LEGENDARY names from the worlds of theater and film come up during conversation with Shirley Knight — Tennessee Williams, Ingmar Bergman, Francis Ford Coppola, Joanne Woodward, Sean Connery.

   Ms. Knight is teaming up with a different legend these days as she’s preparing for her role in Come Back, Come Back, Wherever You Are, playwright and director Arthur Laurents’ latest work. The play will make its world premiere at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick through Nov. 1, opening the theater’s new season just a few months after Mr. Laurents’ New Year’s Eve ended its previous season. It’s the 10th play of Mr. Laurents to be staged at George Street.

   The play follows several people who are dealing with the loss of Paolo, the son of Marion (played by Ms. Knight) and the husband of Sara (played by Alison Fraser). Sara is “returning to life” so to speak by resuming her singing career and getting involved with someone. The story examines how different people deal with death, something Marion and Sara take very different approaches to.

   Loss is something Ms. Knight, Ms. Fraser and Mr. Laurents know about. Ms. Knight’s husband, the writer John Hopkins, died in 1998. Ms. Fraser’s husband, the musician Rusty Magee, died in 2003. Mr. Laurents’ life partner, Tom Hatcher, died in 2006.

   Death is a somber subject, but in a video promoting the play on George Street’s Web site, Mr. Laurents says the play is “uplifting” and that it’s about keeping one’s hope after suffering the loss of a loved one.

   ”I really wrote it to find out what I was feeling,” he says. “And I’m feeling good.”

   ”There’s a lot of humor in it, and it’s very emotional,” Ms. Knight says. “It has a lot of humor because it has familial humor. When you get family together, there’s always drama and comedy, I think.”

   The play continues 92-year-old Mr. Laurents’ busy streak. In addition to staging his new plays, he’s the director of the current Broadway revival of West Side Story. In 2008, he directed an acclaimed revival of Gypsy starring Patti LuPone and Ms. Fraser. (He wrote the books for both of those classics.)

   Ms. Knight met Mr. Laurents earlier this year during an appearance at the Strand bookstore in Manhattan, where the playwright promoted his book Mainly On Directing.

   ”I said, ‘I’m so happy to meet you,’” Ms. Knight recounts before a day’s rehearsal at George Street. “And he went on and on about ‘The Young Man from Atlanta’ and ‘The Three Sisters,’ and all kinds of plays. He talked a great deal about my husband’s play, ‘Find Your Way Home,’ when that was done on Broadway, and how much it affected him, and how wonderful it was.”

   A couple of months later Ms. Knight was in Atlanta filming a television show when her agent informed her that Mr. Laurents wanted to work with her on Come Back, Come Back, Wherever You Are. The timing was fortuitous, as Ms. Knight wanted to return to the stage after a stretch of film and television work.

   ”I think I said at the time that I was looking forward to doing another play but I didn’t know what it would be,” she says. “It was just one of those happy accidents, and he offered me the play, so I was just thrilled.”

   Ms. Knight’s recent television and film work includes appearances on Desperate Housewives and as Kevin James’ mother in Paul Blart: Mall Cop (she expresses great admiration for Adam Sandler, who produced Paul Blart). She has fond memories of those experiences but stage work, she says, is the only way to go through the complete process of creating a character.

   ”You reach a certain point (in movies and TV) with the character and they say ‘cut and print,’” she says. Creating a character takes time, she adds. “And that isn’t about accents or a way of moving, it’s the character embodying you.”

   She remembers performing in The Glass Menagerie when her friend Joanne Woodward told her how amazing her “walk” was in the performance.

   ”I said, ‘What walk?’ The character was just in me,” she says. “She told me, ‘Trust me, it’s just perfect, whatever you’re doing, that walk is just perfect.’ And in a way that’s what happens with a character.”

   During rehearsals for this play, she’s noticed herself drumming her fingers impatiently. It’s not something she planned but it developed as she discovered her character.

   ”The other thing about the theater, as opposed to film and television, is that they’re seeing all of you, they see your total instrument,” she says. “And one of the things I say to young people when I’m teaching them is, ‘You have to understand your total instrument.’”

   Ms. Knight’s film work ranges from 1968’s Petulia (which often appears on lists of the best movies of the 1960s) to As Good as it Gets (1997) with Jack Nicholson.

   There are four things, above all else, Ms. Knight says she is most proud of as an actress: That Mr. Williams wrote a play for her (A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur), Mr. Coppola wrote a film for her (The Rain People), that Mr. Bergman hired her to work on a television project (1973’s The Lie) and that her husband wrote three plays for her.

   A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur came about after Ms. Knight performed in A Streetcar Named Desire and the playwright said to her, “Finally, I have my perfect Blanche.” Mr. Williams then told her he was going to write a play for her — a promise writers often make but don’t always fulfill. The play premiered in Charleston, S.C., in 1978 and opened in New York’s Hudson Guild Theatre in 1979.

   She won a Tony for Kennedy’s Children and was nominated again for her role in Horton Foote’s The Young Man From Atlanta. She’s also won two Emmys and been nominated for an Oscar and two Golden Globe Awards.

   As nice as those are, someone gets nominated every year. It’s not every actor who has one of the great playwrights write something especially for her. “If Tennessee Williams writes a play for you,” she says, “you feel like, OK, I must be good at what I do because Tennessee thinks so.”

• 
  
  Come Back, Come Back, Wherever You Are is at George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, through Nov. 1. Performances: Tues.-Wed., Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. 2, 8 p.m. (no matinee Oct. 10), Sun. 2, 7 p.m. (no evening performance Nov. 1), Oct. 8, 22, 8 p.m., Oct. 15, 2 p.m., Oct. 29, 2, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $37.50-$71.50; 732-246-7717; www.gsponline.org