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Not as sad as if she were actually on “Dancing with the Stars,” and at 38 she naturally seeks to ensure herself against such a fate. That means doing as many different things as she can, while she can, which has sometimes made her seem impatient when stuck in one place. Toward the end of her run as Glinda in “Wicked,” she started tinkering with outrageous new ways to amuse herself, and the audience. Her antics — playing with props, adding an extra fillip, and then another, to every joke — may have pulled focus from her co-star, Idina Menzel, but no Glinda since has mined as many laughs from that recalcitrant script.

Glinda was a perfect role for Ms. Chenoweth: sparkly, self-spoofing, a bit in a bubble. Even the theme of ambivalence about competing with other women felt right. In what she called the “Friday Night Lights” environment of high school in Broken Arrow, Okla., where her interest in ballet could be repackaged as cheerleading but her interest in opera was unforgivably nerdy, she was mystified by the resentment she aroused in other girls.

“People could be so awful,” she said. “I remember once I was in the bathroom, and this basketball player girl came in and said, ‘I just want to punch you out.’ When I said, ‘How come?’ she said: ‘Because you’re happy all the time.’ And I said: ‘You know what? I’m not happy all the time. I’m human. And I’d really like to leave the bathroom now.’ That’s when I realized: Oh my God, they’re mad at me because I’m talented. Because I do something they don’t do. But they have their gifts. Why do they envy mine?”

Ms. Chenoweth said she now resolves this sort of thing by cutting off contact “the minute something goes awry with me and another female.” In “The Apple Tree” the problem is entirely avoided; there are no other featured female roles. Ms. Chenoweth plays different archetypes of woman — Eve in Eden, a dangerous temptress, a drudge dreaming of transformation — in each act of the triptych, and sings all or part of 15 songs in the process. If she is in competition with anything except her own standards, it’s with the legend of Barbara Harris’s Tony-winning turn in the original production. And Ms. Chenoweth is a far better singer. In the show-stopping “Gorgeous” she tosses off a high D that, in 1966, had to be recorded by another singer and played as a joke.

At a recent rehearsal it was clear how much this material needed her; Jerry Bock, who wrote the music, said there hadn’t been a revival of “The Apple Tree” in 40 years “because we haven’t until Kristin had the performer who could do it.”

It was also clear how much she needed it. The size of the job seemed to keep her focused and in a machinelike state of invention. She comes to rehearsals fully prepared — directors say she is essentially performance-ready at the first reading — but can then generate an almost endless series of permutations on any given line or word. And do it while singing. Her voice, which can be nasal or creamy or coloratura, is in any case astonishingly loud. “It’s almost mysterious,” Mr. Bock said, “how she can produce all the vocal requirements and more when you just look at her and think, ‘Where is this coming from?’ ”

Ms. Chenoweth herself doesn’t know, and in a way that’s the central drama of her life. She was adopted at birth by a family of brunette right-brain types; her father and brother are both chemical engineers. But being adopted isn’t the mystery; Ms. Chenoweth bristles when it’s assumed that kids who were adopted, lacking something central in their lives, need to be “found.”

“Well what if we don’t want to be found?” she said indignantly, adding that various people claiming to be her birth parents have recently materialized, seeking money. “Nobody ever thinks of that on Sally Jessy Raphael.”

The real mystery is how talent arises, and flourishes, in the middle of nowhere. Yes, there was always music in church, and yes, the Chenoweths, though baffled, indulged their daughter, buying the piano, paying for the dance lessons, driving to Tulsa for every recital. But little Kristi Dawn came equipped with something fierce and inexplicable, rather like faith. When, at 10, she was playing a rabbit in “The Nutcracker” and a vine fell onstage, preventing a scene change, her hours spent mulling rabbit behavior paid off. She hopped over to the vine and dragged it offstage in her mouth.

“The audience went ballistic,” she recalled beatifically. “And when I got offstage, the head of the Tulsa Ballet said, ‘Who’s my smart bunny?’ and I said, ‘Kristi! It’s Kristi!’ And that changed my life.”

It wasn’t just the approbation. She had experienced that star-making moment when alienation and empathy, both formerly experienced as painful, fuse into ecstatic pleasure and thus a lifelong mission. You are lifted up but also away. “I hate to say it made me a loner,” Ms. Chenoweth said, “but I did learn that there’s nobody else to rely on but you.”

That realization may be why performers tend to dally with their own kind. Ms. Chenoweth’s well-publicized love affairs have been with creative types, including the television auteur Aaron Sorkin, the violinist Joshua Bell and the actor Marc Kudisch, to whom she was engaged for several years and who now (“full circle,” she said) plays the Snake to her Eve in Act I of “The Apple Tree.”

In that playlet, based on Mark Twain’s “Diary of Adam and Eve,” the familiar story of Eden is given a gently touching turn, the point of which, Ms. Chenoweth said, is that “you don’t pick who you fall in love with.” She was referring, at least in part, to Adam, played by Brian d’Arcy James. “You may think you can, or should, but you can’t.”

Probably Mr. Sorkin was also on her mind. He wrote Ms. Chenoweth her role on “The West Wing” and then, after they broke up, asked if he could create a character based on her for “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.”

“I said O.K.,” she recalled. “I was happy to give him that gift. And I watch every week because I’m supportive of Aaron; whether we’re together or not, I love him always. I think it’s a genius show. But ...” She paused. Harriet Hayes, played by Sarah Paulson, is a multitalented star, a sexy born-again Christian and something of an intolerant pill. “It is weird,” Ms. Chenoweth continued, “when I see her behaving in ways that are different from me. I’m really not that judgmental girl. But you have to let artists go where they go.”

She sounded wistful, not insulted. How people take the raw material of their lives and turn it into their work — and the impossibility of predicting how it will end up — are mysteries she respects. If the sitcom with Nathan Lane, about a pair of talk show hosts like Regis and Kelly, is picked up, how will she juggle it with playing the Madeline Kahn role in the stage musical adaptation of “Young Frankenstein,” scheduled for October 2007? And how will that affect the Dusty Springfield biopic and her concert gigs around the country and her Met debut proper, in 2010, as Samira in John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles”? And what about her intention, if she isn’t married soon, to adopt a baby?

“I realize this makes me sound insane,” she said, “but knowing there is a higher power and a plan gives me peace. Of course there have been times when God’s plan didn’t match up with mine” — as, for instance, when she tumbled backward off a stage platform during a tech rehearsal for “The Apple Tree” and banged herself up good.

Ms. Chenoweth continued the rehearsal. Of course. And if she had to wear a neck brace, it’s likely that within a few hours it was totally BeDazzled.

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