Piaf Role Strikes Chord for Actress : Theater: As a recovered alcoholic, Ivy Jones says she can identify with the problems faced by the legendary French singer.

Ivy Jones has a thing for Edith Piaf.

“Right from the top I’ll tell you: I’m a recovered alcoholic,” said the actress, who will play the legendary French chanteuse in Pam Gems’ acclaimed one-woman show “Piaf,” opening Thursday at the American Renegade Theatre in North Hollywood. “So I identified with what she went through. The sobriety that I’ve been graced with she wasn’t. It’s a sad, awful problem, especially for women. I think I understand her from the inside out--and I felt the need to express what I understood.”

Although Jones, too, is a singer (with a vocal quality she likens to Piaf’s) she points out two major life areas in which she and her subject have contrasting experience. “I have love, family, affection; I’ve been blessed with beautiful parents, a loving man, wonderful friends--and that was the part she was constantly seeking,” Jones said. “On the other hand, she had stardom from the time she was a kid, and I’ve been wrestling with that my whole life, always struggling to make it.”

Born and raised in New York, Jones graduated from Adelphi University with a degree in drama and promptly headed for the West Coast and an early marriage. “I did some TV and a lot of theater,” she recalled. “I started working right after college as an actress, and then it slowed down. And I couldn’t deal with it. It was like ‘What have I done?’ That was the beginning of my problems with alcohol.”

A longtime member of the local Company of Angels, Jones met Paul Brennan when he stage-managed a play she was acting in there. Now, 12 years later, after recently resigning from the post of president of the Angels, he is directing her in this show. “Ivy has such an affinity for the role,” he said.

Brennan, who staged last season’s hit Horton Foote double-bill “The Blind Date” and “Midnight Caller” at the Company of Angels, explained: “The show is just right for her and fits her so well. She has the passion, energy and talent of Piaf.”

The actress acknowledges that playing the tragic singer has been a loaded proposition.

“For the first time in my life, I’ve put myself out there--put something together for myself,” she said, citing the rigors and responsibilities of producing a show. “And emotionally, there’s a lot of pain I had to go through to play her, feelings I had to investigate. There are horrendous things the alcoholic feels: loneliness, negativity about life. I used to feel that 10 years ago; I was a walking corpse. Now I’m like a Pollyanna, so excited about life. So yes, it’s been difficult to go back and look at those old feelings.”

On a lighter note, Jones clings to the notion that her playing Piaf was somehow cosmically preordained. “When I was in my early 20s,” she said, “I went to a psychic--something I don’t do very often--and she told me, ‘You had a former life as a French or Italian singing star, but your life was snuffed out by booze and drugs.’ ”

The psychic admitted that she sometimes confused actresses’ life readings with the parts they played, but Jones nonetheless takes pleasure in that intimation of destiny.

“Whatever problems I faced putting this together, I knew it would work out--I knew the show would go,” she said firmly. “Edith Piaf was all about passion, and doing this has been filled with passion for me. It’s a way for me to come back to the world.”

“Piaf” opens Thursday and plays at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays at Stage 2 of the American Renegade Theatre, 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, through May 24. Admission: $12.50 to $15. Call (213) 660-8587.