Annette Bening -- lady of the theater.

I don't mean to be cynical. OK, maybe I do.

I have just learned that Annette Bening will receive the Distinction in Theatre award at the Geffen Playhouse's "Backstage at the Geffen" gala on March 17. Robert Iger, president and CEO of the Walt Disney Co., will also be recognized.

Bening, who took home a special career achievement award for theater at the Ovations a couple months back, will be honored "in recognition of her seemingly inexhaustible vast commitment to the arts both on and off stage."

That would be primarily off stage.

Much is made of Ms. Bening's stage roots, her early days in San Diego and her training at ACT's Conservatory in San Francisco. She has exactly one Broadway credit: Tina Howe's "Coastal Disturbances" in 1987-88, and she got nominated for a Tony for it.

Yes, she has appeared on the Geffen stage, in a sold-out, month-long production of "Hedda Gabler" in 1999. There was a brief stint in a staged reading of Alan Bennet's "Talking Heads" a few years later and, in early 2006, a production of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" at the Mark Taper Forum with Alfred Molina.

In what seems to me a bit of irony, the institution that is recognizing Bening's "inexhaustible vast commitment to the arts" is the same non-profit theater that had to sub out the Broadway-bound production of Joanna Murray-Smith's The Female of the Species once Bening dropped out for personal reasons. Not recast. Replace. No Bening meant no "Female of the Species." That production has been replaced by "The Joan Rivers Theatre Project" which opens Feb. 13.

I am to understand that Bening and her husband, Warren Beatty, have done much to raise money for arts non profits including the Geffen and Center Theatre Group. So bravo that.

But I'm not sure whether three local stage appearances in nine years does "an inexhaustible vast commitment" make.