E-Mail This Article to a Friend From TV to Stage Claire Danes at Toronto, plus Peter Kubelka BY GERALD PEARY

Stage Beauty offered formidable thespian challenges for the TV-trained (My So-Called Life) Claire Danes: she was cast as a 17th-century Englishwoman, Maria, who on the Restoration stage of Charles II breaks the sexual barrier, becoming, according to Jeffrey Hatcher’s fictive screenplay, the first female ever allowed to act in Shakespeare’s plays. Prior to Maria: boy Ophelias and Lady Macbeths.

"Maria has an unbridled enthusiasm and passion for acting," is how Danes described her role when we talked at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. "She’s unschooled, so, surprise, surprise, she flounders at first on stage. But I admire her audacity and pioneering spirit. She was learning experientially, as I did. It’s the first time I ever stepped on a stage like that. I was intimidated by the others’ legitimacy and my lack of legitimacy. Richard Eyre [the film’s director] was the head of the Royal National Theatre for 20 years, which earned him the title of ‘Sir.’ Billy [Crudup] has a master’s degree from the Tisch School of the Arts. I’m from TV, of all places. Luckily, we rehearsed for three weeks before shooting, an anomaly in film, a luxury."

How authentic did she try to be to 17th-century acting styles?

"There was a bit of information in books about how they genuinely performed, but Billy and Richard and I made things up. I have to assume the human experience is timeless. I did try to make the character plausible. I tried to sit straighter at the dinner table and speak more clearly."

There’s one anachronistic scene when, playing Othello and Desdemona, Crudup and Danes dramatize the Moor’s murdering of his bride in a brutish, post-Stanislavsky manner. "We were working in a current style, a naturalistic performance," Danes acknowledged. "That was pretty whimsical and fantastical. We took a leap and trusted the audience to follow." And she defended the odd staging: "It’s a leap of 300 years, and Richard did it elegantly: Marlon Brando with his heart in the Restoration."

Maria has more problems than becoming the first female ever on the English stage — she’s enamored of actor Ned Kynaston (Crudup), who, gay-sexed and gender-muddled, specializes in Shakespeare’s heroines. Could Ned possibly love Maria in return?

"He’s very confused, in some denial, and a little deluded," Danes admitted. "But because Maria loves him so much, she has an x-ray vision, and she see his authentic self. She sees a center, though it’s not really defined. It’s unclear if he could have a girlfriend. But their love for each other transcends sexual orientation and sexual biases. "I think we’re starting to accept that gender is much more fluid than we used to believe. Thank goodness! I have a good friend who’s a lesbian and is dating a man who had a sex-change operation. It’s so wonderful that people now can tolerate and accept it."

PETER KUBELKA, the Austrian avant-garde artist born in 1934, is, no argument, the most obsessive and solipsistic filmmaker in the history of cinema; and those really familiar with his œuvre — people who have, as he desires, watched his works hundreds of times — rank him at the very top. His pal Stan Brakhage has called him "the world’s greatest filmmaker." That’s on the basis of less than one hour of total film output. Kubelka toils for years and years on a tiny film, absorbing himself with every single frame in his movies, 24 distinct images in one projected second. Plus a sound track that’s just as impossibly complicated. At one point, he admitted to completing two minutes of film in a year. Then he slowed down!

His noble object is "to leave a testament to future generations." So it’s a big deal that’s he’s in Boston now, in an extremely rare visit sponsored by the Balagan Film Series. If you missed his "Metaphoric/Metric Films" at the Coolidge Corner this past Wednesday, don’t fret: you can still catch him tonight (October 21) at 6 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts. He’ll be showing "Dichtung und Wahreheit," his first new work in 30 years!