Friday, April 12, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
The bathroom, Iona Morris says, is the ideal locale for her tell-all show with the incongruous name ("I Don't Want You to Know This").
"It's such a private, intimate place," she says. "In a bathroom you sit on the throne and you read. When you comb your hair and do your makeup, you imagine looking like a movie star. When you take a shower, you come out naked."
So, Morris reasoned, what better place to flush her system of all the hurt and anger that has weighed her down these oh so many years?
"If the audience was just there and I came out on stage, I probably wouldn't tell them half the things I say in the show," says Morris, the daughter of actor Greg "Mission: Impossible" Morris.
But in a bathroom, the setting of the 75-minute diatribe, she's free to hiss and moan and reflect and reminisce to her heart's content.
"It's funny, it's sexy, it's heartwarming," says Morris, sounding like a movie advertisement. "It's a show about a woman who has reached a stage in her life where, though her life seems good, she wants more."
It's about family, relationships and dreams.
"A lot about dreams," she says. "There's one line she has in the play where she says, 'I don't want to die with my dreams still inside.' I think it's a fear we all have."
It's about the trials and tribulations growing up the daughter of a TV star, and how the turbulent personal relationship with the first man in her life -- her father -- affected her relationships with all the men who followed.
"I never mention who my dad is till the end of the show," says Morris, who had a recurring role (Fiona Griffin) on "As the World Turns" for five years. "I talk about a young girl's relationship growing up with her dad ... and I bring out all the difficulties that I've had with my dad growing up."
As a little girl, she wanted him to do certain things that he didn't.
"I wanted attention unconditionally all the time," she says. "I was a high-maintenance child, and my daddy didn't always give me that. There was a lot of tension in the father-daughter relationship in my family. One of my uncles says it's because my dad and I were too much alike. I was a strong-willed child, and I think he wanted me to use that strong will on everybody but him."
Greg Morris, a Las Vegas resident for 20 years, thinks the show is "marvelous."
"As far as my feelings, I've seen the show twice and I've watched it grow," he says. "She has done a lot of hard work, and I find it fascinating ... because she deals with many emotions quite fluidly. ... I don't see her acting, I see her being. There is a distinct difference."
When he first saw it, he says, "I saw that actress working too hard. I saw that actress acting, which to me is wrong. When I saw it the second time (about a year later), I saw many of the edges smoothed out. I saw more relaxation. I saw more of the character."
Iona was apprehensive about her father seeing the show, "but I feel OK now because he's seen it twice."
Greg, who has suffered from brain and lung cancer in recent years, took none of the public revelations about their private lives personally.
When he watches someone perform, "I don't watch the person, I watch the actor. She's the character. She wrote the pieces. What I find most interesting is the title of the piece, because after she says 'I don't want you to know this,' she takes and hour and tells you things she didn't want you to know in the first place. Those were her expressions. They didn't bother me one way or another because it was all part of the character. I was very proud of her as an actress."
Writing a one-woman show wasn't something Iona aspired to do. It was either do that or go crazy. It was July 1994, and she had just completed a role in the movie "Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored."
"I was in North Carolina doing the movie," she says. "I had a fabulous part and it made me feel like the cat's meow. I came back to L.A. and no one cared, including my agent. For a couple of months I didn't have an audition or a job. That was the first time in my career that had ever happened. I was having a hysterical actor fit of, 'Oh, my god, what am I going to do?'"
Then it came to her: one-woman show. Morris culled poems and short stories from her diary, which she had kept for years, and weaved a story together in six weeks.
She was under the gun to produce, for she had made arrangements to perform it at a club (Masquers Cafe in West Los Angeles) before she had a script. The show premiered in December 1994 and ran for three successive Friday nights.
"It was the most frightening thing I'd ever done in my life," she says. "I'd never been on stage in my life before."
Morris figures she's performed the show 40-50 times, "but every time I'm scared to death. Every time I wish I could take five more minutes before I go on stage."
The show includes live music by acoustic bassist Taiji Miyagawa and flutist Mike Morton.
"I have a section in there where I talk about my fantasy man," she says. "It's a wonderful piece that my bass player and I do. It's sexy, passionate and quite hot."
This sets the stage for Morris' take on the male-female relationship dynamic, and how women invariably mess it up.
"I talk about meeting a man, how a woman falls in love and thinks, 'This is the one.' I discuss how, as the relationship goes on, it becomes more passionate and animalistic. You're swept off your feet. I talk about how a woman, when she makes love to a man, is falling in love and a man isn't; he's having a good time. And how we just jump the gun.
"We meet a man who's good-looking, has a great job and kisses well, and we're ready to marry him. We already know what our children will look like. We need to allow him to court us and not give him all of our secrets. Men love that. Men may say, 'I want to know everything about you,' but they really don't. They're into the chase."
When the topic arises in the show, Morris says, men and women laugh for different reasons.
"They kind of look at each other out of the corner of their eyes. But women have got to learn this."
Morris has, but it took a long time.
"A lot of relationships, a lot of crying, a lot of nights alone."
If "I Don't Want You to Know This" accomplished anything, it has helped Morris appreciate her parents more and conquer the demons that have bedeviled her her whole life.
She's forgiven her mom and dad for transgressions real and imagined -- "they did the best they could" -- and shored up her relationships with men.
"I have a boyfriend now, and I don't tell him everything."
archive
