The Receptionist co-produced by Ron Sossi for Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Bart De Lorenzo for The Evidence Room. Opens Aug. 15 & 16; plays Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun. mat., 2 pm; through Sept. 20. Tickets: $25-$30. Seniors: $5 off Sundays only. Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda, Los Angeles, CA 90025. 310.477.2055 or odysseytheatre.com.

Say you’re a Hollywood agent. You take a call from Megan Mullally. She wants an actor on your roster to be in her new play. No, not on Broadway. On Sepulveda. In August. Oh, and one more thing. It’s a 99 seat theatre.

“That was pretty funny,” laughs Mullally after rehearsal one Saturday night for Adam Bock’s The Receptionist at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble. “Trying to convince an agent at CAA to let his client do this Equity waiver play for $11 a performance. He was like, what are you talking about? That sounds like a terrible idea. I would never let my client do that. One guy said to me, why are you doing this? For the love of the game, I said.”

For those who best know Mullally via her two time Emmy Award winning and four time Golden Globe nominated role as Karen on the iconic sitcom Will & Grace, it may come as a surprise to learn just how deep her theatre roots really go–stretching from Chicago during Steppenwolf Theatre’s 1980s heyday to starring in Broadway musicals (Grease, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) to working or assistant directing at The Evidence Room (The Berlin Circle, She Stoops to Comedy) under The Receptionist director Bart De Lorenzo during her series run.

“I completely had that experience with Young Frankenstein,” she admits, regarding her recent 2007 return to Broadway in the Mel Brooks’ musical of his hit movie, where she famously belted out Deep Love, a post-coital homage to her deflowering by the Monster. “I’d spent eight years in Chicago exclusively doing theatre and made my professional debut there in Bagtime directed by Bob Falls. I had gotten cast in two musicals on Broadway completely on my own merits. Grease was my first Broadway audition and then I went straight out of that into How to Succeed. It became sort of a big scandal in that circle, like who is she?”

That she was someone who’d left Chicago to do series work and guest star shots in Los Angeles for nine years before fielding a call from Northwestern University chum Jeff Calhoun to audition for Grease. After wowing critics as Rosemary in the HTS revival opposite Matthew Broderick, Mullally went back to LA and cycled through several pilots before striking gold with Will & Grace. She returned to Broadway eight years later only to find herself exclusively dubbed a sitcom star.

“Anything that was written about me was ‘Megan Mullally from TV’s Will & Grace,’” she notes. “I don’t associate New York theatre with Will & Grace. I associate it with Grease and How to Succeed. It’s funny. The media doesn’t give a shit about theatre. Broadway included. You know what I mean?  All of a sudden I was this person from Will & Grace rather than someone with a theatre background.”

Not that the LA agents she was speed dialing cared a whole lot more. “They don’t know from theatre. They don’t understand it’s a different discipline. That was very clear to me when I did Will & Grace. You know when we had all those guest stars coming in every week? A lot of them were very high profile people. Almost exclusively, the ones who’d had some kind of stage experience were so much better equipped to do a show like ours then the people who hadn’t.”

Wigs & Equity Waiver

Mullally totes a short brown wig on a styrofoam head to the LA Stage interview in the back stage Odyssey offices. Like her Broadway return, it’s been eight years since she sat down for a March 2001 cover story in the living room of her West Hollywood duplex. She was the magazine’s third cover, triggered by her first performance at Evidence Room in The Berlin Circle directed by De Lorenzo and where she met her soon-to-be husband Nick Offerman (Parks & Recreation), founder of Chicago’s Defiant Theatre Company.

It was early yet in W&G’s meteoric rise and five years before her daytime talk show. Much of the public still expected her to act or speak like Karen in real life. Mullally had just won her first Emmy Award that past fall. She thought it was for being plump by size zero industry standards.

“When I first got nominated for an Emmy, I was on a fishing trip with my husband’s family in Minnesota,” she recalls. “My publicist called me and said you got nominated for an Emmy! And I thought of Emme, the plus size model. I was like, oh great. Fantastic. He’s like, an Emmy! An Emmy Award! I’m like what? I thought there was some new award for fat girls and I’d been nominated.”

Dressed in black knit rehearsal clothes and wearing black glasses, no one would mistake Mullally for anyone larger than Tina Fey now. She is surprisingly petite, owed in part to a strict regimen of healthy eating and pilates, and still blessed with the same ageless Meryl Streep complexion. At 50, she is as candid and introspective as she was in her early 40s; her subversive rebel streak fully intact, if not mellowed somewhat by the kind of inner confidence that comes with age and personal success. Not to mention mid-century babeness.

“I don’t know why but right when I turned 50, I started feeling really cute,” Mullally laughs. “Like that day! I’m like this shit is awesome.”

What’s not quite so awesome is how quickly the wig she has selected for Beverly, the play’s title character, adds more than a decade to her face. In Young Frankenstein, Mullally wore a red haired wig that she says suddenly “made me look 15 years younger.”

“And this one is 15 years older. Like right away!” She snaps her fingers. “15 years! The wig and the glasses, it’s incredible. I could choose to look like that all the time. I mean, nothing wrong with it. When you do something like this, you realize how much of the way we present ourselves day-to-day is a choice.”

Another was returning to the local theatre scene following the cancellation of ABC’s In the Motherhood in May. Mullally attended three DeLorenzo directed plays–Michael Sargeant’s The Projectionist, Caryl Churchill’s A Number and Justin Tanner’s Voice Lessons starring Laurie Metcalf–and wanted back in.

“Doing Equity waiver theatre is so freeing because it’s very pure,” she confesses. “It’s under the radar. You can kind of do whatever you want. There’s nobody breathing down your neck. I will throw myself just as passionately or maybe even more so into something like this than I would into a Broadway musical.

“It doesn’t really matter what the platform is, the point is just to create the best experience of whatever type that is for the audience that you can. It’s never about you. It’s about the person on the receiving end.”

Mullally asked DeLorenzo to be her collaborator. Coincidentally, a slot had just opened up at the Odyssey so he proceeded to pick plays for her to read. She narrowed them down to Wally Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon or The Receptionist. While the early June readings went well, everyone quickly realized there wasn’t enough time to decently mount the Shawn piece.

Megan Mullally as Beverly in The Receptionist

“Altogether from picking the play to the first preview was like seven weeks,” stresses Mullally. “No one could put a production of Aunt Dan and Lemon together that fast. This play however is super simple to produce. One set. Minimal costumes. Four characters. It just felt like the right play to do now. Plus it’s such a great piece of writing. It has been a pleasure to work on it every day because when the writing is really good, it just keeps unfolding. It just keeps blossoming. Whereas when the writing’s a little thin, there’s nowhere to go. After the first table read, you’ve plumbed the depths.”

The Receptionist debuted in 2007 at the Manhattan Theatre Club, directed by Joe Mantello and starring Jayne Houdyshell, Robert Foxworth, Kendra Kassebaum and Josh Charles. Nominated for the 2007-2008 Outer Critic’s Award for Outstanding off-Broadway play, the 70 minute comedy tracks the seemingly banal daily comings and goings of a corporate workplace, whose routine changes course with the appearance of an enigmatic visitor from headquarters. The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble/Evidence Room co-production stars Mullally, Jeff Perry, Jennifer Finnigan and Chris L. McKenna.

Perry’s casting takes Mullally back to her Chicago acting roots. The Steppenwolf Theatre co-founder gave the Northwestern University graduate the only formal acting training she had ever received.

“I never studied acting, except for a 10 week scene study class with Jeff,” she admits. “I got all of my training on the job by doing theatre in Chicago and at Northwestern. I took this acting class my first trimester of my freshman year.  I was absolutely mortified. I’m from Oklahoma City where acting hadn’t been invented yet or something. I could not believe that people were rolling around on the floor. I just couldn’t believe it. I was way too inhibited. So I quit. I started as a theatre major and then withdrew. I started just taking English and Art History but then I did a whole bunch of theatre at school and hung out with all the theatre people.”

Mullally still cites Steppenwolf’s legendary Balm in Gilead as her seminal theatre audience experience. “I was in Chicago at their zenith. So I saw Laurie Metcalf in all her glory. I worked with a couple of Steppenwolf actors at other theatres. There was this bar, the Gaslight, where everyone used to hang out every night. Laurie and Glenne Headly were my inspirations.”

Karen: The Musical

Mullally has several theatrical projects brewing including her first appearance on Broadway in a straight play, which is scheduled for spring 2010 and just days away from a full cast announcement. Ironically, the one dearest to her heart is an original musical based upon the character the media won’t let her leave behind.

“I’m going to do Karen: the Musical,” she announces with a sly smile. “The idea is that Karen decides she is going to do a Broadway musical for a variety of hilarious reasons. It’s a couple years out. My very good friend Jeff Blumenkrantz is doing music and lyrics. We’ve been collaborating on this for a few years and have everyone’s permission to do it, if you know what I mean. We’re just now starting to go out to book writers and directors. I just think it’s a funny idea.”

Mullally wants to premiere the piece in Los Angeles first, somewhere “not too splashy. Somewhere Kirk Douglas-y.” Then take it to New York and beyond for limited runs since she won’t have an understudy. She admits another W&G character will be included in the cast, but is coy about divulging which one. Place your bets on the letter J.

“I think the idea of her singing is funny!” she enthuses. “But I also love doing the wrong thing some time. The thing you’re not supposed to do. Everyone always wants to distance themselves from their past sitcom characters. But I think it’s funny just to keep doing it!”

When asked whether some might consider it wise to leave a successful character lie in its final resting spot, Mullally’s answer is adamant.

“No! You’ve got to bring her back. She’s a vampire. She’s a bat. She hangs from a rafter at night to sleep. She’s 300 years old. She’s not going anywhere!”

While other Broadway musicals beckon, Mullally admits she is in no hurry to sign up for another year-long commitment despite her recent success.

“I loved doing Young Frankenstein,” she says. “I love doing musicals. It was really fun to work with such great people. Once I get started in something, I’m very tenacious and I’ll just do it forever if it’s entertaining for the audience. That show was a big crowd pleaser. Nick was there the whole time and we had our dogs but 14 months is a long time to be away from home. I need at least a couple of years before I do something like that again.”

According to Mullally, the best Broadway musicals she has seen are Cabaret and The Light in the Piazza. When asked if there is one role she has always hoped to do, the answer is no. Perhaps A Little Night Music. Maybe some “Sondheim-y type stuff.” But for someone who fronts a band called the Supreme Music Program, once dubbed “post-modern-cabaret-gone-mad,” she is not a fan of the new Broadway musicals.

“Sometimes I feel like the songs are supposed to sound contemporary but to me they actually sound really queer,” she shrugs. “Really dumb. They don’t sound hip. They sound like fake rock. That part I don’t like. If you’re going to do a rock musical, you’d better be able to really rock.”

Mullally admits to experiencing a sea change a few months ago where she came to accept the decisions she’d made in the past as the right ones. Even her short-lived daytime talk show, which battled to overcome the tiresome Karen-versus-Megan viewer expectations.

“It might have been a little soon to do the talk show,” she reflects. “I should have waited. I always wanted to do one and I still will probably do something in that world down the road. I didn’t like that format for me. I never really wanted to do celebrity talk. I wanted to do more sort of talking to everyday people about their stories. I learned a lot from that.

“I don’t think it matters if I was Karen or I was Megan. I think if the show had been the right show, who cares? But that’s what happened sometimes. I had things I kind of wanted to do. I’ll do them later.”

Mullally says that while she loved the actual doing of the show, she didn’t relate to the corporate culture of daytime television and syndication.

“I’ll tell you right to your face!” she laughs. “I don’t read trades. I don’t know who anybody is. I don’t know who runs the studios. I don’t know who the big agents are. I don’t know any of that. I’m not interested. I’m interested in reading books, reading plays, seeing good movies and listening to music. I’m a creative. I’m not the suit. I had a lot of suit time during that show and it really was an education. There’s nothing wrong with it. Everybody’s very nice but it’s a different thing. I may think like a producer but I don’t know if I want to go down that road again where it’s so dry.”

Fame

Mullally acknowledges that turning 50 has given her a new perspective regarding the precious value of time. A fan of Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, she believes in being completely present in her current life. Her priorities now are to work with “good people on good material.” One of those projects surprisingly turned out to be the new movie Fame, a re-imagining of the classic 1980 film of the same name opening late September.

Mullally plays the part of Fran, a New York City High School of Performing Arts singing teacher. Initially lukewarm on the script, she warmed up after learning her character got to sing. She says she signed on because “most people don’t know my background as a singer at all, theatre or otherwise.

“I went into it thinking, whatever. It’s the remake of some movie and you know what? It was just the greatest set in the world. This guy directing it (Keven Tancharoen) is 25 years old. He’s incredible. He’s like a wunderkind. We saw a screening of it the other night and it’s really pretty good. I worked with some of these kids who are all unknowns and they were really good. The set was so nice. Everybody was so good at their jobs. That’s what I want, whether it’s Equity waiver or a big movie.

“At this stage, you don’t want to be the smartest person in the room anymore. The funniest person. You want everybody to be smart or funny or whatever they are supposed to be. And it can definitely be that way. Will & Grace was a very good case in point. Fame is like that. This play is like that.”

When told people often call her a “comic genius,” Mullally defers the compliment and notes that only recently has she been able to appreciate her gifts.

“I do see now how I’m funny and I’m grateful for that,” she admits. “I think I own that more now. But the thing I don’t think I will ever really fully understand or accept or come to terms with is the notion of fame or celebrity. I don’t think it exists. I think it’s kind of an illusion. It’s just a money thing.

“I mean look at someone like Laurie Metcalf. She doesn’t have time for fucking fame. And I don’t either. I really don’t! And ironically, neither does the movie Fame. The whole message of the movie is very anti-fame. It’s a really good message and very inspiring. People just want to be famous for its own sake but famous for what?”

The topic has clearly hit a nerve, enough so to rouse Mullally from her mellow post- rehearsal musings to denounce those plying their trade without the highest artistic intent.

“You can’t be in it for anything having to do with…fame…people…I can’t even talk about it. It’s so not how I think! If you’re doing it for any reasons other than to make something good for the audience then it’s over. It may not be over now. But it will be in a couple years.”

So if she had any career advice for young performers like the ones in the movie, what would it be?

“Get a job and be nice to everybody while you’re doing it. Treat yourself and everyone else well. Do your work to the best of your abilities and good things will happen. If you can get to a place where you’re experiencing a lot of synchronicity then you know that you’re on the right track. And then it doesn’t matter. You can take time to lay groundwork for other things. You don’t always have to be conquering the universe.”

As for herself, Mullally feels she is at the brink of a new creative era.

“From the time I was a little girl, I had a feeling about what I had to offer. At this point, I feel like I’ve been able to show a lot of that but not all of it. So now my focus is on the last 25% that people don’t really know about yet because I haven’t really had opportunities to show it. So it’s really exciting.”

Story image of Megan Mullally by Enci.

Watch Megan on YouTube in Young Frankenstein:

Or view Clip 1 from How to Succeed

Clip 2 from How to Succeed