A Real Texas Mensch

Texas-born Harriet Harris arrived in Los Angeles in the fall of 1993 to appear in the Westwood Playhouse engagement of Paul Rudnick’s “Jeffrey,” a comedy about AIDS--and she never left.

But the actress, schooled at Juilliard and nourished by years of regional theater, is glad she remembers where she came from.

During a recent conversation in a whole-grain/fat-free/herbal tea kind of cafe in Silver Lake, near the home she shares with parrots and her boyfriend, actor Matt Bradford Sullivan, Harris recalled one of her first meetings with a Hollywood-sized ego here in the world of TV sitcoms.

“On one series that I did, there was a really lovely actress, smart, funny, wonderful--but I think she actually thought we were interesting because we had a series, because all of these people wanted to talk to us,” Harris said, with a characteristically zany laugh. “I thought, ‘No, they are not going to be interested in us when we don’t have the show.’

“When you are in a situation when you are immediately courted, made to feel like you are big deal, it’s hard not to feel that way,” she said. “But when you are doing ‘Romeo and Juliet’ on a basketball court, someplace in North Carolina . . . it’s not all this courting-the-actor kind of thing that happens at other points in people’s careers.”

Harris--who currently portrays Reba Freitag, the sweet-but-daffy mother of a Jewish Southern belle circa 1939 in “The Last Night of Ballyhoo” at the Canon Theatre--has experienced more basketball courts than Hollywood courtship in her long acting career.

It began at age 21, after four years at Juilliard, touring with the Acting Company, a repertory troupe with affiliations to the famed drama school. “It was a great opportunity to tour the country, little college towns,” said Harris, who is probably most familiar to audiences as Frasier Crane’s shark-like agent on the NBC series “Frasier.”

“A lot of towns had parties and receptions for us, and one of the more interesting things about the whole experience is, people would come up and say: ‘You know, you’re good, but you know who’s great?’ Or, ‘You were really cute, but boy, he’s got talent, doesn’t he?’ They’re not critics, they’re just people, reacting to the play.

“But one of the things that I came away with is, everyone out there is going to have a different opinion, so you can’t try to win the audience, you can’t get them to fall in love with you. The main thing that you have to present is the ideas in the play; that’s the only thing worth talking about the next day.”

Those early experiences may be in part responsible for Harris’ self-deprecating attitude, which comes across even in the program notes for “Ballyhoo.” At the end of a list of distinguished credits--including Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, the Guthrie in Minneapolis, American Repertory Theatre and the New York Shakespeare Festival, as well as numerous television appearances (“The X-Files,” “The Practice,” “Ally McBeal”)--the program notes her appearance in “very few films in parts that no one would notice.” (She does have a role in Neil LaBute’s upcoming film “Nurse Betty.”)

Harris, tall and regal-looking with startlingly blue eyes and dark hair pulled back in a severe bun, overstates the case when she says: “I don’t really look like anything. . . . I could be anybody.” But, though she hardly looks like “just anybody,” it is safe to say the bulk of Harris’ career has been in supporting and character roles.

“In a way, as I got older, that was a good thing. When I was younger, I think it would have been enormously helpful to be beautiful,” she said, laughing. “But once you really can’t pass for 32, you really don’t have to be that beautiful anymore.”

Harris declined to give her age, but she’s markedly younger than some of the characters she has portrayed. “After I was 22 or 23, I never played my age, I don’t know why,” she said. “Bebe [the agent she portrays on “Frasier”] is much older.”

The part of the mother in “Ballyhoo” is probably also older than Harris, but she took the role because it was something different from the brittle, ‘90s neurotics she has portrayed on “Frasier” and in another sitcom, the short-lived “Union Square,” in which she played a bitter, divorced real estate agent on a never-ending quest to destroy her ex.

Another recent role was as what she calls a “psychotic clone” on Fox’s “The X-Files.” “I guess I can access insane,” she said dryly. “I am Southern.”

“This I thought was a really sweet part,” Harris says of Reba Freitag. “It’s not a really big part. . . . I did think, it’s a real opportunity to do something different from what I’ve been doing. Somebody who was real soft, and not real smart. . . . She is a good mother. There are a few moments in the play when you say, ‘Oh, she’s dumb, but she’s got heart,’ or, ‘She’s dumb, but she’s got somebody’s best interest at heart.’ ”

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“Ballyhoo,” written by Alfred Uhry (“Driving Miss Daisy”), tells the story of an upper-crust German Jewish family steeped in the denial of their Jewish heritage; the play opens as they decorate their Christmas tree.

“I’m surprised by the impact it has on audiences some nights,” Harris said. “We find that some people really don’t know what Pesach [Passover] is, or what certain things are, but by the second act, they begin to identify if not with the denial of the Judaism, with the denial of something in their family, somebody’s alcoholism, or denial of something that is an object of shame.

“The director [Ron Lagomarsino] said he got letters when the show was in New York, saying ‘we thought we were the only ones, that this was this big, secret weirdness in our family.’ ”

The show has received favorable reviews, but Harris has not read them. She stopped reading reviews in 1986, when she portrayed Ophelia in an offbeat production of “Hamlet” at the New York Festival Public Theater, starring Kevin Kline in the title role. Critics found something rotten on stage, and, because of Kline’s notoriety, the show got reviewed over and over, each review more cutting.

“Then, an important critic did an analysis, and magazine articles came out about how horrible it was, and how deeply bad I was,” Harris said, laughing and moaning at practically the same time. (A New York Times critic wrote: “By the time Hamlet would banish this production’s shrill Ophelia to a nunnery, the audience has long since wondered what nunnery would take her.”)

“The hardest thing about the reviews was, I didn’t read them and say, ‘Oh my God, they’re right, I should have done it this way instead,’ ” she said, sounding bemused after more than a decade. “I really did think that I was doing well.”

Aside from avoiding reviews, however, Harris doesn’t evidence much actors’ temperament. Unlike the characters in “Ballyhoo,” appearances don’t mean much to her. When she moved from her rented home in Hollywood to a rented home in Silver Lake, she was amused by the disdainful reaction of one local when she mistakenly referred to her new address as “Los Feliz.” “Evidently I hadn’t achieved Los Feliz,” she said, giggling at the absurdity.

And, she added, if you were to enter this rented house adjacent to Los Feliz, you would never know that it belonged to actors. “When you go to a lot of actors’ houses, there are posters and pictures everywhere--’Look at me, I was so wonderful in this.’ And I look around our house, and you wouldn’t know actors lived there.

“I just feel like I would really rather look at other things,” she said. “Maybe if I had a really big house, and had a little shrine with just the right candles. . . .” She dissolved into giggles again.

“But I don’t like all that stuff. It may be why I’m in the business, and I’m just in denial--but I don’t want to see it.”

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“THE LAST NIGHT OF BALLYHOO,” Canon Theatre, 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills. Dates: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Dark Dec. 24, Dec. 25, Jan. 1. Ends Jan. 10. Prices: $32.50-$42.50. Phone: (310) 859-2830.