DOG EAT DOG.(The Talk of the Town)(The Little Dog Laughed"'s Julie White)

The actress Julie White, who stars in the new play "The Little Dog Laughed," at the Second Stage Theatre, arrived at Orso for dinner one night last week with fingers black from signing autographs with an exploding Sharpie. After stopping in the ladies' room to wash her hands, she returned in triumph: "Indelible, my ass!" White can make an entrance. And an exit: after three years in Park Slope, she and her actor husband are returning to Los Angeles. "The Times finally loves a play I'm in," she said, "and here I am leaving."

A slim forty-four-year-old stage actress with a comedienne's supersized eyes, White is best known as the wacky neighbor on the sitcom "Grace Under Fire." In "The Little Dog Laughed," by Douglas Carter Beane, she plays a Hollywood agent named Diane. An asexual, gutter-mouthed clotheshorse with a veneer of Buddhist resignation, she exemplifies the type. "There's a bit of televangelist in her, that fast-talking enthusiasm," White said. We see--through her asides to the audience--that Diane is always four moves ahead of the other characters, primarily Mitchell, her closeted actor client.

In one scene, Diane is having lunch in Manhattan with Mitchell and a writer whose play about a gay romance she wants to buy for the movies. Smiling solicitously, she asks the writer whether he doesn't see Mitchell in the lead role, but he misunderstands:

DIANE (to audience), No, not for the play. You inconsequential little stain. I didn't fly across the country to put my client in a play. I am not paying for your fucking crab cakes in this hellhole for my client, who is on the rise, to replace someone in a play., (to writer), That could work if Mitchell's schedule clears up. Maybe he could do a short run of the play, a limited-engagement sort of thing. No, I was thinking more of a film version.

Diane, White said, believes that "being a movie star is the ultimate degree of evolution that a human being can have." So Diane plots to betray the playwright by turning his story into a heterosexual ...