DeWitt in different kind of company for NYC stage debut

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Joyce DeWitt has the starring role in an Off-Broadway comedy. | Charles Sykes~AP

Updated: July 2, 2011 2:06AM

NEW YORK — It has taken a long time, but veteran sitcom actress Joyce DeWitt is doing what she always wanted to do: Make her stage debut in New York.

“I know, isn’t it a hoot?” the former “Three’s Company” star asks with glee. “This is where I was headed and then I got sidetracked.”

Her theater is modest: It’s Off-Broadway, underneath a restaurant, and the audience sits on folded seats. But it’s near Times Square — the heart of Broadway — and she’s the star. Plus, DeWitt is still making people laugh.

“I’m just a late bloomer,” says the 62-year-old actress.

DeWitt has stepped into the title role of “Miss Abigail’s Guide to Dating, Mating & Marriage!” — a 90-minute comedy being staged at Sofia’s Downstairs Theater on 46th Street.

As Miss Abigail, DeWitt presents dating tips from her library of decades-old etiquette and advice books, earnestly believing that good grooming and hygiene are still the basis of any successful relationship. With help from an assistant, Paco, who secretly adores Miss Abigail, she calls people onstage to help with quizzes, play little games and help demonstrate improbable dating tools.

“This show does something very similar to ‘Three’s Company’ in that it allows us to play and be silly and funny and laugh about interactions of human beings,” DeWitt says. “The fact that the purpose of the play was to make people laugh and let them have a good time and touch their hearts is my favorite kind of play to do.”

Dewitt, who has been working onstage since she was 13, was intent on a life in theater after graduating from Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., in 1972, but was lured to UCLA. A few years later, she got her biggest role to date: Janet Wood opposite John Ritter and Suzanne Somers in “Three’s Company” from 1977 to 1984.

For her, it was like a Moliere farce — a show filled with sexual innuendo, miscommunications and identity confusion. She is good-natured about the show’s legacy, even though she likes to point out that she’s also played Madea three times.

“Does it bother me that I’m attached to ‘Three’s Company’ 30 years after? Not at all,” she says. “All we were trying to do was be funny. How can I complain? That’s all I wanted to do.”

Though she still gets checks from the TV show, the residuals aren’t much. “It wouldn’t pay my light bill. But on the other hand, it fills my heart because if, as an actor, you have the opportunity to do something that creates joy, that’s a gift.”

In many ways, today she is following the advice from the theme song of “Three’s Company”: “Take a step that is new.” She’s finally made it to a Manhattan stage, and she just got her first computer.

One message she still needs to send is to Robin Williams, who also making his New York stage debut, in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.” He and DeWitt are old friends from when “Mork & Mindy” taped in a studio near “Three’s Company.”

“I haven’t yet had time to write him a note and go, ‘Robin, I’m across the street. Would you like to have tea after the show one night?’” DeWitt says, laughing.

AP