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Subject: Ex-D.C. Actors In L.A.<By Carla Hall=Washington Post Staff Writer=
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 05:02:45 EST
Message-ID: <60.1992Nov16.050246@AmeriCast.com>

Ex-D.C. Actors In L.A.<By Carla Hall=Washington Post Staff Writ-
er=

LOS ANGELES>

 When actress Leslie Byrne left Washington for Los Angeles in Au-
gust 1989, she had $7,000 - all earned in industrial film work in
D.C. - waiting for her in a Screen Actors Guild credit union ac-
count. Her working nest egg.

 When Arena Stage's Robert Prosky arrived in L.A., he had a role
on "Hill Street Blues" awaiting him. When Alicia Wollerton left
behind her boyfriend and a vaguely frustrating Washington theater
career and landed out here, she had two friends - an actress
struggling to get work and her husband, a writer struggling to
kick heroin - waiting to share their cramped apartment with her.

 It's far from a sure route - that 2,630-mile trip from Washing-
ton to Hollywood. But a surprising number of Washington stage
veterans populate the sound stages and talent agency rolls of
Hollywood. These are people who cut their teeth on stages inside
and outside the Beltway, who earned extra bucks and union cards
by working in educational and industrial films - those movies and
videos that government agencies and businesses make to explain
their work to clients or employees.

 When these actors reflect on the decision to come to Los
Angeles, most of them say they were at an impasse in Washington.
When Arena Stage and the Shakespeare Theater need actors outside
their companies, they do some local hiring, but they routinely
use New York talent to fill bigger roles - much to the frustra-
tion of local actors.

 "I directed in D.C., I acted all the time," says Wollerton, 32."
But there came a point where I felt like I had gone as far as I
could go in D.C. I felt like Arena would hire me to be a spear
carrier, they'll hire me to understudy, but they'll never hire
me."

 Of course, not getting hired is very much a part of life in Hol-
lywood too. But the way Ron Canada, a D.C. veteran who turned
himself into a Hollywood actor, sees it, Washington was a proving
ground. "If you can make the bulk of your living as an actor in
D.C.," he says, "you are capable of operating in New York or Chi-
cago or L.A. as an actor."

 Here are five stories of Washingtonians who went west.

Ron Canada: The Player<

He's never waited on a table in his life. At this stage, Ron
Canada's disappointments are those of successful working actors -
like losing a nice juicy part he read for and knew he could do.
The part was in the movie "Sneakers." "I was just heartbroken,"
he says. The guy who got it was Sidney Poitier. "When I found
that out, I just laughed at myself," says Canada, 43.  He was a
28-year-old on-air news reporter for Channel 7 when the news
director fired him in late August 1977. "One of the reasons was
he didn't think I was enough of a performer," says Canada with a
chuckle.

 But Canada, who grew up in Harlem, was thinking just the oppo-
site. A friend saw a newspaper ad for an audition at Cedar Lane
Stage, a community theater in Bethesda, and encouraged him to go.
"I went and read for the director and he gave me the part of Yang
Sun, the flyer, a romantic lead."

 Canada quickly began working his way through little theaters as
well as doing industrials and voice-overs. The first year he saw
his income dwindle from a $30,000 reporter's salary to $8,000.
"But no day in television news ever gave me the inner satisfac-
tion or the joy that I experience even to this day performing,"
he says.

 An earlier marriage had ended in divorce, and he had no chil-
dren. His only commitment was to his burgeoning career. But after
eight years on Washington stages, Canada found he was frustrated.
He had worked at every theater that would have him.  The other
theaters, he felt, were reluctant to cast black actors.

 Although he praises the now defunct New Playwrights Theater and
Montgomery County's Round House Theater for nontraditional cast-
ing back in the mid-'80s, he says, "the rest of Washington
theater was Jim Crow."

 Figuring his outspoken criticism of the local theaters wouldn't
win him any new friends among directors, he went to New York and
found an agent and stage work - mostly at regional theaters
around the country. When his agent moved to Los Angeles, he sug-
gested that Canada come out as well.

 It's been a very different kind of career from the ones he had
in New York or Washington. Economically, it's dramatically im-
proved. Last year he earned a low six-figure income. "I'm a Spar-
tan kind of guy," says Canada, who is still single. "Things for
things' sake don't move me." He has an apartment in a funky part
of town and drives a five-year-old Mazda 323 - downright shabby
by L.A. standards.

 The work has ranged from "Dallas" to "Doogie Howser, M.D." to
small roles in "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid" and "Home Alone 2."
(That was him a couple of weeks ago on "L.A.  Law" playing the
candidate running against Blair Underwood's Jonathan for a City
Council seat.) And he's been spending evenings this month playing
Macbeth at a local theater.

 "Now I can turn down 'Friday the Thirteenth, Part Nine,' " he
says.

 But he admits that on screen, "I haven't had the breakthrough
that I want. But hell, I've been here a little short of four
years. People are around this town 10 years before they get
that... . I'm not after a star career. Why do you want to be a
movie star?"

Elizabeth Hamilton DuVall: The Unbowed Blonde<

Since she left Washington two years ago for Los Angeles, Eliza-
beth Hamilton DuVall, 28, has found that most of her drama has
been the real-life kind:

 In the first year she broke up with her boyfriend, developed a
kidney infection, which ate up her savings, and briefly had no
place to live.

 "When I first came out here," she says, "people who had been
here for years said, 'If there's one thing we can tell you - be-
sides keep your ego intact - it's don't get jaded, don't lose
that fresh, sweet self-confidence, because if you lose it you'll
be like any other blond actress out here.' " She pauses a beat
and deadpans, "I didn't mean to lose it." DuVall had flourished
in D.C. She dropped out of Walt Whitman High School at 17 - much
to the dismay of her parents - to do a play at the Bethesda
Academy of the Performing Arts. Next came a part in "Charley's
Aunt" at the Lazy Susan Dinner Theater. She was so naive she
didn't understand they would pay her.  "The director said, 'I've
got to tell you something - it's $120 a week.' I said, 'I'll talk
to my father, I'll find the money.' He said, 'Are you kidding?
We'll pay you.' "

 Not that she worried much about money. She was living in her
father's Potomac house - her parents are separated - and driving
one of his cars. Occasionally she did temporary office work for
extra money.  She earned a Helen Hayes Award nomination in 1984
when she was 20, for "The Wake of Jamey Foster" at Studio
Theater, and a second nomination in 1987 for the Woolly Mammoth
Theater's production of "To Clothe the Naked." She even managed
the ultimate coup for a local actor - she got work at Arena
Stage. She had a small role in Arena's much-acclaimed 1985 pro-
duction of "Tartuffe." "I had good roles and good reviews," says
DuVall, "but no one said, 'Go to New York.' If anything, people
said, 'Stay, all our best actors leave.' But I was ambitious."

 DuVall moved to New York, where her career was quickly reduced
to waiting in line with hundreds of other actors at open calls.
Even after she landed an agent and a good role in a regional
theater production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," she couldn't
get steady acting work. When her agent moved to L.A. and suggest-
ed she do the same, she took him up on it.

 "You're going to see how horrible that place is," she recalls
her skeptical Washington boyfriend, theater director Peter
Frisch, as saying. He nonetheless made a preliminary trip west
with her. When they arrived, he found he had friends and former
colleagues who were more than happy to introduce him to the
directing world out here. "Suddenly it wasn't Liz's trip, it was
Peter's trip," she recalls ruefully.

 She and Frisch installed themselves in Los Angeles in January of
1990. Things got off to a disastrous start. The transplanted New
York agent who encouraged her to come to L.A. wouldn't sign her
to his agency.  And the clash of her and Frisch's fledgling
careers destroyed their relationship within four months. (Still
close, they worked together last spring when he directed her in a
theater workshop production.) But worst of all, she says, the
lessons learned on D.C. stages were virtually useless in L.A.

"In Hollywood, range doesn't matter," she says. What mattered was
being exactly the type the casting director wanted when she
showed up. And DuVall, with her fragile looks and glib manner -
she's a blonde but not a bimbo - rarely was.

 So she tinkered with the superficial things - hair long then
hair short, a re'sume' picture that portrays her off-center in a
horizontal frame (very radical), a three-name moniker. (A casting
director said it sounded classy.)

 She did find an agent but she's gotten few jobs. For the past
week she's been doing training films for a local department
store.  Otherwise, she makes money doing occasional secretarial
work, and she shares a small house in a marginally safe part of
town with her friend John Franklin, the diminutive actor who
played Cousin It in "The Addams Family" movie.

 She was lucky enough to be cast as a lady's maid in "Bram
Stoker's Dracula" - but unlucky enough to be relegated to the
background in the few scenes in which she appears (padded out to
look fat, no less).

 "Every day I think of going back to Washington," she says wist-
fully. But she's not finished with L.A. yet.  Leslie Byrne:<The
Pragmatist<

When Leslie Byrne, now 33, arrived from Washington in the summer
of 1989, she steeled herself for what she thought would be a
two-year wait for her first job audition. But six months later
she was walking onto the Universal lot, a "star" for a day on a
national U.S.  Sprint commercial. (It's supposedly set in Israel,
and she's a young Israeli woman who hands her father the phone
when he gets a call.) "I made about $6,000 off of that," she
says. "It paid scads of rent."

 Byrne, who acted as well as directed at Source Theater, is noth-
ing if not pragmatic. When she went to a group audition in front
of a number of agents, instead of aping the young Hollywood ac-
tress look of tight clothes and billowy hair, she wore the frum-
piest, goofiest clothes she could find and brought her silliest
re'sume' picture - and snagged a commercial agent (many actors
have separate agents for commercials and theatrical work).
"You've got to cultivate your own look," she says. "If anything,
you should go for being ugly. You're a dime a dozen otherwise."

 Byrne says this matter-of-factly. "It's a business," she adds.
"And that's the way I treated it in D.C."

 When the Source Theater wouldn't cast her - she was 18 at the
time, a drama student at Catholic University - she got them to
let her work in the box office. Eventually Byrne became a fre-
quent performer there, taking the lead in a production of "Beyond
Therapy" that went on to a theater festival in Edinburgh, Scot-
land, and even played a short stint at a small London theater. At
Source she also tried her hand at directing - she put on her own
adaptation of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." By the time she
was 26, Byrne was making about $8,000 a year from industrials,
dinner theater and an occasionally profitable theatrical run at
Source. Her peripatetic lifestyle lent itself to the vagaries of
a career in local theater - her residences ranged from a friend's
couch to a large Adams-Morgan house in which she was a part-time
nanny. But after a few years of this life, she was restless for
bigger opportunities.

 The choice was either New York or L.A. "And New York is not good
business sense," she says.  "It's just too expensive to live
there. And I knew I wanted to work in television or film."

 She saved her money from industrials, living on earnings from a
waitressing job at the Post Pub on L Street NW.

 Once she had landed a commercial agent here, she went on a flur-
ry of commercial auditions. But except for that U.S. Sprint job,
nothing much happened.

 When prospects looked bleak, she took her knowledge of American
Sign Language and fashioned a production of excerpts from Harold
Pinter plays for a cast of five deaf actors and two hearing ac-
tors.

 She's now producing a cable talk show hosted by deaf actors
("Caption This") and she's put her pursuit of acting on hold.

 But she still believes she could make it as an actress. "I can't
wait to go back to it when I'm 40 years old," she says. "It's go-
ing to take me that long to work on producing. And, yes, there
will be a fortysomething."

Robert Prosky: The Name<

To the extent that you can be a famous Washington actor, Robert
Prosky was just that. For two decades his name was synonymous
with Arena Stage, where his roles ranged from Willy Loman to
Galileo. "I wanted to get into films, but they were only offering
me day work because I was a quote-unquote 'local' actor," he
says. But director Michael Mann changed all that when he cast
Prosky in his film "Thief."

 "Everyone wanted to know where I'd been," Prosky says dryly. He
was 49.

 "At an age when most men's options are closing, mine were open-
ing," says Prosky, now 61.

 A recurring role on "Hill Street Blues" as Sgt. Stanislaus Jab-
lonski lured him to Hollywood. As he had lived on Capitol Hill so
he could be close to the theater, so he lived in Studio City
within walking distance of the studio - a quaint idea in Southern
California. But Prosky hates to drive.

 He had an agent and a manager and a publicist, and he allowed
himself some perks. But after his stint on "Hill Street," he let
the publicist go and stopped doing celebrity golf tournaments. He
and his wife, Ida, an anthropologist, moved back to Capitol Hill
to longtime friends and a lifestyle they preferred.  "People ask
me now how I can live in Washington. No matter where I live it's
the wrong place. The last couple of films I've done were in Mon-
tana, Ireland, Detroit, Chicago." What's important, he says, is
that he be able to get to the airport.

 Although he still does stage work, most of his acting since
"Hill Street Blues" has been in film and television. He was in
"Far and Away" with Tom Cruise. He worked with Jack Nicholson in
the upcoming "Hoffa."

 Despite the name recognition that "Hill Street Blues" brought
him, there are still disappointments. One big one was his failure
to get his Broadway role in the film version of "Glengarry Glen
Ross." It went to Jack Lemmon.

 Prosky hasn't seen the film yet. "It's going to be tough for me
to see," he says. "If it's better, you die inside. If it isn't as
good as when you did it, you die inside. It's also possible that
Jack will do some things I didn't think of.  And that'll kill
me," he says, laughing.

Alicia Wollerton:<The Contestant< If circumstances had been just
a little different, Alicia Wollerton, 32, muses, "I would have
probably stayed in Washington forever."

 Her acting dreams had been nurtured in Washington ever since
high school plays at James W. Robinson Secondary School in Fair-
fax. Even after earning a master's degree in acting from the
American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, she passed up
L.A. to return home in the fall of 1985. Within a month she was
working steadily. She did a wacky spoof of "Batman" that played
late weekend nights at Source. "People came in droves," she
remembers happily.

 She appeared in Leslie Byrne's production of "Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy" at the same time she was making her own directori-
aldebut. Wollerton's production of the campy "Women Behind Bars"
was a minor sensation in the summer of 1986 when it ran in a
jerry-rigged outdoor theater in the alley behind Source Theater.
Her expenses were few. She lived at home in Alexandria with her
father, Chinch Wollerton, a former congressional aide to the late
Silvio Conte, and waited tables one night a week at Stetson's on
U Street NW. The rest of the time she was free to act.

 But eventually she reached a plateau in Washington. She under-
studied at Arena, but she was never cast in anything. She studied
directing with Joy Zinoman, the head of Studio Theater, but she
doubted Zinoman would give her a role there. "I just remember
feeling like there was no place for me to continue working,"
Wollerton says.

 So with the encouragement of a couple of West Coast friends and
all the resolve she could muster, she made the trip to Los
Angeles in the fall of 1987.

 "I just busted my butt," she says. "I was going to make it."

 By day she went to open auditions and by night she mailed out
hundreds of re'sume's and pictures to casting directors and
agents. It wasn't just acting work that was difficult to come by.
"It was hard to finda waitressing job! Everyone waiting tables is
an actor."

 Wollerton's most lucrative gig, as it turned out, was in neither
a theater nor a restaurant. She went on "Super Password" six
months after getting here and won $43,000. "I just ran out of it
last year," Wollerton says.

 After several months in a cramped apartment with her friends -
the writer wrestling with a drug dependency and his actress wife
- she got a new place and her first acting job, a part in "Comedy
of Errors" at the Grove Shakespeare Festival theater here.

 She's never had an agent, but she has had some remarkable luck
with open auditions. She managed to parlay her acting skills and
modern dance training into a role as a 17-year-old ballerina in
L.A.'s long-running murder mystery play "Tamara." She makes $475
a week for seven shows.

 She's begun to reconsider her choices. She's married now, to a
young screenwriter, and she's enrolled in a master's degree pro-
gram in education at UCLA, not at all sure what she would do with
such a degree. "I'm very clear about this: I don't want to be 50
years old and chasing guest spots on 'Jake and the Fat Man,' "
she says firmly. "If that's my option, I won't be an ac-
tress."<02:58 11-16C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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