Never Neutral, and Proud of It By Patrick Healy From 'Weeds' To Broadway: Returning to Broadway after a long, successful run in Hollywood, Mary Louise Parker is set to take the leading role in the play "The Snow Geese." As her Showtime series "Weeds" was nearing its eighth and final season last year, Mary-Louise Parker kept haranguing her agents to send new plays her way. But while she was itchy to find a vehicle back to her first love, theater, a part of her also felt that she would never act onstage again. She couldn't imagine performing a show without having the chance to savor it with her father, John, who died in September 2010. "He would always come to town for opening nights, and see it, and then say, "Well, you know, if there are any tickets for tomorrow's performance, I'd like to go," " Ms. Parker recalled recently. And he'd come and come. And he'd understand it. He understood my choices. Then she read "The Snow Geese," a new drama by a rising playwright, Sharr White. If some of the writing didn't grab her, and period plays ("Snow Geese" is set in 1917) usually aren't her thing, the character of Elizabeth Gaesling struck a deeply personal chord. Elizabeth is two months a widow; but more to the point, she won't stop mourning, even in the face of her family's financial ruin. "I loved that Elizabeth was so committed to her grief," said Ms. Parker, 49, who signed on as Elizabeth in the Chekhovian "Snow Geese," which is in preview performances and opens on Broadway on Oct. 24. She's delusional in many ways, but she knows it at the same time, which is fascinating to me. She continued: "I've never in my life said to someone, "You need to get over it." My mother is committed to her grief of the loss of my father. And I think it's the most romantic, beautiful thing. I love her for it. She will not budge from it. She 100 percent inspired me for this role. Ms. Parker's talent in delivering an ode to overwhelming grief - and making it seem like the only sensible choice - goes some way to explaining her seductiveness as an actress. And it's why, despite a difficult reputation and a 2009 Broadway run in "Hedda Gabler" that brought the worst reviews of her career, "Snow Geese" - at one point planned for Off Broadway - was bumped up after she signed on. Her own neuroses and eccentricities have helped humanize a string of characters who, on paper, range from peculiar to unlikable: a newlywed whose body is taken over by the spirit of an old man in her 1990 breakout performance in "Prelude to a Kiss"; a narrator conjuring up her sexually abused childhood self in "How I Learned to Drive"; a mathematics savant teetering on the edge of sanity in "Proof," a role that won her a Tony Award for best actress in 2001; a runaway housewife in "Reckless;" and more recent new works like "Dead Man's Cell Phone" and "Snow Geese." She also won converts for off-putting characters like Nancy Botwin, the drug-dealing mother on "Weeds," and Harper Pitt, the drug-addled Mormon wife in the HBO mini-series adaptation of "Angels in America," which earned her a supporting actress Emmy Award. Those idiosyncrasies, to choose a kind word for what others describe as erratic behavior, have also made her a target of gossip in New York theater. By the opening night of "Hedda Gabler," she and her director, Ian Rickson, were barely on speaking terms. Nearly 20 years earlier, in the Off Broadway production of "Prelude to a Kiss," she threw a shoe at an audience member who walked across part of the stage while leaving mid-performance. (Ms. Parker described the shoe toss as part of a costume change: "The shoe went in her direction, which I was not sad about. I was not sad at all.") In a 2000 article in The New York Times, she recalled watching a show while a child munched potato chips nearby. After he didn't respond to her finger wave, she leaned over and whispered, "Will you stop eating those? I'm going to kill you! He stopped. And this summer she told a News Corp Australia interviewer that she might quit acting, expressing weariness as well as some disgust with cutthroat bloggers. She now says she plans to keep acting. None of these moments make her blush in the telling. Far better to be quirky than "neutral," the state of being that acting teachers advised as necessary to be castable. "One person's crazy is another person's refreshing," Ms. Parker said during an interview at a theater district watering hole, Angus" Cafe Bistro. I was always a very hidden, quiet child, and in some ways I can be opaque as an adult. I can have an air of vacancy about me. I can see it in my son. He can go so far away, and people made fun of me as a kid about that. But I hate fakeness. You have to be true to yourself. Daniel Sullivan, who directed Ms. Parker in "Proof" and has reunited with her for "Snow Geese," described her as direct, intense and intuitive, but said she hardly presented any of the challenges of his Broadway play last spring, "Orphans." During the first week of rehearsals on "Orphans," Mr. Sullivan and one of the stars, Alec Baldwin, clashed so much with his co-star Shia LaBeouf over acting choices and temperament that Mr. LaBeouf was fired and replaced. "This time we've been able to just explore the text, with ideas zinging around and everyone able to build on the ideas of others, and Mary-Louise has been a great part of that," Mr. Sullivan said. Asked if "Snow Geese" had been a calmer experience than "Orphans," he chuckled and said, "Well, what wouldn't be?"