To Be Young, Urban and Neurotic

But Cohn can't say for sure if she will be coming to a theater near you. She could just as easily be headed for the outtakes pile. Whether this brown-eyed bit player gets seen will be up to the respective directors, Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh. As for Cohn, she is left to cope with the lack of autonomy, the uncertainty of it all, as best she can.

This common actor's lot has turned Cohn and a select group of her similarly situated friends into Neurotic Young Urbanites. They know what it means to feel isolated, marginal and at the mercy of other people's whims as they try to crack the big world of Hollywood. But during the past 10 years, this theater troupe, made up mainly of old friends who went to acting school together at New York University, has been able to find both community and control by creating little worlds of its own onstage. The current Neurotic Young Urbanites production is "Once Upon a Primetime," a musical spoof of TV culture playing at the 75-seat Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica.

At first, their intentions were purely mercenary. To survive in Hollywood's feed pond, they needed agents. To acquire agents, they needed to be seen. The solution: Rent a theater for a couple of weekends, put on a program of one-act plays and hope to be noticed by somebody.

It worked. Co-founders Patrick Fischler and Paul Wittenburg, now the company's artistic directors, both landed agents. Despite their initially narrow aims, the two buddies realized they were onto something worth doing for its own sake. Staging those short works by John Guare, Jason Mulligan and James McClure had been fun. Why not do it again?

Now, after a decade of struggling to make their names in film and television, the Neurotic Young Urbanites say the shows they do together--they are on their 13th since that debut in December, 1992--are not a means to an end, but a vital end in themselves.