N a messy midtown rehearsal studio last month, Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci were at an impasse, and it involved skin. Ms. Falco, 39, is best known as the manicured mob wife Carmela in the HBO series "The Sopranos." Mr. Tucci, 41, is an accomplished character actor seen currently in the gangster movie "Road to Perdition."

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Now they were sitting on the rumpled sheets of a weathered sofa-bed, looking half awake, half undressed and wholly self-conscious. Mr. Tucci was wearing only a pair of gray boxer briefs, trying to block out the logistics of intimacy. "Do I have my pants on at this point?" he asked.

Harsh lighting pressed overhead. Muffled street noise seeped in through the windows. Both actors have worked nicer joints than this.

They were two weeks into rehearsals of Terrence McNally's two-character play "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune," about a night in the broken lives of a waitress and a short-order cook. The play, which first ran Off Broadway in 1987, opens at the Belasco Theater on Thursday. The story follows two adult lovers trying to crawl their way out of the deep funk of failure, both professional and romantic.

For Ms. Falco, a former waitress, the character Frankie hit near to home. "Carmela is very far from me," she said. "Frankie is pretty damn close. So it's a very vulnerable place to be. But she is a me that I think I could have been had things gone differently. She's a me that some of my friends are either in or heading toward. She's not only stuck, but she's given up. She was hanging onto the side of the boat, but after a while, your arms get too tired. That's where we find her."

On this day in mid-July, the actors were battling their own fatigue. As the immaculately lacquered Carmela Soprano, Ms. Falco can probably repel bullets with her fingernail polish. But on a steamy New York afternoon she seemed both more voluble and also drawn, stressed from juggling play rehearsals with the demands of the television series, which should have wrapped up its season weeks ago.

Mr. Tucci, also, was alternating long hours on the film set of "The Chambermaid," a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes, and directed by Wayne Wang.

Ms. Falco said, "When I have two things going on at once, it's just mayhem. I've been doing `The Sopranos' and press for `The Sunshine State.' " She was referring to John Sayles's current movie, in which she plays the manager of a Florida hotel and restaurant. She continued: "Stan is shooting `Chambermaid' and doing press for `Road to Perdition.' So we're just grabbing snippets of time when we can. Rehearsal time has become very precious and very tight."

Specifically, what the two actors and director, Joe Mantello, had not worked out yet was the choreography of undress. The stage directions call for total nudity. In rehearsals so far, they had not gotten past the penultimate peel. "Every rehearsal we talk about it," Mr. Tucci said. "Every rehearsal."

Ms. Falco took a reading of her anxiety. "This play is about two people who are having sex, and there's sort of no way to make an audience believe it if when you get out of bed you have your clothes on," she said. "I trust Stan implicitly. He's in love with his wife and has a family, so it's not as weird as it might be were that not the case."

She added, "I also think it's important that I have a regular woman's body." She cast a glance at the laundry strewn about the rehearsal room floor. "This is about two regular people. There's nothing phony or glamorous about it."

The production represents the sort of hedge on which Broadway is coming to rely these days. It features big-name stars, a time-tested play and a limited run, ending Dec. 29. Mr. McNally, who also adapted the play for a 1991 movie version, acknowledged that the theatrical stakes were lower this time around. "With revivals like this, the casting is really the event," he said, speaking from his home in Bridgehampton, N.Y. "That's what people come to see, not the play."

The fans who buy tickets to see such celebrities, he added, will make an unpredictable third character in the theater. "They won't see Carmela Soprano," he said.

Mr. McNally made very minor tweaks in the script. He has also written two new works that will have debuts in the fall: the libretto for a City Opera production of "Dead Man Walking" and the book for a musical based on the movie "A Man of No Importance." Mr. Mantello will direct the latter.

"Frankie and Johnny," in its new incarnation, began not with the play but with the stars — or rather, with Ms. Falco. The Araca Group, producers of the hit "Urinetown" and other shows, wanted to stage a play around her, in part because of the popularity of the HBO series. "I was a production assistant on a little film called `Judy Berlin' that she was in," said Matthew Rego, one of three partners in the production group. "I drove Edie back and forth from the set. Since then we kept saying, `We should work together.' "

The producers invited Ms. Falco to select a play she wanted to do. She originally considered Marsha Norman's " 'Night Mother," a two-character play about suicide. "But I remembered reading one of the actresses saying that she fell into the deepest depression of her life doing that play," she said. "I thought: `You know what? I don't need to go through that during my hiatus.' I didn't want to spend that much time in a sad place."

Instead, she was drawn to Mr. McNally's play, which staggers toward a note of tentative conciliation. The producers asked Mr. Tucci to read the part of Johnny, and the two clicked. Mr. McNally, 63, particularly liked Mr. Tucci's tonsorial charisma. "He's the first sexy bald guy since Yul Brynner," the playwright said. "Now that my own hair is starting to thin, I appreciate that." It took about a year to align the schedules of the actors and Mr. Mantello.

Mr. Rego estimated that it would cost about $1.3 million to get to opening night, then about $150,000 to $200,000 a week during the run. With expenses so high, the stars' brand appeal was essential. "When you have actors who are beloved," he said, "it takes a little of the risk out of the equation."