SOREL PLAYS THE ECCENTRIC IN LIFE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Evil? No, she's not evil. Just because she has bludgeoned, shot, stabbed and poisoned several people, buried another alive and had herself implanted with her ex-lover's sperm and his lover's egg, that doesn't make Vivian Alamain evil.

``She just does what she has to do,'' says Louise Sorel, describing the over-the-top character she's played for six years on the high-rated soap opera ``Days of Our Lives.''

``I don't think anybody's evil - well, Hitler, Goebbels, that's truly, truly evil. But human beings on the norm are not evil. (Vivian) is eccentric.''

Eccentricity, in Sorel's book, is a good thing because it shows you're ``taking life in.'' That's exactly what Sorel, a past winner of Soap Opera Digest's Best Villainess Award, appears to be doing with a vengeance these days.

Through the end of August, she'll be co-starring in the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble's production of Terence McNally's ``A Perfect Ganesh.'' First produced in New York four years ago, McNally's dramatic comedy concerns two middle-age Connecticut women, each at a critical life juncture, who journey through India in search of self-awareness.

Burdened with painful memories and unfulfilled ambitions, they encounter a powerful intermediary in the form of Ganesh (pronounced gay-naysh), the elephant-headed Hindu god who vanquishes obstacles. Sorel plays the WASP-y, repressed Margaret, with Lois Nettleton as the flightier, theatrical Katharine in director Allan Miller's production.

It's Sorel's first appearance on a Southern California stage since her role last year in Brenda Krantz's ``Lovely'' at the Santa Monica Playhouse. She admits the prospect was daunting.

``I was scared to do it, and I don't like that in myself,'' Sorel says. ``I'm not fearful of much of anything, except earthquakes. I was intimidated and daunted by it, and I thought, `That's why I have to do it.' Because there's some reason that he (Miller) asked me to do this. If he thinks - and I have great respect for Allan - if he thinks I can do this, I can do it. And I question it every night.''

Sorel, an elegant, refined, soft-spoken beauty, was brought up in the San Fernando Valley. She was formerly married to the late Herb Edelman and the actor Ken Howard. Her father, film producer Albert H. Cohen, marshaled such movies as ``Fighting Seabees,'' ``East of Sumatra,'' ``Sign of the Pagan'' and ``Horizons West.'' Her mother was a pianist and painter whom Sorel describes as - that word again - ``very eccentric.''

For the past 20 years, Sorel has made her home on a quiet Westwood street, in a rustic apartment complex that might have been airlifted from Paris' Montmartre district. Sorel's unit, set off a flower-strewn central courtyard, is filled with trompe l'oeil paintings, oversized marionettes, and other personalized touches that give it the appearance of a 1920s salon. There's a 10-by-5-foot likeness of Paris' Tuilleries garden on her bedroom wall, and the dining room table's surface has been painted to appear as if it were covered with real place settings.

She also maintains a one-bedroom apartment in New York City, where she first broke into acting in the Broadway production ``Take Her, She's Mine'' with Art Carney and Elizabeth Ashley.

``I think this house - wherever I've lived - people have walked in and sensed a lot of life,'' Sorel says. ``It's not just my life, it's all the lives that have been in it. And I've always had a lot of dinners and people in. I think that that's what life is about.''

Bottled-up emotions

Her vibrantly cluttered digs also testify to the ``great spareness in my emotional life'' that Sorel felt as a child, and to ``a great need for communication, which I didn't get.''

``My mother, she's in a home now, but she used to walk in here and say, `Well, darling, is there anything else you might want to put in this room?' She didn't get it. She thought I was nuts.''

When director Miller first approached her about ``A Perfect Ganesh,'' Sorel assumed she'd be playing Katharine, the role Zoe Caldwell essayed in New York opposite Frances Sternhagen's Margaret.

It came as a shock when Miller, an old friend, told Sorel he'd pegged her as Margaret. But now, Sorel says, she's absorbed in the character.

``I think Margaret is a woman who's bottled up so much in her life. She's grown up in a way a lot of us do, which is to cover the pain and not to really allow it to come to the surface, because it's just too much to deal with. So that she has settled into a certain life and accepted certain things that probably are not acceptable anymore, for instance her marriage. She's in a marriage with a man who's been having an affair for seven years, and she hasn't dealt with it.''

Miller says he knew that Margaret would be ``very tough.'' He agrees with Sorel's assessment that he pushed the actress to go to ``a very dark place.''

``I not only pushed her, I shoved her at least once! I asked her to go someplace where she hadn't been in a long time. Actually, I didn't do that push until the day before the first performance. So we were building it.''

But hasn't Vivian Alamain visited a few dark places in her time?

Yes, Sorel agrees, but Vivian's behavior is insane and without motive - essentially a gimmick.

``See, I have no gimmicks in this play. I have no place to run. It's my own demons that I'm dealing with, and certain deaths that have occurred in my life in the last year or so that I'm bringing to this play. And it's very painful. Really hard.''

What's equally hard is that, after ``A Perfect Ganesh,'' Sorel arrives home around 11 at night and has to memorize up to 25 pages of script for next morning's 7 a.m. call (like most soaps, ``Days of Our Lives'' shoots 52 weeks a year).

But it's worth it, Sorel says, to step outside the madwoman she plays on TV. Yes, she'll willingly plead guilty to eccentricity - but not insanity.

``I always think of myself as a nice Jewish girl, and people go, `Oh, excuse me?!' And I think, `I'm very normal. I'm very responsible. I take care of things. I go to work. I accomplish things. I can do 20 things in a day that most people can't get together.' So I think I'm just a normal person getting through life. Evidently that isn't the case!''

THE FACTS

What: ``A Perfect Ganesh.''

Where: Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles.

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday; through Aug. 30.

Tickets: $18.50 to $22.50; $5 discount for students/seniors rush.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Louise Sorel, surrounded by marionettes in her apartment, thinks of herself as normal, though others don't always agree.

David Sprague/Daily News