Harris Yulin and Kristen Lowman’s house is an easy walk from Bridgehampton’s Main Street but worlds away. “We’re right in the Long Pond Greenbelt,” said Mr. Yulin, who, like his wife, is an actor with a long career in theater, film, and television.
“I bought this place 11 or 12 years ago,” he said. “I had rented in Springs and Amagansett. When I was looking for a house, somebody suggested this one, and I said, ‘I don’t know Bridgehampton.’ But I looked at it, and it seemed like the right situation. So I said yes. I bought it really for Kristen, but she didn’t like it — at first.”
“No, he’s stretching it. I bought my very first home in California seven or eight months before Harris bought this one. But it was very clear that we wanted to be together, so I sold mine and came out here. I drove across the country.”
“She did, it was an odyssey.”
“It really was. With a teenager, a dog and a cat, and a really big vacuum cleaner.”
Since then, after lives spent mostly in cities, they’ve embraced the woods and ponds and fields of the greenbelt, and Mr. Yulin has become an enthusiastic birder.
“I’m not as interested in birding as Harris, but I’ve got to tell you, he seems to know everything. When I moved out here, I didn’t understand the terrain. I’d been in Los Angeles a long time. But now I love it. Harris is a great teacher.”
“And I don’t know anything,” said Mr. Yulin. “I was under the tutelage, if you will, of the great Jim Ash. We met and became friendly. There’s no better guy to hang out with as far as knowledge of the natural world is concerned.” Mr. Ash is a board member of both the South Fork Natural History Museum and the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt.
“We’ve seen so much,” Ms. Lowman said. “Kristen’s a very good spotter.”
“For some reason, I see things. Sometimes I wish I didn’t.”
“She’s a spotter and a finder.”
At times, a visitor was reminded of a November evening at the Drawing Room in East Hampton, where Mr. Yulin and Ms. Lowman gave a reading of three short plays by Joe Pintauro. Their back-and-forth recalled the brisk dialogue of the couples in Mr. Pintauro’s “Rex” and “Two Eclairs.”
They still spend time in Manhattan, sometimes on short notice. “Harris got a call on Wednesday from someone at ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ asking if he could come in to the city the next morning.”
“Tina [Fey, one of the sitcom’s creators] is great, and they have some wonderful people in it, so I said sure.” A car arrived the next morning at 6:15 to drive him to the set in Brooklyn.
Both actors agreed that being dropped into an ongoing television series isn’t always easy. “I’ve done a lot of sitcoms as a guest,” said Ms. Lowman, “and I’ve always felt like I was pushed out of an airplane, parachuting into a foreign country.”
“It can be a bitch to come in when everybody knows what they’re doing,” he said, “and you land and you’ve got to just do it. It’s tricky.”
“The acting is the easy part,” she continued. “It’s almost a relief. Because you’re the new kid, the shift in reality is so immediate. You’re not the regular who can mess up his lines and joke about it.”
“I messed up yesterday,” he said, grinning.
Both actors have a particular fondness for the stage. “I like the theater most of all,” she said. “I’m comfortable with it, because there’s a continuity, and then, once you’re onstage with your fellow players, it’s yours, for better or worse. Nobody stops you.”
“We come from the theater,” he said. “I like to act and direct in the theater. But I like to do it in films, too, and in television.”
The pair first met in 1983 when both were cast in “A Mad World, My Masters,” a Jacobean comedy by Thomas Middleton, at the La Jolla Playhouse.
“It was a wild romp,” she said.
“We went out there to do this play, and Kristen did a striptease in it. And we fell in love. What can I say?” “No, wait, it was a striptease as Margaret Thatcher. Thank God it was a comedy! I remember the moment I saw Harris as if it were a photograph. He doesn’t remember like I do.”
“We got back together about 13 years ago. She finally wised up.”
It was supposedly a blind date, which Ms. Lowman at first resisted, all the more so when informed, “almost apologetically, that he was an actor. And I said, ‘Oh, no!’ Then she told me his name was Harris Yulin, and that was the beginning — “Of the end.”
For Ms. Lowman, the beginning of the beginning was in Saudi Arabia, where she was born and grew up; her father was a petroleum engineer. “He was only going over there for a few years to make some quick money, but he fell in love with the country. My senior year in high school, my dad, who was polishing his Arabic in Lebanon, died. So then we came back to the States.”
“I always wanted to act, but I was too embarrassed and too shy to claim it. It was actually my father who said, thinking of the shyness, that acting might be good for me.” She enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, but left during her junior year to attend the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, whose alumni include Angela Lansbury, Minnie Driver, Julia Ormond, and Terence Stamp. “I loved it. It changed my life.”
Mr. Yulin was born and raised in Los Angeles and attended U.S.C., Berkeley, and U.C.L.A. before entering the Army. “After I got out I went to Europe for a couple of years. I just moved around, and it was inexpensive to live there in those days, the early 1960s. You could make a living dubbing films at the big dubbing centers in Rome and Paris.”
While in Paris, he worked in theater. “A friend of mine who knew William Burroughs told me about a new venue looking for two actors to read Bill’s writing, accompanied by a three-piece jazz band.”
“Bill would sit at this table by the side of the stage in a gray suit and gray hat, drinking Pernod, and he would always say, ‘That’s great, Harris,’ and I’d say, ‘But I don’t understand this at all,’ and he’d say ‘Yes, you do.’ ” Mr. Yulin nailed Burroughs’s raspy monotone.
“We had a very pleasant relationship. He’d always say, ‘In the future, Harris, we’re the police, the artists are the police. Never let ’em see you, never let ’em know who you are. I blend into the wall.’ He did, too. He was gray. He used to cook me curry once in a while in his hotel room.”
Later, while in Israel, Mr. Yulin was offered opportunities to act and direct. “My accent was good, because my ear was pretty good. The theaters were excellent, too, but finally I thought it seemed absurd, I didn’t have anything to say about Israel.” He decided to return to New York to pursue his acting and directing career. Well over 100 film, television, and stage roles followed.
Ms. Lowman is also a prolific writer. “I’ve written four plays and a novel that I call the old ball and chain. It’s with an agent, and she likes it, but asks would I revise — ”
“It’s a very good book. It’s about a girl growing up in Saudi Arabia. It’s very cool.”
“But I’m sick of it, it’s suspended in purgatory. I have another novel about a Serbian living in Los Angeles, a young woman from Croatia.”
Mr. Yulin feels the East End theater scene is developing in a positive way. “Bay Street has a new guy at the helm, Scott Schwartz, and Guild Hall is changing as well. I think Alec [Baldwin] is now pretty much central in the planning and the execution of what goes on there. That’s a good thing. There are many of us who’d like to do more theater out here in the summer.” Both Mr. Yulin and Ms. Lowman have been active in the local theater community.
They are in Chicago now, where he is preparing to play James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” which will open in March at the Court Theatre. While there, Ms. Lowman is focusing on her writing.
