-== ARTICLES ==-

NEW YORK -- You have to wonder who is giving Quentin Tarantino, not so long ago Hollywood's most happenin' director, career advice these days. 

    What's he up to? Bet you can't guess. Writing another opus about lowlife thugs, you say? Nursing his wounds since the breakup of his relationship with Mira Sorvino?

    Good answers, but dead wrong. They might make sense. Try this on: Tarantino is living the life of the working stage actor - eight  shows a week at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on West 47 Street,  just off Broadway in New York city.

    The unlikely vehicle for the emerging serious thespian: A decades-old thriller called Wait Until Dark. You may remember the 1967 movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin. It's about a blind woman who is terrorized by a trio of thugs - and it is a somewhat dopey play that doesn't hold up very well. Consider, for example, that at one point one of the thugs disguises himself to fool the blind woman.

    Why produce Wait Until Dark again at all? The force of celebrity,  apparently.

    The woman is played with considerable skill by Oscar-winner Marisa Tomei, and the cast includes Broadway veteran Stephen Lang. Making not only his Broadway debut - but his first bow on any stage - as another of the lowlifes is Tarantino, determined  apparently to establish an acting career.

    The critics have not been encouraging to the influential filmmaker-famous media celebrity.

    The Village Voice said that Tarantino, "in a role meant to be scary, has all the menace of a dentist's receptionist.''

    The critic for the New York Post, longtime Broadway observer Clive Barnes, was somewhat surprised. "He was far better than I had been led to expect - in fact he was merely terrible.''

    Last Saturday's matinee performance in the venerable Atkinson Theatre, which opened in 1926 and has hosted productions starring everyone from Rex Harrison to Gene Hackman and Jackie Mason, was packed.

    The audience was mixed, obvious theatre regulars side by side with tourists, older people perhaps drawn by the familiarity of the title, and a healthy sprinkling of those attracted by the marquee value of the edgy auteur.

    Tarantino's first appearance on- stage provoked a ripple of excitement through the house, but high expectations were soon deflated. He is soon all but invisible on-stage, hopelessly overshadowed by the talented Tomei and the superb Lang, whose Tony and Drama Desk nominations speak to his Broadway credentials.

    Lang's thundering physical energy and trained theatrical voice leave no doubt who is the actor on stage - even if he is not the star of the show.

    Tarantino's voice, perhaps well-suited for the weasely, conniving characters he writes for himself on- screen, is an embarrassingly inept instrument for the stage. He comes off like the understudy who didn't bone up on the role and still got a shot to play in the big leagues.

    Perhaps it is just an experiment - or it's for the experience. You have to admire Tarantino's courage while wondering at the same time what the heck he is up to.

    It was only three years ago that, after Reservoir Dogs and an Oscar for Pulp Fiction, Tarantino had emerged as one of the pre-eminent young directors of his generation. Film fans were committing his words to memory - "I'm gonna get medieval on your a--," as Marsellus tells one of his captors in Pulp Fiction - and the term Tarantino-esque was passing into the lexicon.  Then, just as quickly, Tarantino exhausted all the goodwill.

    He was everywhere, posing with Sorvino, directing an episode of ER and appearing in the sitcom All-American Girl. And there were too many movies - Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn among them. In the latter, he played George Clooney's brother - talk about requiring suspension of disbelief.

    After last year's Jackie Brown, the over-exposed Tarantino finally disappeared, re-emerging on Broadway confident as always - a state not unnoticed by the critics.

    The Post's Barnes wrote of Tarantino's "unfortunate air, probably quite unconscious, of seeming extraordinarily well-satisfied with himself.''

    "I'm not afraid of Broadway,'' Tarantino told Sun Media late last year. "It's exhilarating.''

    But for those who have to cough up $60 for a ticket to Wait Until Dark, be afraid - very afraid.