*

Jane Fonda's new workout is Broadway: theatre aerobics — doing 33 Variations, eight times a week, at the O'Neill Theatre. It has been 46 years since she was a Main Stem star, and her regimen now is quite different from the "go for the burn" edict she espoused in 1982 in her first exercise tape, still the top-grossing home video of all time.

What's changed? "Sleep," she says. "You need to get enough sleep. Sally Field and Eve Ensler — friends of mine who have done theatre in the past few years — said, 'Don't do anything else. Just sleep.' And I've discovered the wisdom of those words."

The 71-year-old actress and activist has indeed heeded the call to Broadway, but she hardly considers this new and utterly unexpected move a comeback. "It wasn't like I decided I wanted to do theatre and went looking for a play," she says. "The play looked for me, and the play found me at just the right moment in my life."

That question has hung heavily in the air for 185 years, and it remains unanswered. So Kaufman conjured up a crusty contemporary musicologist (Fonda) to suss out a solution that gives the illusion of dramatic closure. Obsessed with Beethoven, she suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease, which gives her mission a desperate urgency.

"The play is not about disease," says Fonda. "What the disease does — as the deafness did for Beethoven — is add a time constraint. We both need to accomplish our passion, our obsession, while there is still time. There's a ticking time element to it.

	Colin Hanks, Jane Fonda, Samantha Mathis and Zach Grenier in 33 Variations promotional art

"It's a very unusual play — very unusual — in that there are eight actors but there are really ten characters. The music is a character, and so is the set. In my passion, I conjure up the past, and the past is interwoven with the present. The set moves like a character and interweaves with us. Then, there's a classical pianist — Diane Walsh — who plays through it. As Beethoven talks about what he is writing and as I'm looking in the archives at sheets of music, you hear the music as he composes it. I have to say I've fallen in love with Beethoven. I'm in awe of him. The fact I'm able to converse with him — albeit during a hallucination but nonetheless — is very moving to me."  Continued...