It is unclear whether Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones kept their legs uncrossed ...

“Please return to your seats!”

The typical orders were barked from the front row at Michael Kors on Wednesday, September 12 at 10 a.m. Too much too early. Due to some recent Team Kors PR shifts and rifts, we couldn’t locate the familiar faces that would help The Observer with its conquest. Where were Savannah and Lauren to sneak us past the testosterone-pumped security forces void of interpersonal skills who guarded Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones and recent Tony-winner Nina Arianda? Yes, it’s true that I, personally would have accosted Ms. Arianda because she was so fabulous in Venus in Fur, but do Broadway stars really warrant a detail to watch cotton blazers and crepe gowns sashay up and down a walkway for 10 minutes?

“Sir, I’m sorry, but you need to take your seat please!” growled the plus-size security goon, leaving me no choice but to traipse back to section A, pondering how on earth he knew my name was “sir.”

So how, exactly, are editors who don't publish the redundant proclamations on trends for their glossy readership supposed to get those juicy interviews we so rely on for cushy page hits? Or even modest news appeal?

As we waited for the show to commence, the only thing deflecting our disappointment at missed interview ops was an unfortunate Michael Kors visuals production staffer kicking us from behind with his obnoxiously pointy boots.

“Uncross your legs and please push in your bags, ladies and gentlemen in the front row!” screeched the photography pit repeatedly. (I don’t mean to get all political ... maybe it's fine for the ladies, but frankly, forcing 200 men at a fashion show to uncross their legs sounds to me like a gay rights issue!)

Hoot, holler, belt they did, until they deemed the runway bony-leg- and Céline-bag-free enough to their liking.

Knees stayed firmly together as look No. 36 walked down at Michel Kors.

Finally the production began, and thankfully our misery was quelled within the first four looks. Mr. Kors trod the familiar  with American sportswear, this season with vague waves at the sport of golf, and crisp and clean nautical references—all with a wearable ’60s touch. Get your stripes now, people! First Marc Jacobs had people just shy of orgasm with his Edie-meets-’60s contemporary pieces, and Kors too laid the stripes on thick. Especially memorable was a studded navy plunger shift dress, which had edge. The collection had more European commercial appeal, a smart move as the now-colossal brand expands more there and in Asia. One sky print on tops and dresses was created from a picture Michael Kors had taken himself. And for evening? Mr. Kors kept things signature and simple with body-con crepe dresses with geo cutouts. As Karlie Kloss prowled down the catwalk, our seatmate whispered, “Crepe never looked sexier!”

It was true. And the punchy color palette was a stylist’s dream. There were pocketing and stitching details that added value and youth … perhaps a bit too much, said a few. The Observer overheard Jamee Gregory commenting to another UES Queen that she actually liked the youthfulness of the collection, “It was very nice, actually,” she said before debating a swim upstream to kiss-kiss Mr. Kors backstage; as this editor watched her go, he crossed my legs.

Nina Arianda. (Photo: Jason Bell)

The first time Nina Arianda walked on the stage at the Cort Theatre, she broke into tears.

“I was having a conversation with somebody, and I got onto the stage, and I looked out, and it was—I just started crying,” she said a few weeks ago over an afternoon cappuccino in Soho. “Because you’re there. It’s happening to you. And I can ignore that as much as I want to, to keep myself calm and focused. But when you have to actually go and look at the space, you have to face the magnitude of the theater, and the history, and the ghosts. It’s beautiful. And it’s really—it was overwhelming.”

Ms. Arianda can be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed.

She took that walk on the Cort stage near the start of this year, when she was preparing for Born Yesterday, in which she played opposite Jim Belushi and Robert Sean Leonard. She was 26, a year and a half out of N.Y.U., where she earned an M.F.A. in acting, and she was about to take on her first Broadway role, the role that made Judy Holliday famous. She’d landed the part after a single meeting—director Doug Hughes knew he wanted her—and she ended up with a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play.

A year earlier, in January 2010, when she was 25 and only six months out of N.Y.U., she bowled over audiences and critics in the debut of the David Ives two-hander Venus in Fur, off Broadway at the Classic Stage Company. She’d nailed that role in a single audition, too. This fall, Venus will open on Broadway, and Ms. Arianda—directed once again by Walter Bobbie, but with a new co-star—will likely earn a second Tony nomination.

The play is an intriguing, amusing and very intense 90 minutes of shifting power dynamics and charged sexual dynamics, in which we watch Vanda, Ms. Arianda’s young and desperate actress, audition opposite the author and director of the play-within-the-play, a dramatization of the 1870 novella “Venus in Furs,” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, for whom masochism is named. There are, suffice it to say, some weird scenarios in Sacher-Masoch’s story, and therefore in Mr. Ives’s play, and Ms. Arianda’s part required her to be by turns timid and controlling, manipulative and manipulated, funny and frightening.

“The play is every single thing you can imagine,” she told The Observer in Soho. “It’s romantic. It’s scary. It’s hilarious. And there aren’t a lot of plays like that, or a lot of opportunities for a female lead to have that kind of thread. I love that. And I love that I can’t figure Vanda out completely.”

Vanda was her first real role, and it won Ms. Arianda rapturous reviews. “Remember the name—Nina Arianda,” wrote Joe Dziemianowicz in the Daily News. “In Venus in Fur, she proves herself to be a comic goddess.” In The Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout even more enthusiastic: “She has star quality oozing from every pore.”

As Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday, a gangster’s moll who discovers within herself a mind of gold, Ms. Arianda stole the show from her more famous co-stars and earned even better notices than she had for Venus. “Forget yesterday: A star is being born right now at the Cort,” Adam Feldman proclaimed in Time Out New York. In Entertainment Weekly, Melissa Rose Bernardo wrote that Ms. Arianda was “giving a performance that could be called breakout, although breakout seems somehow insufficient.” “I hereby nominate the luminous laugh-goddess Nina Arianda for president,” gushed New York’s Scott Brown.

Somewhere along the way, she also filmed parts in Win Win, with Paul Giamatti, which opened around the time Born Yesterday did, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which arrived in late spring, the recent Higher Ground and Brett Ratner’s Tower Heist, with Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller and Casey Affleck, which opens at the beginning of November.

Four days after Tower Heist arrives in theaters, Ms. Arianda will be opening in Venus at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway house, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

“I don’t like relaxing too much,” she said, somewhat redundantly, as she sat restlessly in her seat and carefully folded the empty wrappers of the two Splendas she’d used. “Sometimes it’s necessary, but it’s more that I force myself to.” She was fully in character as the comic ingénue that afternoon, bright, bubbly, and quick to laugh, her heart-shape face topped by blond, loosely curly hair coiled at the top of her head in a loose bun that bounced as she spoke but always fell precisely back into place.

“I’m forcing myself to take some down time before we start Venus,” she said. She was preparing to leave for a few days on the Jersey Shore with her parents—she grew up in the Garden State, with her doting mom and dad shuttling her to acting lessons and auditions and to see shows in New York. “It’s nice to take a couple of days and really just center,” she continued. But she also seems to find it nice not to take that time. “All summer last summer I was working,” she said. “Which was great; I loved it.”

A lot of things, in Ms. Arianda’s telling, are great.

On this spring’s Tony Awards, when she lost her category to Frances McDormand: “The category! It was Vanessa Redgrave! I still don’t believe that my name was next to hers in any way. And that was—that was just, in itself, thrilling. And I was pumped. It was a celebration for everybody, you know? It was amazing.”

On Born Yesterday closing after only 70 performances: “It was disappointing. But not so disappointing, because I got to be on Broadway! And work with Doug Hughes and Robert Sean Leonard and Jim Belushi!”

On her very busy 2010: “I like being a part of good stories; I like being a part of good work. Midnight in Paris is a really great story. Higher Ground, it’s a great story. Venus is an amazingly complicated, layered story.”

On working with Hugh Dancy, who will replace Wes Bentley for the Broadway run of Venus, and whom she she’d met only once: “I’m genuinely excited to work with him. I had a really, really great time with him for those, what, four minutes we were together. It clicked. It was great.”

On the constant stream of rapturous reviews and fawning profiles: “I like saying thank you. Really. This is all a dream come true, and not in a Disney way. In a really true way for me. I pinch myself every day, and I’m like: ‘Oh my God, the show you love, that’s so personal to you, Venus? Yeah, you get to do that on Broadway.’”

Talking to Ms. Arianda, an interviewer is at first tempted to dismiss all these greats and amazings as the programmed responses of a professional actress. But listening to her, the interviewer also entertains another possibility: for a young actress living a dream come true, why shouldn’t everything be great and amazing?

It should be.

But how, then, to explain her excellent, convincing performance as Vanda, an actress for whom things are going much less well? The character arrives late for her audition, soaking wet, desperate, and demands a chance to read. Vanda starts off a needy supplicant, and she ends up an angry dominatrix.

“The rage?” laughed Ms. Arianda. “Oh, it’s there.” And what brings it out? “Having somebody—like in the play—putting you in your place,” she said. “Testing you.” She was claiming that things aren’t always great and amazing—but she’d shifted to the second person, distancing herself from it. She remained clinical and removed as she went on: “There’s a lot in the play to connect to female rage. And I’m fascinated by female rage, because it’s so—it’s wild. There’s almost a messiness to it, with women, that is fascinating to me.”

On stage, she can access it. “When we did it at CSC,” she recalled, “I went so far into the rabbit hole one time that I got home and I was scared of myself. It’s scary to be that angry.”

Then Ms. Arianda stopped herself. “Remember when I said I don’t like feelings in my real life?” she said. “That’s why I do this.” She was done talking about rage. “There’s nothing better than having a terrible day and knowing that you get to do Venus in Fur at night. By the same token, if you’re having a great day, there’s nothing better than doing Venus. You get to work things out—and with someone, which is great. Mood stabilizer, therapist, partnership.” And there it was again: “It’s great.”

And, in truth, suppressed rage aside, everything for Ms. Arianda is great. “There’s nothing really dark,” she told me. “I’m stoked to be part of this community. I’ve wanted it my whole life. It’s happening. No dark cloud.”

When she got up to leave, escorted by her publicist, she seemed genuinely surprised that The Observer didn’t want her to pay for her coffee.

editorial@observer.com