From below radar to stage spotlight

She's making her Broadway debut this summer.
By MARK KENNEDY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- Befitting an actress who has stayed below the radar for so long, Carla Gugino arrives for an interview from underground.
She emerges from a bustling downtown subway stop like a diminutive Venus on a clam shell, a fresh-faced Hollywood starlet whose presence goes unnoticed among the rabble and the irritated.
Her disguise? A lack of one: No baseball cap yanked low over her head, no sunglasses to obscure her eyes. Just a pair of jeans, a backpack, portable music player, a cell phone and an orange button-down shirt.
"I basically feel that if I get on the subway and I don't have any makeup on and I put my iPod on, people don't ever accept that an actor would be doing that," she says.
It's telling that Gugino's absence of disguise is so effective: Few who share her subway car may recognize the mom in the "Spy Kids" movies, the sexy crimefighter in TV's "Karen Sisco" or the indie star of films such as "The Singing Detective."
Another step
Gugino's career takes another step into foreign, subterranean territory with her Broadway debut this summer as the bombshell singer Maggie in a revival of Arthur Miller's searing play "After the Fall."
Gugino's part, inspired by Miller's tempestuous relationship with Marilyn Monroe, is a character who craves fame and attention. She would throw a fit, for instance, if she wasn't recognized on the subway.
"There is no doubt that this is a part that has demanded the most of me and has been, on many levels, the most gratifying," Gugino says over a cup of chamomile tea in a downtown hotel.
Written a few years before Monroe's death and performed first in 1964, the play traces the soul-searching journey a lawyer named Quentin makes into his past, including revisiting troubled relationships with his wives and his mother.
Maggie, his second wife, appears in the first act as an irrepressible joy. By the final curtain, though, the bubbly light has been replaced by dark paranoia and drug-addiction. Few can miss the echoes of Monroe.
"What was really important to me as an actor was that I didn't imitate her," says Gugino, who has dyed her brown hair a fiery red. "I didn't want to do the breathy thing -- because you can't hear that on stage -- and I chose to do the red hair because I wanted something that had an apparent sensuality and vibrancy."
Producer's assertion
Todd Haimes, artistic director of the Roundabout Theatre Company, which produced the play, auditioned many actresses before seeing Gugino. "To see that kind of performance from someone with no experience is just sort of extraordinary," he said.
A one-time petite model, Florida-born Gugino, 32, has amassed a quirky acting r & eacute;sum & eacute; ever since she appeared alongside Shelly Long and Craig T. Nelson in "Troop Beverly Hills," her first feature film.
There have been roles in such lowbrow films like "Son In Law" opposite Pauly Shore, art house flicks like Wayne Wang's "The Center Of The World" and big budget ones like "Michael" with John Travolta and "Snake Eyes" with Nicolas Cage.
"It's never been my intention to confuse people and yet I do find that once I've done one thing I gravitate toward something on the opposite end of the spectrum just naturally," she says.
"I want to do it all," she adds.
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