SHE'S A LONG WAY FROM CAPESIDE, the quaint and fictitious locale of Dawson's Creek. Tucked in a back booth at a grungy diner in Manhattan's West Village, Michelle Williams is sealing and stamping a parking ticket. "Call playhouse" is written in blue ink on the back of her left hand; in black, the time "4:45." As she reaches for a cigarette, the eighteen-year-old remembers picking up the habit, four years ago, "I thought I was going to die," she says. "I got all shaky and hot, and it's just horrendous. What makes you pick up another one?"

Quick transitions have become a way of life for Williams, who, two years back, suddenly found herself labeled a teen idol for her role as an urban bad-girl-trying to fit in among wholesome suburbanites, on the WB's adolescent smash Dawson's Creek. And judging by her variegated role choices of late, she seems eager to make another quick one. This month she stars in Dick, a whimsical comedy about two clueless girls who, after stumbling onto Watergate secrets, are hired by a paranoid Nixon to serve as his official dog walkers, Then there's the reason she's hanging out in Manhattan during her TV hiatus: Killer Joe, an off-Broadway black comedy in which she is sexually abused by an older man, blows away her trailer-trash brother and father, and strips naked for one especially brutal scene. She does this eight times a week.

Her teenage fan base probably won't see the play (it's "strongly recommended" for people over seventeen), and they probably won't get all the Dick jokes, either. But they'll certainly get a kick out of Williams's movie character, Arlene, a naive daydreamer who develops a Monica-size crush on Tricky Dick. "Arlene's the opposite of anything I've ever played," says Williams, who admits that "it was fun to revert to innocence, to sort of let go and allow myself to be silly." These indulgences included some far-out '70s outfits ("I'm not a big fan of color," she says, "so every day, it was like, 'Orange? Lime? Are you sure?'") and giggle fits with costar and friend Kirsten Dunst. "There was once scene with her where I was laughing so hard, I literally took a pushpin and stuck it into my thumb," she says.

Now here's a girl who isn't afraid of a little pain. Actually, pain seems at home in her perma-puffy eyes, the kind that always make her look as if she has just finished crying. Director Andrew Fleming points to a moment in Dick when the girls are shocked to hear their pal Nixon using foul language on a tape. "It's a quick scene," he says, "but Michelle injected this real sense of betrayal and hurt into it. She always added another emotional dimension to things."

It's a quality that her pal and Halloween H20 costar Jamie Lee Curtis understands. "I think we both saw in each other some sort of damaged person, and yet at the same time a triumphant person," says Curtis, herself a former teen star. "I haven't made a friend like Michelle in a long time."

Born in Montana, Williams moved with her parents and four siblings to San Diego when she was nine. At fifteen she was legally emancipated, and hightailed it to L.A. Although all adolescents have difficult relationships with their parents, Williams's recently hit a snag when hers showed up -- unannounced -- at Killer Joe. Her father, a commodities trader and "die-hard Republican" who once ran for Montana's state senate, wasn't prepared for the nudity. "He hated it," she says, her voice barely a whisper. "Doing this play is the best thing I've ever done -- it has been such a personal experience and has touched me in so many ways that to have it cut down by a parent is tough." She pauses. "The day after they came, I went on a therapist hunt."

She may need to go on a house search next. Williams, who has been crashing with friends while in New York, doesn't know where she'll go after the play ends. "I have no home," she says, referring as much to the apartment in L.A. that she shared with her boyfriend (the two broke up on Valentine's Day) as to the Dawson's Creek set, in North Carolina, where she spends ten months of the year. Since the show's young stars (James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, and Josh Jackson) have become distracted by individual movie deals, the atmosphere down there has changed. "Fame is weird," Williams says pensively. "Everybody thinks it's gonna last forever when it first hits, but you look at people's track records, and it doesn't. The scary thing is that I have nothing to fall back on," she says, a slight tremble in her voice. Then again, she adds, her voice stronger, "if I did, there would have been times when I would have fallen back."

Jill Bernstein