It looks like Ethan Hawke is the latest high-profile actor to join the cast of the increasingly star-studded Lincoln Center Theater production of Jon Robin Baitz's new play, Ten Unknowns. Jason Robards and Julianna Margulies have already been announced.

Hawke, a film star whose credits include "Before Sunrise" and "Hamlet," occasionally returns to the stage, most recently in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's original Chicago revival of Sam Shepard's Buried Child. (That staging eventually transferred to Broadway, though without Hawke.) On Broadway, Hawke has appeared in The Seagull. The actor recently dismantled his own Malaparte Theatre Company, which presented short runs of new and old plays in the late '80s and early '90s.

Hawke told New York Magazine that he "hoped" to be doing the play. Ten Unknowns will open on Feb. 26, 2001 and run through April 15, Variety has reported.

In the play, Robards will play a once promising, now obscure painter, living in Mexico. Margulies is a researcher studying a breed of frog that is on the verge of extinction. The two meet and become lovers.

Baitz's A Fair Country was seen at LCT a few seasons back. Since then, Manhattan Theatre Club has staged his Mizlansky/Zilinsky, while his adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler was seen in L.A., in a staging starring Annette Bening. Baitz's other works include The Film Society and The Substance of Fire. Robards' last New York appearance was in Brian Friel's Molly Sweeney at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Laura Pels Theatre. Other recent stage turns have included Pinter's Old Times and Horowitz's Park the Car in Harvard Yard. Robards is famous for creating or recreating many characters in the O'Neill canon, including Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh. He also appeared in the original production of Arthur Miller's After the Fall and won a Tony for his performance in The Disenchanted.

Margulies will leave the long-running "ER" this month.

--By Robert Simonson