UP TO THE TASK; TOUGH HEDDA GABLER, MEET ANNETTE BENING.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

She was the original angry chick with a gun. Before Jackie Brown, before La Femme Nikita, even before Bonnie Parker, there was Hedda Gabler.

Whip-smart, self-destructive, trapped in a b-o-r-i-n-g marriage and most probably pregnant, Hedda likes to keep her father's old pistols close by. She's a walking powder keg, a proud, headstrong woman threatening to blow the bourgeois propriety off a provincial Norwegian town.

A Victorian femme fatale? Or simply a 19th-century version of the kind of middle-class mom you might find schlepping the kids to soccer practice in Sherman Oaks?

``Most women, I think, have a bit of Hedda Gabler in them,'' says Annette Bening, who's playing the formidable title role in a new production of Henrik Ibsen's 109-year-old classic opening tonight at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood.

``All of us, in a way, can relate to her predicament, whether or not you're happily married or happily have children - which I am,'' Bening says. ``I can still understand the problems and the inherent contradictions in the effort to take care of yourself as a human being and also be this nurturing figure.''

It's easy to see why the Geffen is letting Bening fulfill a 20-year ambition in playing Ibsen's disturbing, complicated heroine. In a town where impeccable technique usually counts less than flawless features, Bening, 40, is one of the few Hollywood actresses with both a certified celebrity aura and a proven stage record.

She began her acting career with the prestigious American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and has played Shaw, Chekhov and Shakespeare. Before Hollywood came knocking in the late 1980s, she earned a Tony Award nomination and a Clarence Derwent Award for Outstanding Debut Performance for her turn in Tina Howe's comedy of love and longing, ``Coastal Disturbances''

Shortly after, the Topeka, Kan., native was cast as the scheming seductress the Marquise de Merteuil in Milos Forman's ``Valmont.'' It was the first of several roles, including her dark-hearted con artist in ``The Grifters'' (1990), that stamped Bening with an inevitable '90s epithet: She was the thinking person's vixen.

With her subsequent marriage to Warren Beatty and entry into motherhood (the couple have three young children), the mass media instantly recast Bening as a ``post-feminist'' paragon, successfully juggling home, hubby and career.

But, speaking by cell phone as she chauffeurs her two eldest children to school, Bening sounds pretty much like any pleasantly harried working parent.

Why does she think others feel the need to idealize her?

``I think we do that to famous people,'' she replies. ``We all do it - I mean, I do the same thing - to people who are well known: We look to them as some sort of a guideline. And it's something that, if you're in that position, you have to kind of be careful, because we're all just struggling as much as everybody else, and trying to get our lives to be satisfying to us, and to be meaningful, and to balance all the different demands.''

There's a genuineness in Bening's voice, a quality both empathic and sharply focused. When the phone line twice goes dead during the conversation, she calls back immediately. When it happens a third time, near the end, she calls back once more.

``I guess I don't like not being able to say goodbye,'' she explains.

Although Bening sits on the board of the Actors' Gang theater in Hollywood, this will be her first major L.A. stage appearance. Its genesis goes back several years, when Bening met Geffen producing director Gil Cates at the Academy Awards and began discussing the idea of doing a play, possibly Noel Coward's ``Fallen Angels.'' When that didn't work out, she proposed ``Hedda Gabler,'' and Cates agreed.

``I just wanted to get back on my feet,'' Bening says. ``I wanted the machines to be out of the room, I didn't want any cameras or microphones or semi-trucks. I just wanted to be able to dive into a great piece of literature. That's the thing I'm so excited about - the day-to-day process of trying to understand the play.''

Directed by Dan Sullivan, former head of the Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Geffen production has been newly adapted by L.A.-born playwright Jon Robin Baitz (``The Substance of Fire''), with Bening specifically in mind. Baitz and Sullivan have worked together since 1989, smoothing the way for this collaboration.

``We wanted to make it (the translation) fresh and alive and something that lands on our ears appropriately,'' Bening says. ``We didn't want it to sound stilted or phony or arched or in any way removed from hot-blooded talk. Actually, there are some good translations, but they're either British, and they have a sort of British vernacular to them, or they just sound kind of hokey. And so it is so great, and I'm very impressed with (Baitz's) work on it.''

Although Hedda is clearly its catalyst, Ibsen's play is really an ensemble piece in which the various characters' conflicting agendas are observed with a cool, scientific eye. The Geffen cast includes Byron Jennings as George Tesman, Rosemary Murphy as Aunt Julie, Paul Guilfoyle as the scheming Judge Brack and Patrick O'Connell as Eilert Lovberg.

``It's one of the great women's roles, and she (Hedda) is never off the stage,'' says director Sullivan, ``but it is such a layered subtext for everyone in the play that everyone's wants and desires collide in the course of the evening. It's just not that one person, even though it's that one person making it all happen. You have to be as invested in everyone else's lives.''

Sullivan describes Bening as ``a creature of the theater, extremely disciplined and hard working.''

A prescient, socially conscious artist, Ibsen sometimes is held up as a literary champion of progressive causes, including feminism. The playwright himself, however, made no such claims, preferring to identify women's rights with human rights in general.

Bening agrees that it would be far too reductive to label ``Hedda'' a feminist tract.

``Ibsen was, of course, this incredible, really, revolutionary to explore a dilemma of a woman who didn't have all of the qualities women really had to have in order to get along in society then,'' she says.

``You know, the idea of a woman who was not maternally oriented is still, I think, an extremely hard thing for people - for any of us - to witness, a woman who cannot relate or hasn't any instincts about children. It's a very upsetting kind of an idea, because I think we all need our mothers so desperately, so we idealize motherhood.''

Since arriving in Hollywood, Bening has walked an intriguing line between nurturing matriarchs (``In Dreams''), hard-bitten molls (``Bugsy,'' ``The Grifters'') and many other types of women in between.

Although she never has seen a production of ``Hedda Gabler,'' she was greatly moved by Janet McTeer's fierce, eroticized performance as Nora in the imported British version of Ibsen's ``A Doll's House'' on Broadway in 1997.

Now she's faced with making dramatic sense of a character one critic described as ``the most hateful woman in dramatic literature.'' It's a role sometimes called the female Hamlet, a theatrical Anapurna that perhaps only Eva Le Gallienne, Maggie Smith and a few others have successfully scaled.

``Certainly I think all great characters have many, many layers,'' Bening says, easing Hedda onto the analyst's couch.

``There is their own conscious layer of behavior, then there's their subconscious layer, then there's their unconscious layer, which is very important in this play because I think so much of what is happening is coming out of that unconscious; it's coming out spontaneously.''

Suddenly, Bening's voice races up a gear.

``I'm so terrified talking about it this way because I don't know that I'm going to get all this!'' she says. ``So, this is all just kind of intellectual talk.''

But a moment later, a more assured Bening describes the task as something ``one has to cope with as a creative person, if you want to challenge yourself.'' It helps that her Hollywood friends have been supportive, at a time when record numbers of movie and TV stars (Kelsey Grammer, Danny Glover, Jenna Elfman) have been appearing on L.A. stages.

``I'm very gratified by it,'' Bening says, ``just because I hope that it kind of maybe will get other people to get involved in this way as well, to take time to do this kind of work.

``I mean, part of the reason I haven't done plays is because of my kids. I've got three little kids, and I just haven't been ready to do a play. And now that I'm doing it, I understand why.''

THE FACTS

What: ``Hedda Gabler.''

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood.

When: Through April 18. Performances at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Special performance 2 p.m. April 7.

Tickets: $30 to $40. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Scenes from a marriage

Annette Bening returns to the stage as Ibsen's fiery housewife

(2) ``Most women, I think, have a bit of Hedda Gabler in them,'' says Annette Bening, who plays the title role in a new production of Henrik Ibsen's classic opening tonight at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood.