where the heart is; Mary-Louise Parker returns to Broadway, and, as Adam Green discovers, she's glad to be back.('Reckless')

Since the dawn of storytelling, heroes have been leaving home and then struggling against perilous odds to find their way back: a Greek warrior in The Odyssey, a Kansas farm girl in The Wizard of Oz, a very bright collie in Lassie Come Home.

In Craig Lucas's darkly absurd fairy tale Reckless, a naive housewife, spurred by the news that her husband has hired a hit man to kill her, sets off on her own journey of self-discovery. An Off-Broadway success in 1988, Reckless is being revived at the Biltmore. But the production's real homecoming is for its star, Mary-Louise Parker, who-on the heels of giving birth to a son and getting a Golden Globe for her nakedly honest performance in Mike Nichols's small-screen adaptation of Angels in America-returns to the New York stage for the first time since her Tony-winning turn as a fragile math prodigy in 2000's Proof.

In a red tank top and jeans, Parker has, at 40, the coltish sex appeal and luminous intelligence of that breathtaking girl from your freshman-year Keats seminar. Poetry, it turns out, is one of her obsessions (Mark Strand and Andrew Zawacki are among her favorites). But her greatest passion is for acting onstage, which she describes as "better than anything, except childbirth." She says, "I like the pressure of having to deliver to a live audience night after night. That's why I haven't done a play since Proof-I would never be able to just walk through it. I want to give them tonight's show, not last night's."

For Parker, Reckless is also a family reunion of sorts. She made her Broadway debut in Lucas's 1990 romantic fable Prelude to a Kiss and appeared that same year in his AIDS drama Longtime Companion (both directed by her late mentor, the gifted Norman Rene). And under Reckless's director, Mark Brokaw, she gave a flawless performance in Paula Vogel's haunting 1997 play How I Learned to Drive. Brokaw remembers the first time Parker walked onstage as Li'l Bit, an ambivalent victim of sexual abuse whom we see from age eleven to 35. "She seemed to possess ...