From Film to Stage

The heroines of Rebecca Gilman's plays are an unlucky and complicated lot, prone to be stalked (as in last spring's "Boy Gets Girl") or enmeshing themselves in tricky issues of race and prejudice (as in "Spinning Into Butter").

The lead character in her early play "The Glory of Living" is no exception: a neglected teenager who helps abduct a hitchhiker.

It is, in short, just the kind of character made for the precociously talented Anna Paquin, 19. Beginning on Tuesday, Ms. Paquin will be in rehearsals for "The Glory of Living," which begins performances on Oct. 30, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who recently appeared in "The Seagull" in Central Park, directing it for the MCC Theater on West 28th Street.

It is Ms. Paquin's first go at stage acting. "I'm casting myself into the deep end," she said. "I hope I'll be as quick a study for this as most things I've tried to do in my life."

Those things include, of course, her Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film "The Piano," playing a nymphlike child, and a dozen films since, often playing the touched and troubled.

She says that's no reflection on her.

"I don't think it's anything in my own life," she said. "Maybe it's a fascination of getting into the head of someone who is so completely different from myself."