpuff Girls" and the lead voice on "Babe 2." "I would never, ever undermine another actor who's established and created a character. That's like crossing the [picket] line at the supermarket. It's just not OK."

A character Adlon created onstage will get a new lease with next month's New York backer's audition reading of "Heartbreak Help," a play by L.A. scribe Justin Tanner that she starred in back in 1996. She'll fly on her own dime to join co-stars Laurel Green, Ellen Ratner, and Carol Ann Susi because she believes Tanner "deserves his due in New York. I love the show. We had the best time. It's a fun show. It's just giddy."

She'll fit the play reading into a hiatus on "Hill" tapings, which start up again in January for the show's 9th season next fall. For Adlon, the show's glow hasn't worn off.

"I'm stunned by the level of the scripts," she said. "They let all these natural moments happen -- there's actual silence on a TV show. It feels like classic television, like we're working on something that will last."

Don't tell the Academy, but that just might be worth even more than an Emmy.

Untimely Exit for Stage Fave

You'd have to go back to the sudden death of "Rent"'s young composer/lyricist Jonathan Larson in 1996, on the eve of the work's Off-Broadway premiere, to find a theatrical tragedy as untimely and bewildering as Kellie Waymire's death, apparently from natural causes, last week.

A small, sweet-faced actress with serious theatre chops and some resemblance to Renee Zellweger, Waymire had returned from a TV shoot on Thursday evening, in time to go onstage that weekend for her critically acclaimed run in "Kate Crackernuts" at the 24th Street Theater. It was her boyfriend, scenic designer Gary Smoot, who found her on the kitchen floor at 1:30 Friday morning, according to sources involved with the show.

Friday night's performance was cancelled, and the cast and crew gathered at the theater, shaken, to sort out their feelings. They thought of how insistent Kellie, a busy TV actress, had been that she appear in as many performances of the play as she could. Her understudy had gone on a few times, but Kellie made a point of scheduling her TV commitments around the play's run as much as she could.

There was no contest, then, said director Jessica Kubzansky: The best way to honor Kellie's commitment to show was to go on with the remaining three performances, last Saturday and this coming weekend.

Eerily, one of Kellie's co-stars told Wicked Little Town that at a post-performance gathering the week before, the cast had been trading stories about their worst fears. Kellie's was that she would die in her home and not be discovered for days.

That her significant other found her so relatively quickly after death is very small comfort. But we take comfort where we can when confronted by such a senseless loss.

Mapa the World, Ma

Some actors just don't fit into Hollywood's cookie-cutter roles. But if they stick around long enough and keep doing their thing, they can eventually be embraced for their originality, and get a chance to reshape the roles they get to fit their outsized personalities.

Take Alec Mapa, for example. A short, impish, epicene Filipino now in his 30s but still looking Peter Pan-ishly ageless, he's best known for playing the original "M. Butterfly" and for a series of solo shows about the ups and downs of his career and his life (two of them, presented earlier this year under the grouped title "Mapa Mia," are nominated separately for Ovation Awards -- yes, Mapa is competing with himself).

"People are starting to incorporate my creativity now that they know what I do," said Mapa, who turned a receptionist part on UPN's "Half and Half" into a recurring role by basing his nonchalant demeanor on his own temping days of yore. "And as long as you're working, it attracts other people who are interested in what you do."

Mapa wasn't even going to read for "Connie and Carla," Nia Vardalos' new movie about two women (Vardalos and Toni Collette) who go into hiding by disguising themselves as West Hollywood drag queens (for release next spring). "I so didn't need to be in drag again," quipped Mapa, who apart from "Butterfly" has been called upon to don the eyeliner on other occasions. The caliber of the cast -- and of his co-queen, Stephen Spinella -- convinced to try for a part that, he says, was "pretty thinly conceived." He went in and read the lines as his own Filipino grandmother might; he later found out from Vardalos that when she wants to do "ethnic," she conjures her inner grandmother, too.

Next up for Mapa is Bravo's improvised show about couples in therapy, "Significant Others," (not be confused with the short-lived 1998 drama featuring a current ABC star). Mapa plays the partner of Patrick Bristow -- a pairing that seemed obvious, Mapa said, when producers put the two together and "we wouldn't shut up."

And that's the lesson for today, kids: Just keep talking and eventually they'll hear you.

Understudy Up for 'Shaggs'

Understudying is among the most thankless jobs in the theater--until you get to go on.

"It's something I really enjoy," said Elizabeth Tobias, who's understudying all the women's roles in the new musical "The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World," about the best worst rock band in history. "You get the rush of opening-night adrenaline that you can rely on to get you through. Also you get to be the fabulous pinch hitter, and do one or two adrenaline-push performances, and everyone thanks you. You don't get that when you do the whole run of a show."

She was on for two performances this past weekend in the supporting role of the Shaggs' put-upon mother -- guaranteed stage time she knew was coming when she signed on, because Laura Lamson, who usually plays the part, had a prior commitment. Tobias said also she's preparing for the possibility that star Hedy Burress may get a film job she can't turn down. The three leads are "really committed to these parts and to this production," though, and she could see them missing performances only "if somone gets deathly ill or they get a phone call from Spielberg."

Tobias is a regular L.A. theatre actor and producer, but by day she runs a children's theatre company as well as the "classroom enrichment" programs for the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, where she's also worked as an actress (and an understudy). "Enrichment" doesn't refer to her bottom line. "The only thing that pays less than acting is teaching," she joked. "I made more money on a Siemens cell phone commercial I did last year that aired only in Britain than I did the whole year teaching."

But having a day job that's at least related to her performing is a plus -- and there may be some truth to the notion that the more work you do, the more comes to you. She's started to "cook" a little more, as she put it, with on-camera bookings for commercials and episodic roles.

They say you've got to be ready when opportunity knocks. Maybe this is why Tobias doesn't mind understudying: What better practice for the everyday life of the L.A. actor than to always be waiting for the call that offers the job that starts right away?

Rising Arizono

Mami Arizono turns up in the strangest places: as a performer with the theatre company Zoo District, as a strange multi-instrumentalist imp in the Sam Shepard deconstruction "Go True West," as the accordionist for Zooey Deschanel and Sam Shelton's retro swing band the Pretty Babies (that's Mami in the middle, though her face is blocked).

This past summer she turned up as a director in her native Japan at the Toga Summer Arts Festival. Lest you have a vision of a Roman-themed beerbust, Toga happens to be the name of the hometown of performance training pioneer Tadashi Suzuki, whose intensive techniques have been embraced and taught by many American companies.

Arizono directed a scene from a play well-known in Japan, Yukio Mishima's "My Friend Hitler." The scene called for just two actors, but she snuck in an extra two silent "movement" performers, one of them her boyfriend (and "Go True West" co-star), non-Japanese-speaking Ben Simonetti.

The reception was good enough, she said, that it's about "80 percent sure" that the hit "Go True West" will visit Japan next spring for a performance at Suzuki's own theater in Toga. Are Japanese audiences familiar with the original "True West," I wondered?

"I don’t think so," she said. (Actually a production was just up in Tokyo.) "But it's not a wordy show, it's a lot of movement, so it'll be good for Japanese people."

Accordion to Mami, at least.