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If she stays on track, Cynthia Nixon should hit all of The Ages of Man on stage. She's a Child of Theatre who has grown up right before our eyes. Now, at this slightly-left-of-midway point in her life, she plays the moms of kids almost as old as she was when she first burst on to the Broadway scene — as the bratty kid-sister of Blythe Danner's Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story at Lincoln Center. Cued by Virginia Weidler's movie performance, she made the brat brainy and sweet, prompting John Willis to give her one of his Theatre World Awards for Most Promising Newcomer to encourage her to stick around a while — and she has gripped the road like a Goodyear tire ever since.

One odd thing about her stage mothers: her offspring, so far, have never been seen.

Rabbit Hole, her Tony winner, opens with her in the laundry room methodically, almost ritualistically, folding a young boy's clothes. The boy, it gradually develops with quiet horror, has been struck down and killed by a teenage driver eight months before, and this is how we grieve. The play itself died a premature death at its limited run of 77 performances. "We were almost able to move it," remembers Nixon. "David Lindsay-Abaire won the Pulitzer for it, but he won it a year later. Had they given it to him that year, I think we would have been able to swing it and run a much longer run."

	Cynthia Nixon in Rabbit Hole
	photo by Joan Marcus