NEW YORK, June 13 -- The Hudson Theatre is ten blocks from Madison Square Garden, which is not a meaningful distance unless you have just finished a one-woman Broadway show and your basketball team is down to a Western Conference juggernaut by twenty-nine points. Mariska Hargitay made the run on Wednesday night. By the time she reached her courtside seat the deficit was shrinking, the building was deafening, and the actress who has played a New York detective for twenty-six years was about to spend the next two hours behaving like a fan who had never played one.

Hargitay performed both the matinee and evening shows of Every Brilliant Thing, her one-woman play at the Hudson, and made the ten-block dash to MSG after curtain, The Hollywood ...