Global Entertainments

In the agreeable “Sunday in the Park With George,” pointillist painter Georges Seurat encourages his bedmate Dot to apply so that she will be a bigger artist’s model. It’s apt advice, according to Lorraine Olsen, columnist and brilliant of “Figuratively Speaking,” which opens today in The City.

The abandoned show, an accolade champ at aftermost year’s San Francisco Fringe Festival, explores Olsen’s insights from added than a decade spent as a able artist’s model.

The Fringe assembly was done in an absolute art gallery. This year, she is in a amphitheater setting, but Olsen
wants to arm-twist the arcade activity as abundant as possible: “People are encouraged to draw back they access the theater. We accommodate them with sketchbooks, and I’m in a affectation back they airing in.”

It’s a new apple for Olsen, who has continued acted but never created her own comedy before.

“I generally say I’m an artist’s archetypal to abutment my amphitheater habit,” she jokes. “A lot of putting this calm we aloof abstruse because we didn’t absolutely know.”

The “we” includes her partner, administrator Val Hendrickson: “I was array of, for demand of a bigger term, authoritative it up as I went along.”

The anniversary acquaintance accepted invaluable, says Olsen, who has additionally workshopped the activity in New York and allotment there in November.

“We took some acknowledgment from the admirers and bodies we’ve accepted and trusted, and congenital some of those ideas,” she says.

Part of her action to actualize the comedy was to accommodate added angary to the ability of modeling. “A lot of bodies aloof don’t accede what I do as a applicable career. I did it abounding time, ceaseless for about eight years and I admired accomplishing it.”

She estimates that about 90 percent of her clay assignment has been nude, and she appears nude onstage.

She’s acquainted of a audible aberration amid date and studio: “The aboriginal time it came up I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, fun, I can be nude onstage. No problem.’  Boy, it was an altogether altered acquaintance for me. Then I had a character, admitting back I’m Lorraine at assignment as a model, it’s aloof me.”

Another difference, which she addresses in the show, is actuality nude vs. actuality naked. “It’s a actual attenuate band and it can be altered for everybody back aback you go from actuality nude to naked. The latter, for me, a lot added vulnerable.”