Ilana Keller

@ilanakeller

Nearly 50 years ago, Dale Soules took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War with the cast of "Hair."

These days, you'll find her fighting for criminal justice reform alongside members of the cast of "Orange is the New Black."

It was a long journey from the original Broadway production of the groundbreaking musical to her current role on the television hit, but at the heart of it all is a gung-ho belief in what is right and just.

A native of Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, Soules has a career spanning more than a half-century of work in theater, television and film. In addition to "Hair," where she made her Broadway debut, her credits on the Great White Way include "Hands On A Hard Body," "Grey Gardens," "The Crucible," "The Magic Show," "Whose Life Is It Anyway?" and "Dude."

She also has an extensive off-Broadway and regional theater resume, and played three roles, including Papa, in the all-female production of "I Remember Mama" at Two River Theater in Red Bank last year following a 2015 turn in "Shows for Days" with Patti LuPone and Michael Urie at Lincoln Center Theater.

Soules won her third Screen Actors Guild Award for her ensemble work as prisoner Frieda Berlin on "Orange is the New Black," on Sunday, Jan. 29. Soules made the trip to Los Angeles and back in a whirlwind 24-hour trip from New York, where she currently is starring in James Lecesne's ("Trevor") "The Mother of Invention" at Abingdon Theatre Company in New York (312 W. 36th St.), a new play about a family dealing with the effects of Alzheimer's disease. The show runs Jan. 28 to Feb. 26, with an opening night set for Feb. 9. For more information and tickets, call 212-352-3101 or visit abingdontheatre.org.

Auditioning for 'Hair'

In addition to marking her Broadway debut, Soules' experience with "Hair" also taught her a heck of a lesson about auditioning and persistence.

She came to New York shortly after graduating high school and started working off-Broadway to pay rent.

BROADWAY HEADQUARTERS: All the latest news, reviews and much more

"I ran lights and sound and slides and stage managed — in fact, I joined the union as a stage manager. My first show was 'A View from the Bridge' by Arthur Miller. I was doing like five jobs and making $50 a week. I was the prop girl and I worked the box office during the day, and I pinch-hit on the light board and I did the laundry and I ushered. I had the most wonderful education every night getting to watch that."

She was working as an electrician on "The Boys in the Band" when "Hair" opened in 1968.

"I went to see it — in between its run at the Public Theater and Broadway. It was at the Cheetah nightclub for a very short period of time. I saw it there and once I saw it, I was absolutely determined that I was going to be in that show. I had never seen anything like it. It was like the personal, the political and the professional just seemed to come together there."

She auditioned for the show. And auditioned. And auditioned. She tried out more than 20 times.

"One day the stage manager was standing next to me offstage and said, 'I think they’re going to hire you today.' I sort of shrugged. He said, 'Aren’t you excited?' I said 'I do my laundry. I make my bed, and I audition for "Hair."’ I had to put it in that place, otherwise I would have gone crazy."

READ MORE: Peek behind the curtain at 2017 on Broadway

This time, she was hired.

"They put me in that night with really no rehearsal at all," Soules said. "Even though I knew a lot of the music because I’d auditioned so many times, it’s quite a bit different finding yourself on stage. There were times people actually had to pick me up and carry me to the other side of the stage because I didn’t know where I was going and coming next."

Why the 20-plus auditions?

"After I was in the show for two or three weeks, when I got my sea legs, I went to the same stage manager and said, 'Listen, how can it be that they auditioned me so many times? Clearly they were interested, or they wouldn’t have kept calling me back, but what kept them from hiring me?' He said, ‘Well, you’re not going to believe this, but this is the truth. There is a company astrologer and your sign, your chart just didn’t line up.'

"I tell young actors all you can do is your work, and go in and do the very best job that you can because you never, never, never know on what criteria you are being judged. I can tell you that from experience."

And it turns out, her stars were not quite aligned in the end either.

"The night they hired me, it didn’t have anything to do with astrology," she said. "Shelley Plimpton was off doing a film called 'Putney Swope' and her understudy, Lillian Wong, had vocal nodes, and they needed somebody right away."

There's no business like show business.

Advocating with 'OITNB'

Soules sees parallels between her experiences in "Hair" and her current work on "Orange is the New Black."

"There were people at the time, and there may still be people out there, who felt it was the end of musical theater, that the dirty hippies had taken over and we would never see 'Oklahoma' again. But underneath it all, it was about a young man being drafted and sent off to war, and we were in the midst of Vietnam. It was very timely and a very heartfelt piece of work. (In 'Orange is the New Black'), there’s a little bit of that, maybe more than a little. For instance, the last season of 'Orange is the New Black' dealt with what happens to prisons when they are privatized, which is a big issue right now. The exact things that we show in the show are what happens."

Soules and members of the cast do benefits and otherwise support the Women's Prison Association, battling against issues like privatization and the recidivism rate. She says "Orange is the New Black" brought immediacy to the ideals of justice system reform, but it is not a topic she is new to. Her father spent time in prison, and she worked on Marsha Norman's "Getting Out," which features a woman incarcerated for most of her life. She also had done extensive work with the now-defunct Affiliate Artists, which led to her performing in prisons.

READ MORE: 'Falsettos' a dream come true for Jersey native

She says what makes "Orange is the New Black" an effective vehicle for change is its realism and accessibility.

"​It does what any really good story does — it humanizes the experience, it makes it relatable," she said. "A great deal (of the show's success) is due to very, very smart writing and casting. It’s probably the most women I think ever in any television show at the same time, and the most diverse group with regard to age and race and socioeconomic strata and body type. We’ve got a lot of bases covered there. One of the things that’s very special about the show is they don’t just look at the prisoners’ lives, they also look at the administrators and the guards. So it isn’t so much us and them. They are all human beings caught in a bad system."

Next up for Soules is a turn in James Lecesne's ("Trevor") "The Mother of Invention" at Abingdon Theatre Company in New York (312 W. 36th St.), a new play about a family dealing with the effects of Alzheimer's disease. The show runs Jan. 28 to Feb. 26, with an opening night set for Feb. 9. For more information and tickets, call 212-352-3101 or visit abingdontheatre.org.

Ilana Keller: 732-643-4260; ikeller@gannettnj.com