New role mirrors actress' career

Former ingenue more familiar to TV viewers

NEW YORK — A well-known actress returns to her hometown to star in a play. Her early stage career has long been eclipsed by her fame on television, where on any given night you can catch sight of her in reruns on cable channels specializing in nostalgia. The former ingenue is now in her 60s and looks fabulous, even if she tends to improvise a line now and then, a legacy of all those years in Hollywood. And she is excited to do real theater in front of a live audience — at least until the chance to star in a lucrative new series comes along.

How does it all turn out?

Well, it depends on whether you are talking about Amanda, the protagonist of A.R. Gurney's new play, "Buffalo Gal," who journeys east to appear in Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard," or Susan Sullivan, the actress who is playing Amanda. For just as Amanda's plight matches that of her character, Madame Ranevskaya, Sullivan's career mirrors Amanda's.

"She was almost too perfect," Mark Lamos, the director of "Buffalo Gal," said of Sullivan. "Her life in many ways parallels the stage character's." He confessed he was initially a bit skeptical when Gurney first suggested her. He worried Sullivan did not have enough stage experience.

Sullivan suspected as much. She is, after all, most familiar to viewers from her roles on "Rich Man, Poor Man — Book II," "Falcon Crest," "Dharma & Greg" and "It's a Living," not to mention the years as Tylenol's spokeswoman.

But Sullivan, who grew up in Baldwin, N.Y., on Long Island, has also put in time on the stage, and has performed previously in Gurney plays: "Love Letters" in Martinsburg, W.Va., and "The Fourth Wall" at Primary Stages in New York, which is also producing "Buffalo Gal."

"I knew I could play the part," she said. She leans forward, her aqua eyes fixed on her subject. She is model thin and as perfectly coiffed as she is in the play, if somewhat more elegantly dressed. Her gestures and speech have the studied control that only decades of celebrity interviews can bring.

"I have his rhythms," she said, referring to Gurney's language.

Lamos said his fears quickly faded. "The minute she began doing the part, I realized she was exactly right for this play."

Sullivan has been doing a lot of theater in the past year, including a stint as the former publisher of The Washington Post, Katharine Graham, in "Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers," a docudrama produced by L.A. Theater Works that traveled to universities and regional theaters around the country. And she is happy to spend some time in New York, where she can see her 92-year-old mother, even if it means being away from her partner of 20 years, Connell Cowan (co-author of "Smart Women/Foolish Choices") and their two cats.

The stage is often the refuge of actors who don't match Hollywood's hunger for young talent. Sullivan remembers going to Los Angeles after working on the soap "Another World" (and appearing with Dustin Hoffman on Broadway in "Jimmy Shine") to look for a job at 32. She auditioned for a bit part on the television series "S.W.A.T." with "five perfect 18-year-old girls." She was amazed to find that the director was interested.

"You have to appear in a bikini," he told her.

But she was from New York, and her thighs probably jiggled too much, she protested, realizing an instant later that she had just talked herself out of the job.

Quickly recovering, Sullivan yelled, "But they're not that bad." Then, she recalled, "I pulled up my skirt and said, 'Help, Mother, I'm in California with my skirt up.' " The director laughed, and she got the part.

And now, once again, there is a chance at a TV series. She has appeared in the pilot for an hourlong detective show called "Castle," in which she plays — of all things — a Broadway diva. If the pilot isn't made, she said, she will appear in "Top Secret" when it has its premiere at the Culture Project in New York next spring. Having grown up with what she calls a "poverty mentality," if forced to choose, she would pick the pilot in a heartbeat.

Of course, in the best of all worlds, Sullivan said, ABC would make a decision in September to pick up the "Castle" series, film all the episodes and leave her free to return to star in "Top Secret."

It is like the moment in "Buffalo Gal" when Amanda is rehearsing the heartbreaking scene in which Madame Ranevskaya learns that her beloved cherry orchard has been sold. She interrupts herself.

"Why doesn't she hold onto it herself?" Amanda says of Ranevskaya. "She has that money from that aunt. She could take a second mortgage or something and still go to Paris. Why does it have to be one thing or the other? Is that your Russian fatalism? I mean an American woman would want both."

Sullivan certainly does. And if she's lucky, perhaps she'll get her cherry orchard, too.