Glee for her roles is no act

Sometimes, a little thing like geography can make all the difference.

In England, Welsh-born Lisa Morgan is certain, "I'd just be another 44-year-old character actress."

But in South Florida, the Carbonell Award-winning Morgan is one of the busiest - and very best - actors in a theater community that has blossomed, matured and simply become better. As has Morgan herself.

Saturday night at GableStage, Morgan opened in another of what she calls her "cardigan roles." All season, she's been playing women of a certain middle age - frumpy sorts whose curvy upper bodies are invariably swathed in big, dullish sweaters. This time the actress is donning the clothes and the lunatic persona of Annie Wilkes in Misery, a stage adaptation of Stephen King's creepy novel about a crazy ex-nurse who turns her favorite novelist into a captive audience.

But through her onstage artistry - through craftsmanship that's sometimes bold, sometimes subtle - that's what Morgan does to almost anyone who watches her.

"Every time I see her," says actor-playwright Michael McKeever, "I think, 'Oh my God, that's the best thing I've ever seen her do.'"

This past season alone, Morgan has played the mother of a murdered child in Frozen at GableStage, a judgmental sister with a fondness for booze in The Memory of Water at Plantation's Mosaic Theatre, a woman whose marriage shatters in The Retreat From Moscow at GableStage, a housekeeper whose taciturn live-in love is her own daughter's ex in House and Garden at Actors' Playhouse in Coral Gables.

And despite the fact that most of these roles have meant a 77-mile commute each way from the West Palm Beach home she shares with her handsome husband, still-life artist John Hulse, she has never been happier.

Each day, Morgan says, "I wake up and say, 'I'm so grateful to do all that I want to do, and to be loved in this way.' "

Yet getting to this point has been a drama of its own.

Morgan, a woman with a bawdy sense of humor and ever-changing hair color (she's had four in a season, all to suit different roles), grew up in Newport, a small town in South Wales near Cardiff. Early on, she decided that a provincial existence wasn't for her.

"I'd walk down the main street wearing leg warmers, and by the time I got home, my mum would tell me, 'Four people have called me to say they've seen you walking down the street in leg warmers,'" she says with a laugh.

After graduating with a drama degree from the University of East Anglia in England, Morgan took jobs in the music business, then came to South Beach in 1988 to work for Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood's now-defunct club Woody's on the Beach. When the club folded, she went back to England and did improv, then returned to South Florida to work for a juggling troupe. She paid the bills by working in the office of architect-designers Bill and Phyllis Taylor in Miami Beach, and began acting locally in New Theatre's productions of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit in 1993.

By then, Morgan had also quickly, impulsively married. She met Peter Patrick, a British musician 10 years her senior, on Jan. 4, 1992. He moved in the next day and became her husband three months later. But though the two shared the stage successfully in productions of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming at Area Stage and Donald Margulies' Sight Unseen at New Theatre, the marriage foundered.

"We went back to England because Peter's father was ill, but I was desperately unhappy," Morgan says. "Then Rafael (de Acha, New Theatre's artistic director) saved my sanity by asking me to come back to do Molly Sweeney. Without that lifeline, I don't know what would have happened."

Coming back solo, she says, for most of 1998 "I hid. That first year was rough. I had no car, no phone. I didn't want to see anyone."

Morgan got cast in everything from On the Verge, Electra and I Am a Camera at New Theatre to Alan Ayckbourn plays at Actors' Playhouse. She toiled in the theater division at the New World School of the Arts. She was turning into a workaholic. Then, unexpectedly, she found love again.

After a friend told Morgan about an online relationship, the actress decided to give it a whirl ' as a goof, really ' on a rare Saturday night at home.

"It cost $20, which was a cheap evening 'out.' I put my photo and a description online, and the next morning I had 300 replies in my in box. I just laughed," she said.

But soon she was communicating with Hulse, a divorced artist. After a few weeks, they agreed to meet. He chickened out. And then they tried again.

"We met in the car park of a British pub, the Trafalgar Arms, in Fort Lauderdale. We took one look at each other and were kissing in minutes. We haven't been apart since," she says. "He's very grown up and advanced as a human being."

Hulse also shares his wife's sense of humor - "We're on the same wavelength, God help her," he says - and has infinite patience with the long hours of commuting, rehearsing and performing that have meant more time apart than either would like.

"My desire is to see her happy," he says.

Morgan's professional opportunities, which include serving as a dialect coach, keep coming. This season, she'll be doing Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women at New Theatre and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Palm Beach Dramaworks, as well as helping to launch the professional Inside Out Theatre Company with executive director Robin Braun and actress Sandra Ives at the Museum of Art theater in Fort Lauderdale. Morgan will be the new company's literary manager, an easy fit since she's already a voracious reader of plays.

"I read four or five plays a week," she says. "I'm the only person I know who reads Ibsen for fun."

Morgan is flourishing, her theater colleagues say, simply because she's so good at what she does.

"She's a no-nonsense actor with a solid technique who takes direction like a dream," says de Acha. "She is very daring in her choices, always on time, off book [she has the script memorized at the start of rehearsals], committed and fun. Her sense of humor is wonderful, and when it's blue, it's even more wonderful."

GableStage's Joseph Adler, who cast Morgan in half his productions last season, and David Arisco of Actors Playhouse also say they love working with her because of her interpretive gifts, her strong opinions, her responsiveness to direction and the fun she brings into the rehearsal room.

Carbonell winner David Kwiat, who has starred opposite Morgan in six shows, lauds her intelligence and her onstage give-and-take.

"When we have a post-show discussion, her thoughts are so surgical, so precise, so incisive," he says. "And when we were rehearsing The Retreat from Moscow, she was also appearing in Memory of Water, dealing with having walking pneumonia and doing that commute. But there were no complaints. She has the grace to deal with everything."

Even things like, in the current show, having to imitate Annie's pig.

"You have to train for pig sounds," she says, laughing. "You can't just do them. It's the subtext that's important."