Hathaway, coming off a much-deserved Oscar nomination for her performance in Rachel Getting Married, is starring in the Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night opening this week at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. As a result, Hathaway was featured in a piece in Sunday's New York Times and is subject of this week's New York magazine cover feature.

About her gender-bending role in the play, Hathaway sounded, well, terrified in the Times piece.

"I have a double learning curve, not only because it's my first time with Shakespeare but because this is my first major theatrical production," Ms. Hathaway said. "So just staving off a nervous breakdown has been the main thing for me."

"A lot of people in the cast come up to me at the end of the week and ask how I'm feeling, and I kind of vomit emotions, and they say, ‘Oh, good, that's exactly where you should be,' " she said. "And I remember the first time a bug flew into my face at rehearsal, I turned to Dan and asked, for my own edification, ‘If a bug flies into our face, are we allowed to react or just be stoic?' He just said, ‘Use your discretion.' "

Ms. Hathaway still seemed a bit surprised and thrilled to be in the cast.

"Yeah," Ms. Hathaway said, "I think I live in constant fear of being revealed to be a fraud because I'm with not only exquisite experience, but actors who have so much stage experience. And people who have experience in the park, which is a whole different kind of expertise."

"I had a very naïve, really arrogant adolescent idea that I could do Shakespeare because I did one monologue in an acting class when I was 18," she said. "One thing that dawned on me early in this process: We were sitting around and sharing our knowledge of Shakespeare and some trivia, and I just realized that the study of Shakespeare is cumulative, and I felt really lucky to be getting my first crack at it at such a young age."

In the New York piece, Hathaway noted how she's long yearned to spread her dramatic wings by tackling stage roles and secretly harbors a desire to become a full-blown stage diva.

She likes the long rehearsals, she likes slipping off to the uptown Shake Shack with cast and crew. It's a bit of being the actress she imagined she'd be when, as a child in New Jersey, she decided to take after her mother, who acts in regional theater and has done so forever. "I hounded [Public Theater director] Oskar Eustis for years," she says. After Rachel, "I think it became more of a priority for him to get me onstage." Hathaway stirs her coffee. "I do hope that doesn't sound obnoxious."

Talk of other projects swirls around her, but she's coy about it. "I don't mean to be, but sometimes things don't work out in the end, and then people think it's because you hate someone, and I don't hate anyone!"

It has, however, been confirmed that she'll be playing Judy Garland on Broadway, and that seems about right.

"This is so embarrassing, but one of the waitresses just walked by with a glass of white wine and I almost reached out and grabbed it. It would be lovely to have a bit of release, but no. I have to go to rehearsal. I don't want to be the girl who shows up tipsy. But wouldn't it be fun? Wouldn't it be fun someday to be a grande dame who can get away with anything?"

We think she'll do just fine and we look forward to seeing her perform in the play. Now, who wants $50 to go out and wait in line for a ticket for us, because we don't have time for that crap.

The Three Sisters of Twelfth Night [New York Times]
Her Enchanted Evenings [New York]

• The Web is dead. Churchill once described a pudding as having no theme. The same is broadly true of today’s Internet; Web 2.0 has descended into bathos, which really ought to have its own 'sphere named after it. Facebook’s great advertising revenue model went bust a year ago and everyone’s already stalked everyone else on MySpace. Most user-generated content reads like a stale algorithm of pettiness, paranoia and semi-literacy. Time formerly proclaimed “us” the “Person of the Year,” and it proved too burdensome a responsibility. We renounce the title.

• The television season is over. What is there to watch now except the Real World set where it always belonged – on a Hollywood soundstage – and with revolving cast members that don’t hang around long enough to come out of the closet, smack each other in the face, or forget to load the dishwasher? Bring back House with its acerbic Bertie Wooster.

• The economy is in limbo. It’s bad, sure, but it’s not quite so bad as to precipitate a new artistic or literary movement. No one's ready to move into lean-tos on the B.Q.E., become a Trotsykist, and found Partisan Review. Speaking of which –

• There are no new magazines. What’s to overhype and then hound to an early grave? Radar’s doing fine in that unremarkable way of its. And n+1 will either lurch into neoconservatism or get bought out by Dave Eggers and turned into Zimbabwean refugee’s emo fanzine.

• There are no parties, except the one being thrown tonight by Keith Gessen, the Julia Allison of public intellectuals, who wants to take back the Internet the way Irving Howe wanted to make socialism relevant.

• We live in atomized and fragmented times. Like academia, the culture is over-specialized and only caters to microscopic – mostly web-based – niches. My Buddhist Scandinavian black metal band can beat up your vomit porn-themed ballet troupe. It’s impossible to congregate under a mass banner of anything anymore. Is this why Barack Obama is deified? Is he the closest thing we have to a popular icon? (Michael Chabon thinks so, and he’s the dean of Superman studies.) But there are no other imagos to make our hearts beat as one and give us a shared cultural experience. What’s the last stadium-venue concert you attended? (I'm seeing Mos Def with a Big Band this month and I can't even get worked up about it.) Who’s the Seinfeld of the humorless aughts, the Geldof of this age of waste?

• Politics has sucked the oxygen out of media. Fortunately, like the TV drought, this may just be seasonal and subject to change once November comes and goes and Obama Girl is cast in the next Tom Stoppard play as Béla Kun's wry housekeeper.

• It’s been an uneventful summer thus far. Might we look forward to a rolling blackout in August that will allow us all to mate in darkened stairwells and wash with tonic water for a glorious twelve hours again?

It actually started off pretty promising, the Victoria Gotti/Donatella Versace look-alikes populating the crowed, vampy Bobby Trendy and his self-important crew trying to snag the absolute best seats possible and at this point, I must ask if you've ever seen the El Rey, because all the seats are basically the same. There were also a bunch of America's Next Top Model wannabes running around, probably hoping for a photo-op. I have to say that same of them were appropriately stunning. It's not that often that a woman can make me seem short and fat, but these chicks did impress. [...]

Janice came out over half an hour late, a nervous (I'm assuming), coked-up wreck. It was soooo not fun to watch. For whatever reason, they had tried to get Janice to memorize a script and she was freaking out because she kept forgetting the script, which was really frustrating to watch because SHE ACTUALLY LIVED IT AND COULDN'T REMEMBER HOW THE STORY WENT. After the first costume change, which came after about 10 minutes of Janice's nervous rambling, Kimberly Stewart and her crew RAN out, leaving their lame dj friend to fend for herself. Ha. I liked that part. After the second costume change, we jetted.

From what I understand Janice later fell.

Perhaps the bouts of memory loss and vertigo can be written off to opening night jitters. Who's at their best with a legendary theater critic like Bobby Trendy sitting a few rows away? But if you're feeling like a thrill-seeker, planning on being on some really good drugs yourself, or need to take a break from your nightly cutting, someone's giving away free tickets on Craiglist. A caveat: We can't guarantee that you'll have more fun than you would if you stayed home with the razor blade and some TiVo'd episodes of Top Model.

• Ouch...that's gotta hurt [Office Monkey]