NEW YORK — Julie White isn't exaggerating when she describes as a "huge roller-coaster ride" the interlude between her final performance of Douglas Carter Beane's "The Little Dog Laughed" on Broadway and her reprise as the Hollywood agent from hell in the comedy's West Coast premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.
In quick succession in spring 2007, White closed the show after a disappointingly short run, coped with what she calls "a runaway husband" and bounced back by winning a Tony Award for leading actress in a play in a tough category that included Angela Lansbury, Vanessa Redgrave, Swoosie Kurtz and Eve Best. Then in September, a limo that was ferrying her to the Alamogordo, N.M., set of "Transformers" -- for her role as Shia LaBeouf's querulous, scene-stealing mother -- veered out of control and flipped over several times. She emerged shaken but unhurt.
"The medics put me on that board, and that was the worst for me," the 47-year-old actress animatedly recalls with a clipped tone that one critic described as "an Uzi in a velvet muffler." "Lord, if that's the first step in waterboarding, they'll never have to get to the water part because I'll tell them everything they want to know. I haaaaaate being trapped."
In that way, at least, White is like Diane, the unfettered and Faustian manipulator in "Little Dog," who is a sister of sorts to Ari Gold, the scheming agent in HBO's "Entourage." Diane has a much better wardrobe and a finer sense of irony, which she wickedly exploits as she brings the audience into her confidence to tell them a Hollywood fable about her client, one Mitchell Green. He's a handsome, closeted movie star whose meteoric career could be in jeopardy when, as she puts it, his "slight recurring case of homosexuality" threatens to become more than that when he falls in love with a male hustler. Seeing her first-class meal ticket going up in smoke, Diane springs into action.
The creators of "Little Dog" had little faith at first that White could pull off a character who has been called "Mephistopheles in Manolos." Before "Little Dog" came along, the actress had established a thriving off-Broadway career playing women more victimized than monstrous in plays by Wendy Wasserstein ("The Heidi Chronicles"), Donald Margulies ("Dinner With Friends") and Theresa Rebeck ("Bad Dates," "Spike Heels"). She also demonstrated she could play wacky, as she did for five years in the TV sitcom "Grace Under Fire." Or even meddlesome and maternal, as in the film "Transformers." But a cold villain, as Beane had originally envisioned her?
