“It was a very long time ago, and certainly it was a very difficult piece to do,” she said. “It was a baptism of sorts. I worked with lots of really great actors, but I couldn’t have chosen something more difficult, and I learned a lot.”

Ms. Thurman said she had been looking for years for an opportunity to return to the stage.

“I’ve given my whole life to performance; many of the pieces I’ve done have been very dramatic and rehearsed,” Ms. Thurman said. “That’s the part I’ve enjoyed the most — the exploration of language, the theatricality — and I’m looking forward to something of real depth and complexity.”

“The Parisian Woman” has been in the works for years and is being revised for Broadway. The Flea Theater, a small Off Off Broadway nonprofit, commissioned it in 2011 from Mr. Willimon, a onetime Democratic political operative whose “Farragut North” ran Off Broadway in 2008 and was adapted for film three years later, directed by George Clooney under the title “The Ides of March.”

In 2012 the new play, at the time with the film director Joel Schumacher attached, was looking for a larger theater than the Flea, and Mr. Willimon said that Broadway was one possibility. But the project instead went in a different direction; in 2013 it was staged at South Coast Repertory in Southern California, directed by Pam MacKinnon, with Dana Delany in the title role. It received mixed but encouraging reviews.

Ms. Thurman said that Ms. MacKinnon, a Tony Award-winning director whom she met through a mutual acquaintance, suggested that she read “The Parisian Woman.”