This role would test anyone

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There are reasons actors take jobs in restaurants. It leaves them relatively free for auditions, which arise on short notice; and if she lands a part, fellow servers can cover for them. They can also network with customers.

Friday evening, Highsmith was serving martinis and explaining the risotto to customers at the Brentwood Restaurant and Lounge, a dark, white-tablecloth place that draws celebrities because they can come and go in their luxury cars without much exposure. The restaurant has no windows.

Highsmith, dressed in black, used her "restaurant Spanish" to chat with kitchen staff, and her sharp memory to remember customers' orders. The hardest part of the job, she said, is the awkward moment when she must take orders from people with whom she's worked on sets.

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In times of less labor strife, said Jackson, Sterling's manager, someone with Highsmith's talents probably would have landed a pilot by now. But "in a year like this, anything goes," he said.

Jackson said he sensed from his clients "a feeling of impending doom. Each and everyone feels like his individual career has slowed down."

In the last 10 years, he's seen their salaries decline across the board.

"You can work all the time and still live in a studio apartment," he said. "You can be recognized walking down the street, but somehow you can't afford to buy a home. That's not right in every possible way."

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Highsmith spent Sunday in Santa Monica working on one of the "Cafe Plays" put on by Ruskin Group Theatre as an exercise for writers, directors and actors. The troupe creates and produces four scenes, from writing, to rehearsing, directing and performing, in a single day.

That evening, Highsmith played an emotionally distraught woman trying to leave a man who taunted her and tempted her to return. The man stood by as she sat at a cafe table, trembling, head in hands, kneading a magazine, pleading with him to leave her alone.

Afterward she and her colleagues held hands and took a bow to the applause from the 55-seat audience.

She approached John Ruskin, acting teacher and the theater's artistic director, asking how she might have made it better. She wondered whether the audience understood that she was supposed to be a love addict, that the pair's conversation was imaginary, she told him.

Then they quickly moved on to the next day's plans -- morning rehearsals for a two-person play, "Unbeatable Harold," in which she and Sterling will appear in June as Southerners in an unrequited lowbrow love affair.

"Could we make it at 2:30?" she asked. "I'm exhausted. I'd like to, you know, sleep."

Highsmith is well aware that if her union votes to strike, the actors would be walking out for something that could ultimately benefit her. She would probably join them on the picket lines, she said. But picketing takes up time. And even in the event of a strike, she could still act at the theater and take classes at the Ruskin School of Acting, all of which feeds her creative soul.

"I'm not one to say, 'Hey, let's not stand up for our rights,' " she said. "I just want to act more than anything."

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lynn.smith@latimes.com