FIVE CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN ACTOR

"Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs." —The brittle Elyot Chase in Private Lives, by Noël Coward

"I guess you could say that heaven's where you are when you ain't here no more." —C.C. Showers, the backsliding preacher, in The Diviners, by Jim Leonard, Jr.

Treat Williams is an actor with range. Whether he is a beatific hippie (Hair), a corrupt cop (Prince of the City), a W.W.II ace (1941), or a brutish Stanley Kowalski (the recent television production of A Streetcar Named Desire), only his signature bushy eyebrows seem to remain the same. This year sees him playing a seducer in the film of Joyce Carol Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and singing, dancing, and starring in Michael Bennett's upcoming theatrical adventure, Scandal, in which he portrays a positive flurry of bushy-browed types, including a rock-'n'-roll singer and a Chippendales-style stripper.

"I seem to look for characters that have an internal or external conflict," he says.

Here, in the first of an occasional series wherein Vanity Fair plays casting director to the stars, Williams essays the five important roles he has always harbored a Walter Mittyish desire to fill. And who knows? Future issues might reveal Robert De Niro's Othello, Larry Hagman's Hamlet, or even Barbra Streisand's Cyrano de Bergerac.

"Don't touch me! "Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!" — Estragon, the disoriented tramp, in Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett

"Friends, Countrymen and Brooklynites, lend me your faith! I gotta have yourfaith, you gotta give me faith! 1 want the best for you, and l know best!

— The dictatorial Arturo-Uiin The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, by Bertolt Brecht

"It's a fine end to all my scheming, to sit here with the dead hugged to my breast, and the silly mug of the moon grinning down, enjoying the joke!"

— The manlyJosie in A Moon for the Misbegotten, by Eugene O'Neill