By CHARLES McGRATH


Jane Fonda, it’s hard to believe, is 71. While the rest of us have just about managed one life, she’s had half a dozen. She has been a sex kitten, a fashion model, a radical and war protester, an Oscar-winning movie star, an exercise impresario and the consort of a billionaire. Her marital history alone has made her a kind of cultural bellwether. Her first husband, Roger Vadim, the French director, introduced her to group sex; she first made love with her second husband, Tom Hayden, a political activist, after he showed her some slides of Vietnamese peasants (this was back when people took foreplay seriously); and her third husband, Ted Turner, a media mogul, told her on their first date,“I have friends who are Communists.”

These days Ms.Fonda is revisiting an earlier incarnation, Broadway actress. She is starring in“33 Variations,”written and directed by Moises Kaufman, almost 50 years after she last appeared on Broadway, in“Strange Interlude.”

She looks great. She has had a new hip installed, and a few years ago she had her breast implants removed. But she is still willowy and glamorous; she still has that smoky, velvety voice; and age has brought out her bone structure. No longer the chubby-cheeked vixen of“Barbarella”and“Klute,”Ms.Fonda has at last achieved a sort of Hepburnian elegance. She even looks a little like her father now.

As it happens, Henry Fonda has been on her mind lately, she said recently.

“I’m becoming obsessed with his presence in my head, because my dad adored theater,”she said.“He didn’t talk much, but he would talk about how he loved the immediacy of a live audience. I was never comfortable enough in my own skin 45 years ago to be able to understand it. I just wanted to escape. And now it’s like,‘Oh Dad, I wish you were here and alive, so I could say to you: I get it! I’m finally able to experience what you were talking about.’”

In the early’90s, after she married Ted Turner, Ms.Fonda officially announced her retirement from acting. Then in 2005 she resumed her movie career with“Monsterin- Law,”in which she played with great relish a nightmare version of Jane Fonda: a TV star who has gone through four husbands, gone crazy and can’t accept that she’s getting old.

She has two more films in the works, but in the meantime, when“33 Variations”came her way, she embraced the chance to return to the stage.

“I am not the same person I was,”she said.“I really am a different person. And I feel now that I could really be better than I have ever been in acting. It felt like something I had left prematurely. I didn’t complete it, and I wanted to see if I could find joy in it again.”

A large part of why Ms.Fonda feels like a different person is that she is always working on herself. As she documents in“My Life So Far,”her 2005 autobiography, she has labored through a daunting list of issues: a disastrous childhood (her mother, Frances Seymour, slit her throat when Ms.Fonda was 12; her father was famously icy and remote), anorexia, bulimia, sexual insecurity, stage fright, fear of intimacy, excessive need to please and more than one midlife crisis. She has become a feminist, an environmentalist, a student of Zen, a practicing Christian and, just lately, a blogger.

“Variations” is about a woman who is in many ways the complete opposite of Ms.Fonda - someone who has shut down and is out of touch with herself. Ms.Fonda plays Katherine Brandt, a musicologist who is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Distant and controlling, Katherine has a difficult relationship with her daughter, Clara .

The play sometimes made Ms.Fonda painfully aware, she said, of how withholding her father had been, on the one hand, and, on the other, of her sometimes complicated relationship with Vanessa, her daughter with Roger Vadim.

“I feel 71 years old. I do,”she said. I’m really aware of the miles that have been logged and of the life that has gone under the bridge and how it has made me grow. I’m someone who has always tried to think about what it has all meant. I’m a quester. So I feel my age. I feel grown up.”