Getting serious

Dylan Gelula insists she never expected to be cast as the mature-beyond-her-years teen in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, August: Osage County, opening Wednesday night at the Arden Theatre.

Given how little acting experience she's had, it's easy to understand her doubts.

The 17-year-old senior at Lower Merion High School, who has a gorgeous face, a thick mane of chestnut hair, and a gritty voice, has pursued an acting career since she was 12, though with a nonchalance that has resulted in few jobs.

This could be her big break.

But when her agent told her to audition for the role of Jean - a 14-year-old in a family so dysfunctional it makes the Lohans look like they belong in a Norman Rockwell painting - she resisted.

"I never wanted to do theater. I can't sing or dance. I definitely had an attitude about it," Gelula said over coffee in the spacious kitchen of her family's Merion home.

She was so thoroughly convinced that she wasn't going to get the part that she barely looked over the script. But when she got a callback two weeks later, she gave the play a closer read and realized that it was "a huge deal."

"This is a very important play at a very important theater," she remembers thinking. "I was incredibly humbled, and I was like, I want this so bad."

That yearning might be a first in the teen's career, the highlights of which were last year's guest shots on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Are We There Yet?, a sitcom based on the 2005 movie.

"I think I'm just really chill about it, very Zen to the whole process. I would love it if it happens and love it if it didn't," said Gelula, who is funny and self-deprecating about her talent, insisting she doesn't know why she's gotten as far as she has.

Terry Nolen, director of August: Osage County, which runs to Oct. 30 at the Old City theater, has an idea.

"She's born to do this," he said.

After auditioning actresses, both kids and young adults, in Philadelphia and New York, he met Gelula and was blown away.

"She just came in and knocked it out of the park," he said.

Not only does he credit her with having "an uncanny ability to tell the truth," he said she has no jitters whatsoever at being on stage for the first time.

Gelula's family, on the other hand, say they are still a bit mystified by their daughter's success.

"As her mother, I think she's beautiful and talented and smart and brilliant and special, but I'm not a judge of talent at all," said Karen Gelula, a lawyer who is as irreverent and droll as her daughter. She and her husband, Jonathan, who owns a private-label wine business, also have a son, 20, who is studying to be a musician. "I'm just happy to support her in things that make her feel good."

Karen Gelula has been doing that since her daughter and a friend saw an ad for extras for M. Night Shyamalan's movie Lady in the Water when they were 10. She got picked and, in the trailer, could be seen swimming in a pool - not that she or her parents bothered to catch the movie.

"I was an extra. We had perspective," she said.

When Gelula was in sixth grade she decided she wanted to be in another movie so, on her own, she found and contacted agents who represented kids. One of them took her on.

"Next thing I know, I get a call, this is so-and-so management company," said her mother.

Her daughter, she said, "has always driven the bus herself. It's all her gig."

Now Gelula has agents in California and New York and regularly auditions on both coasts. Except for a very scary first audition for a Disney sitcom, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, that didn't go well, she said she loves auditioning and has made friends with other actors.

Most of her high school friends don't even know about her fledgling career. When she appeared on Law & Order, "It was a big deal for about two days," she said. "Now they don't care."

With August, the stakes are much higher than when she played a murder witness interviewed by Christopher Meloni - "Huge crush!" she says - on Law & Order.

 "This is the first time it really matters if I'm good or not and not just the right height," Gelula said. "There are 500 people judging you every night."

Her plan now is to head west after graduation in May and go to college somewhere in Los Angeles, where she already has a network of friends and a foot in the door with casting directors. But don't expect her to study acting in school - that wouldn't fit her breezy style.

"I like it as my job," she said, "but I don't want to be around it all the time."

Ideally, she mused, she'd like to "have a lot of balls in the air. I could raise bunnies, have a cupcake business, and be on a couple of shows!"