No Greyhound, She's Finally Broken Away From the Pack
originally appeared in the L.A. Times, April 8, 1996
Claudette Sutherland, star of the autobiographical 'Dog Man,' has her life in focus.

Actress Claudette Sutherland says she didn't really have a focus for her autobiographical one-woman show, "Dog Man," until one event brought it all together: Her father died.

Sutherland says "Dog Man"— currently drawing positive reviews at Hollywood's Matrix Theater-was originally intended to be an autobiographical book. She had been working on her life story in bits and pieces, reading them to fellow writers workshop members and at a friend's cafe in New York. The actress, now in her 50s, said that it took the sudden death of her father to put her own struggle for independence, as well as the realities of middle age, into perspective. The show harks back to Sutherland's life as the daughter of the "dog man," a rambler and gambler who traveled about racing greyhounds at parimutuel tracks during the 1940s and '50s. Sutherland winds her tale from the days as a child on the road, worshiping her charismatic but distant dad, to coming to terms with middle age and unwillingly watching her role reverse from being taken care of to becoming caretaker in her father's advancing age. Sutherland also plays the role of Nell in Samuel Beckett's absurdist play "Endgame," which plays on alternate nights with "Dog Man" at the Matrix.

Sutherland, now a resident of Sherman Oaks; is a Broadway veteran—she originated the role of Smitty in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" in 1962, doing some 1,200 performances of the musical. She followed that stint with other Broadway roles in "The Women" and "The Shadow Box," and from there moved into commercials, voice-overs and guest spots on series television.

Her Broadway roots never led to big-name recognition either on stage or in Hollywood—which Sutherland says is just fine with her. She says laughingly that she has done modest TV roles for so long that "a lot of people say to me: ' Maybe we went to school together or something'—I'm kind of generic by now. I have lots of friends who are really big celebrities, and that's fun—but it's not the case for me. But I'm sure that because of that, I get more freedom in the kind of work that I do.

"I'm really interested in how diverse I get to be right now," she continued during a conversation at her home, surrounded by two friendly dogs of her own and another she's dog-sitting for a friend. "I'm in a play that Beckett wrote,

I'm in a play that / wrote, teaching, gardening, cooking ... I say, it doesn't get any better than this."

Sutherland at first worried that critics might find her autobiographical effort too sentimental or self-indulgent—then decided she didn't care. "I like very much being onstage by myself; it's very powerful and exciting and scary and all that," she said. "If you don't like it, well some people do—so get over it. The theater is big enough for everything." She also was concerned that "Dog Man" would be received as a "women's piece," but "no matter what you do, you can't really shake that," she says. " 'Waiting to Exhale' was a 'women's movie,' or 'a black women's movie.' Big deal. It's still a movie."

Sutherland, who decided to reinvent herself at GO, moved to L.A. from New York after raising her children and seeing two 10-year marriages dissolve in divorce. ("I seem to do pretty well with 10-year intervals," she jokes.)

She readily acknowledges that her decision to write her own material was also born of the lack of roles for middle-aged women. After drama study at Missouri's Stevens College and Yale and years on Broadway, Sutherland found plenty of work in New York basically portraying herself—a young mother—in TV commercials. In her 30s, she switched to voice-over work. But at 45, she found that work virtually dried up—a subject she treats with some humor in her monologue.

"Out of the 70s and '80s are coming so many solo pieces. ... It springs out of the frustration of not getting to do enough work," Sutherland says. "As an actor, you have to wait until somebody says: 'OK, you can do this.' As a writer, or somebody who does his own material, at least you are in an j active position.

"I always wanted to be an actress. My father was always very funny, and my father was kind of a star in his circle—that odd, mixed, vagrant circle. He got a lot of hoopla about him. I thought it was neat, and I wanted to have that, too. I listened to the radio a lot. And when I did theater—I remember seeing Julie Harris in 'The Lark' when I was a girl, and I thought, boy oh boy, to be able to do that would be really great! Plus, it was a play about a very powerful woman.

"When I was little, in the '40s and '50s, there weren't a lot of women doing things that had power to them. The only women who I saw who had any power were hostesses in restaurants. You have to wait until they tell you you can sit down, and they tell you to stand over there, and then finally they say: 'Right this way.' Looked good to me!"