Sailing in a New Direction : The former ‘Love Boat’ star is exercising her sense of humor with ‘The Head’

After “The Love Boat” sailed around the world for its final season in 1987, its well-known cast charted new careers:

The captain (Gavin MacLeod) did commercials.

Gopher (Fred Grandy) ran for Congress and won.

And Julie (Lauren Tewes) turned to the theater.

Her latest production is “The Head,” now playing at the Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood, after a run at the Attic Theater. Tewes is the director.

“The Head,” written by William S. Leavengood, is a dark comedy, set in England, about a homosexual scientist--he lost his body in a chemical accident--whose lover is murdered by a ruthless kidnaper. It’s violent and vulgar, hardly what one might expect from the actress who, for seven years, played the bubbly cruise director, Julie McCoy. She’s as far from “The Love Boat” as Mexico is from Montana.

“It’s pretty tough to figure, I know,” said Tewes, 36. “But I have a very sick sense of humor.”

She also possesses a fiery desire to make it back from a string of setbacks, career and personal--her cocaine addiction has been well documented, and she says she has been straight for six years--and theater is her lifeboat.

Tewes discovered “The Head” last year when she was reading plays for a theater company, and immediately, everything clicked. “I knew I had to do this play,” Tewes said. “It was too weird.”

She sees the story as a lesson in the futility of seeking revenge, a temptation she has felt frequently during her recent rough times.

“Once you get started, it goes on forever,” Tewes said. “It was brought up in my mind before, but I never got involved in it.”

Revenge entered her mind after the disappointment she experienced in 1985 when her contract wasn’t renewed on “The Love Boat.” The producers, at the time, said they wouldn’t give in to her salary requests, but Tewes says she was removed from the series because of personality conflicts.

Either way, she was out of work. And though she acted in a few plays and auditioned for television pilots, Tewes was not in high demand. “After all those years on a hit show, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting work.”

In 1987, to regain control of her career, Tewes developed a new craft--directing. She watched television directors in action, and directed one-act plays by such writers as Tennessee Williams, Michael Weller and Horton Foote. As long as she couldn’t find acting roles, she figured she needed to do something to stay active in theater. “Otherwise, I would have atrophied,” Tewes said.

In theater, both in acting and directing, Tewes has found a foundation she lacked even while garnering high salaries and prime-time exposure during the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Because she had landed a job in a hit television series before turning 25, she didn’t take the time necessary to properly polish her acting skills, she said. Things came too easily.

“I felt like I was acting every day, and we all felt that way,” Tewes said of the “Love Boat” cast, “but I often heard, ‘That’s great that you have a TV job. When are you going to get a real acting job?’ I realized I didn’t have the adult training it takes to create characters.”

Furthermore, the stage, she said, gives her a broader forum to explore contemporary moral issues. Tewes said “The Head,” by introducing a lead character without a body, raises the question: Is it morally permissible to let a person die when he or she needs a machine to stay alive?

Tewes, who lost a 1-month-old child in 1987, gave plenty of thought to that question when her daughter, born prematurely, spent all of her brief life in intensive care. “She was hooked to machines before her first cry was out of her mouth. It’s a tough question,” she said.

Tewes said the play also draws a parallel between the main character’s disembodied state and how the body of an AIDS victim rapidly deteriorates. For the other characters, Tewes said, as with friends of patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the sight is very uncomfortable.

Above all else, though, Tewes sees the play as entertainment. “One of the reviews said it was a bad Elvira spoof. I took that as a compliment. It was just what I had in mind. How many hours have I spent in the middle of the night watching bad black-and-white movies?”

Tewes said there have been discussions about converting “The Head” into a feature-length film, but because she doesn’t own the rights, she isn’t included in the talks. She says the producers are thinking about taking the play Off Broadway. It is scheduled to close March 18.

By then, Tewes will be under way with her next play, “The Early Girl,” about prostitutes in a legal house of prostitution. It opens March 16 at the Attic Theater.

Just another wholesome production for Julie McCoy.

“The Head,” directed by Lauren Tewes, at the Matrix Theater, 7657 Melrose, West Hollywood, is performed at 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 7:30 and 10 p.m. Saturdays and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $18. For more information, call (213) 852-1445.