"She told me to change my shoes," recalls Thurman. "She said I didn't look comfortable in my shoes. Which was very astute of her I was worried about slipping out of them."

In everything else, however, the role of Jennifer - the American movie starlet who inspires slavish devotion among a brittle, bitchy group of British arty types - seems to be a perfect fit for the 28-year-old actress whose film career has included many desirable and stylish women, brought to an apogee with her captivatingly mysterious Mia in Pulp Fiction. In Martin Crimp's updating of The Misanthrope, co-starring Tony winner Roger Rees in the title role, Thurman is at the cynosure of the debate between absolutism (personified by the playwright Alceste, who adores her) and the moral relativism - or amorality - of her shallow clique of admirers and hangers-on. These include a fatuous critic (Nick Wyman), an envious acting teacher (Mary Lou Rosato), a petulant actor (Seth Gilliam), and a vicious gossip columnist (Adina Porter); weighing in from time to time on Alceste's side is his more practical friend John (Michael Emerson). But it is Thurman, as Jennifer, who is the coke-snorting sun queen of this updated court, holding forth - in verse, no less - in a chic London flat with panther-like grace.

Elizabeth McGovern had played Jennifer opposite Kenn Stott in the London production of the adaptation by Crimp, whose version of lonesco's The Chairs was produced to critical acclaim last season on Broadway. Edelstein, who had directed Crimp's Play With Repeats at New York Stage and Film, says he flipped when he received a copy of The Misanthrope, and immediately thought of Rees for Alceste. "He has exactly the right combination of technical facility, to get through the huge long speeches, and emotional depth, to get in touch with the guy's rage and comedy skills," he recalls. But who to cast as Jennifer? A series of readings featured Martha Plimpton, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Megan Dodds. Shortly after being named the new artistic director of CSC, Edelstein began compiling his short list of desirable casting choices - and Thurman was high on the list.

"I was talking with an agent at CAA [Creative Artists Agency] about a totally different project," recalls Edelstein, "and told him we were doing The Misanthrope. I said, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could get an actual American movie star to play the part?' And he said, 'Uma's been wanting to do a play for a long time.' We sent her the play, she loved it, and we arranged for her and Roger to read together."

The director says that Thurman has a "magnetic charisma" both on and off the stage that makes her a perfectly logical choice to play a woman who draws almost everyone to her company. "She glows, she has the reality of a movie star's presence," he says. "But that's not enough. She's got the chops to do the role - a stage voice, not a film voice - and she understands style brilliantly." Edelstein adds that, while "it took her a while to learn how big one could get in the theater without seeming phony," she had a freshness and enthusiasm that worked for the character who is the only American living among Brits. "There's a kind of vitality, a source of wonder that someone new brings to the theater," he says. "That's there in the different sense of personality between Jennifer and the English.

Rees says he had no trepidation in acting opposite a woman who had absolutely no stage experience, apart from a high school production of The Crucible. "She's a great stage actress, a real find; she's going to be an extraordinary Rosalind [in As You Like It] someday," says the RSC-trained actor "It doesn't matter if you've been in 450,000 plays or one play. If you're a great actor, you're a member of the club. She's loving, frank, and honest in the way great actors are, and she has a wonderful work ethic. When an actor finishes a rehearsal, you usually put off the dreaded moment as long as possible of going back to it. Her response was invariably, 'Let's do it again.'

Rees adds that, in Crimp's version, Jennifer is a much more fully realized character than Moliere's Celimene, on whom the role is based. "She's less of a toy," he says. "She's quite deep. She and Alceste complete each other's jigsaw. She's as rapacious and avaricious and respectful as he is. They share a greed for things to be right. They're not shallow people, either of them, and it's a tragedy that they don't get together."

Being a fan of the theater, Thurman says that appearing on stage had been a longtime aspiration. Her husband (and Gattaca co-star), Ethan Hawke, is an experienced stage actor whose credits include The Sea Gull on Broadway and Buried Child at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre; he also served as artistic director of the off-off-Broadway Malaparte Theatre Company. At first, however, Thurman wondered whether Jennifer might be too much of a stretch. "It's exciting and intimidating to play such a fantastic and complex character," she says, "especially coming from the film industry, where the roles for women are so two-dimensional or of one level of consciousness or agenda. Jennifer is a series of paradoxes and contradictions: youthful coquette and femme fatale; strikingly intelligent and painfully frivolous; remote and passionate. It's so exciting to find the woman between the polarities. I love the fact that she's so deeply shallow. I've never played a character like her before."

Indeed, while Jennifer may be captivatingly shallow, she does advance a rather sophisticated argument against Akeste's puritanical rages toward the phoniness and rampant dishonesty of her world. "What's the matter with having a littie fun?" is the way she undermines the arrogance of her lover's position. This brittle world, superficial though it may be, is the air that she breathes. "I love the city, I love the night. No way will I abandon that without a fight," she says in a couplet, her fierceness matching his. "In the end, she's more of a misanthrope than he is," adds Thurman. "She exposes the shortcomings [of her entourage] and is well aware and accurately pins them down. But she doesn't hold it against them. She's interested in pleasure, not in a moral delineation."

And while almost every character in the play tries to tell Jennifer what to do with her body and her persona, she resolutely insists on her own right to do with her body- and her image -what she will. If she, like Madonna, wants to reinvent herself every two minutes, then that's her prerogative. Her ownership of her desires, misguided though they may be, is admirable, says Thurman.

When asked in what areas she most closely identifies with the character, the actress demurs, observing that she simply doesn't approach acting in that manner. But she speaks passionately about the distortions and assumptions which fame leads people to make - particularly about someone like Jennifer, who is not only a movie star but also a sex symbol. After all, Alceste accuses her of sleeping around with nearly everyone in London when, in fact, she is sleeping with no one. "It's an interesting cross to bear for her," she says with obvious sympathy. "As a sex symbol, the image that precedes her is so powerful, it overwhelms anything that she may be." Asked if she can identify with that, Thurman - the mother of seven-month-old Maya Ray Hawke - says, "Yeah, definitely - the idea of notoriety, or being notorious without it having anything to do with your own real behavior. Things are so blown out of proportion. Being famous has a way of contorting the air around you."

What intrigues Thurman most about the play is that both sides of the debate come with a price tag. As director Edelstein frames it, "You can be inflexibly demanding, as Alceste is, but that means you can't dance at the party. Or you can be a total relativist, as Jennifer is, but that means the man who loves you isn't going to be with you."

"She really loves him and be gives her an emotional depth that is nowhere else in her life," Thurman says. "But she clings to this fantasy that the party will never end. That's what makes the play finally so tragic. There may be other men in her life but none like him. Anyone with a modicum of sense knows that the party does end, and that beauty fades. And then what?"

BY PATRICK PACHECO