Janeane Garofalo, the tell-it-like-it-is comedian-actress who rejects Hollywood's glamour culture -- and has earned a loyal following for it -- will star in a new, untitled Off-Broadway comedy in spring 2000.

Jon Steingart and Jenny Wiener of Mosaic Entertainment will produce the small-cast new comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire (Fuddy Meers).

"Janeane had come to us, so we've been looking for an appropriate writer and an appropriate piece," Wiener told Playbill On-Line Sept. 14. The producers hooked Garofalo up with Lindsay-Abaire and they clicked, and the work has been written with the former "Saturday Night Live" actress in mind. Among Garofalo's films are "Mystery Men" and "The Truth About Cats and Dogs."

The playwright told Variety the work is "about a woman desperately trying to escape a world of squelched dreams, equipped with little more than a sliver of hope and brazen caustic wit."

Christopher Ashley (Communicating Doors, Voices in the Dark) will direct. Mosaic's Steingart and Wiener have produced God Said, "Ha!" on the West Coast and in New York. In the wings for Mosaic is the October Films feature, "Thick as Thieves," with Alec Baldwin, and the fall 1999 Off-Broadway staging of Kenneth Lonergan's The Lobby. No theater has been announced for The Lobby or the new Lindsay-Abaire piece. Before the 2000 Garofalo project premiere, Lindsay-Abaire will see his Fuddy Meers debut in a staging by Manhattan Theatre Club, Oct. 12 Dec. 12. Mark McKinney and J. Cameron-Smith star in the comedy about an amnesiac trying to make sense of the world.

-- By Kenneth Jones