And she's nonstop. She's an Energizer bunny out for bear in The Little Dog Laughed.

Specially, she is a high-pressure, tightly wound Hollywood agent, micro-managing a hot male star whose mojo keeps slipping. Mitchell (Tom Everett Scott) wants, in the best and worst ways, to come out of the closet, tippytoeing out by picking a prestigious gay play to film. Diane (White) will, of course, have none of this, shoving Mitchell back in the closet, triplet-locking it and heterosexualizing the play so no one will be the wiser.

There are additional complications—read: other people, like Mitchell's sex-for-hire boyfriend, Alex (Johnny Galecki), and Alex's girlfriend, Ellen (Ari Graynor), whom Alex has impregnated for free. To find an Ozzie-and-Harriet happy ending in all of this churning emotional morass would challenge most mortals, but not Diane. An Olympic control freak, she goes about creating her illusion with the force of a Level 5 hurricane.

Douglas Carter Beane, author of this savage and cynical comedy, has helpfully obliterated the fourth wall at the get-go so Diane can take the audience directly into her confidence and show you the way her racing, overheated, irreverent mind works. The playwright with whom she negotiates the screen rights is such "an inconsequential stain" he is not even a visual presence on the stage. (And, if you want to insert the initials D.C.B. for that playwright, you can—and you might understand the rage fueling the laughter.)

"It's definitely a very self-motivated performance, I gotta say," she admitted when she landed later on Planet Hollywood for the after-party. "I always knew she should be fast, do things, move and talk in a way where you would wonder, 'How's she doing that?'

"That would be the fun of it—if you could never get ahead of her. If you, as an audience, never got ahead of her, it would be like watching a trapeze artist so I tried to throw some tricks in there—in a real big way, to where people will go, 'Whoa! No Way! That's not really gonna happen.' That in itself, when you set yourself that goal, it makes the work exciting. It's like, 'Can I pull this off, or am I going to crash and burn?'"

In the madness, a method. "I guess it's because I feel like I'm having a big party. Like, I have Hostess Energy. I want everything to work out so much, and you just step up there."

And did everything? "I think it worked out really well. Sometimes, an opening night crowd can be kinda stiff, y'know, because there's a lot of money people there, y'know, but this was a really super-fun crowd. They were totally hip and in on it. I had a mob backstage. My dressing room is small and in two parts, so it just became a reticulating python of people who kept going in and out and in and out. But it was really fun. And especially my friends — Cady Huffman and Lisa Baines, backstage, just crying, people who root for you and want the best for you and are happy to see you achieve a dream."

As perfect and precise a fit as this role is for White, Beane confessed, "I didn't write it for her. I wrote it for Cynthia Nixon, and she couldn't do it because she was doing Rabbit Hole," so the author retailored the role to White's persona and down-home accent, merely relocating them to the corridors of power. "It's a Southern woman under a lot of pressure, which is fascinating. I watched a lot of Paula Dean on The Food Network. She's a Southern cook, and I was watching because that's the way Julie talks. Sometimes Julie had ideas, and I would write them in. It was a total collaboration, which is what I love."

Galecki made his Off-Broadway debut in January when the play premiered at The Second Stage — and his Broadway debut, now. If you think he was more nude Off than on, he says no. "It's exactly the same," he insisted, adding with a sly smile, "It's just a bigger house."

The main difference is he looks less scruffy, the result of a new 'do. "I had this in mind when we did it Off-Broadway but didn't get around to it. My ex-girlfriend, a graphic designer, helped me design it, along with Jeff Mahshie, who did the costumes, and Kyle LaColla, who's a dresser on the show, so it was an amalgamation of ideas we all had."

He has a new girlfriend for Broadway, Graynor, late of Brooklyn Boy, who found some surprising humor in the character of Ellen. "I love her exterior persona because it's so different from her interior persona," said Graynor. "She's very witty and sharp and very pleasant in her daily life, but she's also lost and brooding and needs so much and looking for so much, and I like that there's that balance. There's a flip side of the coin. and that's what's so important about being an actor. We're all trying to find the size of that."

Also new to the cast, striking some comic sparks that weren't there before, is Scott, playing the bisexual movie star around whom all the hysterical commotion is centered.

"I really do enjoy this character," he admitted. "That's why I took it. It's such a complex role. He has sold his identity. There are two things going on for this character. He's falling in love, and he wants to be a movie star. He really believes the two can't coexist. I wanted to take on that challenge so I was glad they offered it to me. I'd worked with Douglas before [in The Country Club] and I think anytime anybody you've worked with comes back and wants to work with you again — it's the best compliment in this business."

An inordinate amount of all-star Lone Star support came out for White's high-octane arrival on The Great White Way: director-dancer-choreographer Tommy Tune of Wichita Falls, critic Rex Reed of Fort Worth, playwright Terrence McNally of Corpus Christi, actor Keith Nobbs of Houston and The League of American Theatre and Producers' newly minted executive director, Charlotte St. Martin of Big D (my, oh yes). Continued...