Joyce DeWitt Happy To Be In ‘I’m Connecticut’

Joyce DeWitt says that she feels sometimes as if she’s living two lives.

She grew up in two different places: a West Virginia town not far from Pittsburgh for her first seven years and then Speedway, Indiana, home of the Indianapolis 500. She was both a cheerleader and “a theater rat” in high school. Later in life, although she started out as a theater person, she is primarily known for her role in the hit sitcom, “Three’s Company,” which ran from 1977 to 1984.

Now she’s in the new comedy “I’m Connecticut” which is receiving a world premiere production by the Connecticut Repertory Theatre on the UConn campus in Storrs.

“I always seem to be balancing two things,” she said recently during a break in rehearsals.

At 62, a trim DeWitt displays the same hyper-perky personality she demonstrated in the farcical TV series. After all, she went to Speedway High where the school mascot is a spark plug and it seems like she’s been revved up ever since.

Though she announced when she was four years old to her family that she wanted to be an actress, it wasn’t until a high school drama teacher, Don Johnson, encouraged her to take a life on the stage seriously that she started her acting dream in earnest.

“He was extraordinary, a great mentor,” she says. It was Johnson who encouraged her to go to a small college where she would get starring roles right away and not “just carry spears in plays until my senior year.” She went to Indiana’s Ball State University where she took on a double major (education, to please her conservative father; theater arts, for herself).

After graduation she gave the teacher’s degree to her dad and went on to work in summer stock in Chicago where a guest director pushed for her to continue her acting study at University of California at Los Angeles. “But I never for a moment thought of going to Hollywood,” she says. “Not one time.”

But when she found out that Uta Hagen, the famed acting teacher in New York was going on a sabbatical for a year, DeWitt decided to drive her ’63 Rambler to California after all and enroll in school there.

California Dreaming

“L.A. in the early ’70s was the land of personal freedom,” she says, “especially coming from the Midwest and a very protective and powerful father’s home. Life was so free in L.A. and people weren’t ultraconservative and judgmental as they can be in Indiana.”

Over the next few years she studied, worked in stage shows and got work in commercials and industry events. She was also making friends and connections which led to a chain of events that led her to “Three’s Company.”

A friend of a friend led her to connect to an up-and-coming casting agent who got her a role in an episode of the hit drama series “Baretta,” starring Robert Blake. That led to an audition for a new ABC sitcom, which was going to a spin-off from the hit series “Happy Days,” which featured “the Fonz” (Henry Winkler).

DeWitt didn’t get the role of the Fonz’s girlfriend but she made such an impression as a comic actress that she she says she signed a contract with ABC not to work for any other network while producers found a project for her.

The show which she says she chose was “Three’s Company” an American version of a British sitcom, John Ritter was immediately cast as the ladies’ man who has to pretend he is gay in order to live with two female roommates in a Santa Monica apartment complex.

“John and I knew immediately that we had chemistry together,” says DeWitt. “That first day we worked together, well, we didn’t have to talk. We we could just feel what the other person as going to do.”

Finding the Blonde

But finding the third lead was another matter. Two actresses were cast and the pilot was shot but the producers still didn’t feel the chemistry right. A third actress — Suzanne Somers — auditioned with DeWitt. A few days later Somers was cast as the ditzy blonde roommate and the show’s pilot episode was re-shot.

“It was never not wonderful with Suzanne and never not comfortable,” says DeWitt. “It was very easy working with her immediately and we all got on very nicely. Everyone got along beautifully.

DeWitt says the show was a contemporary version of a classic 16th century farce “that has certain ingredients: double entendre, mistaken identities, doors slamming, general insanity. So we would do anything stupid, nutty and crazy that would accomplish that — within the structure of farce.

“As John used to say, ‘We’re not interested in making people laugh. We want people to laugh so hard they fall off their couch.’ I think we did just that.”

Some viewers at the time thought the sexual set up and the far-from-subtle innuendo not proper programming for network television.

“As you might recall, there was some negative press — minimal, about the show being too racy,” she says. “Now people come up to me and ask, ‘Why don’t they make good family programming like ‘Three’s Company’ anymore.”

The show, she says, has been shown in 33 countries and has never been off the air somewhere in the world. (Ritter died in 2003 at the age of 54. Somers, now 65, left the show after the fifth season in a contract dispute.)

Regarding “I’m Connecticut,” DeWitt says, “It’s my favorite type of material where you make them laugh as best you can – and every once in a while touch their heart. I’ll sign on for that in a basement in the middle of nowhere where we’re bringing out own popcorn.”

I’M CONNECTICUT continues through Dec. 10 at the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre on the UConn campus in Storrs. Performances are Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. Tickets are $6 to $29. Information: 860-486-4226, 860-486-1629 and http://www.crt.uconn.edu.