On a Role

“Two years ago in New York,” says actress Deirdre (Deedee) O’Connell, “I couldn’t get arrested. I think everyone was just tired of me. And then, one day I get this phone call. . . .”

O’Connell is talking during a lunch break. She’s in rehearsal for “Three Ways Home,” a play by Casey Kurtti that opened Friday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

The fateful call was from Los Angeles. There was a play, “Etta Jenks” by Marlene Meyer, and LATC couldn’t find the right actress to play Etta. . . .

“It was just kind of like boom ,” says the actress between bites of fruit salad. “It took a long time to get here, but once it happened, it happened fast.”

LATC has become a home away from home for the New York-based actress. The two times she stepped on stage there in 1988 she walked off with nominations from the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle. She got a best actress nod for her work as Etta, a Hollywood hopeful turned porn star, and a best supporting nomination for Anna, the boozing prostitute in Alexander Galin’s “Stars in the Morning Sky.”

“Oh that was pretty exciting,” says O’Connell about the double nomination. “I felt so strongly about Anna, and I loved Etta with all my heart. . . . I guess that means that if you really love doing something, then you’re on the right track.”

But right now O’Connell is preoccupied with Sharon, her character in “Three Ways Home.” Sharon’s a computer animator, a yuppie living comfortably in Greenwich Village , who takes the Uptown Express to Harlem and ends up as a volunteer in the home of a welfare mom and her troubled son.

Isn’t that a departure for O’Connell? Don’t her characters usually, well, inhabit the lower depths?

“Yes,” says the actress, “Of course they do or else why would I play them? I’m attracted to going through events and going to places that have a certain . . . darkness .”