and from the world of theatre.....

In the NYTimes (reg. req.)....

Kristin Davis plays a death-row inmate... In unrelated, but equally odd casting DME editor new speedo model...

The skinny: Kristin Davis has made the leap from ingenuous gal about town in HBO's "Sex and the City" to death-row inmate as Sunny Jacobs in the play "The Exonerated."

Yoga prowess aside, there is not much common ground between the glossy life experience enjoyed by Kristin Davis, instantly recognizable as Charlotte York, the ingenuous component of that gals-on-the-prowl quartet in HBO's "Sex and the City," and the egregious life experience endured by Sunny Jacobs, the death-row inmate Ms. Davis now portrays nightly downtown in the play "The Exonerated."

...Sunny went to prison in Florida in 1976 for 16 years, 7 of them spent in solitary confinement, after being falsely convicted, with her husband, of shooting two police officers. He was electrocuted for the crime. Wrenched away from her two young children, she was exonerated in 1992, more than a decade after another man confessed to the killings. She taught herself yoga in prison and now teaches it to others.

..."Terrifying — I was afraid I'd bring the whole play down," chirps Ms. Davis, more vivacious than va-voom. But she's already plotting another Sunny stint after this one concludes on Feb. 9. "The Exonerated," she says, hooks you in. More mind-boggling than those orgasms the "Sex and the City" girls are forever chattering about? Much.

"It's so intimidating to read people's real words, and you kind of want to try to live up to it and do justice to them, if that's even possible for an actor to do," she says, her brown eyes gone wide from the effort of communicating the connection she has come to feel to Ms. Jacobs after reading a rash of court transcripts.

"The message of the play, and I hope I don't cry as I say this, is that it takes a lot to be alive, and to be open," says Ms. Davis, 37, striking a sober pose on her living room sofa. "It's not a downer about capital punishment. Really, it's about a joyous kind of overcoming of the odds; the people in the play went through an unthinkable experience and have grown from it." ....