Elaine Stritch is the quintessential Broadway veteran, going strong in her ninth decade -- one of a kind.

She'll be in Pittsburgh this weekend to do her ample one-woman "Elaine Stritch at Liberty" as a benefit for Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre. A combination of career highlights and autobiographical striptease, it's a full-measure mix of comic reminiscence, rueful confession, tart opinion, prideful survival and lots of music, with a surprisingly dramatic core. It's one of a kind, too.

Who wouldn't want to meet the legendary Stritch, or "Strrr-itchy!" as Noel Coward used to call her with imperious familiarity? It's also a test, because she really is a prickly national treasure, famed as much for not suffering fools as for seizing the spotlight with talent and experience.

So, anticipating a day in New York last week on other business, I requested an audience through her voice mail at the equally legendary Hotel Carlyle. (Living at a hotel -- how sophisticated is that!) Don't call before mid-afternoon, I was told.

Back came word that late afternoon tea would be possible. But the day before, it turned out she had been summoned to a distant borough to shoot an installment of "30 Rock," in which she's won an Emmy for playing Alec Baldwin's mother, showing she can triumph in that medium, too.

So on the day itself, I kept myself ready, roaming midtown Manhattan, marking time at the Drama Book Shop, trading phone messages. It was touch-and-go whether the timing would work, since she had a Broadway opening (of course) to attend that night.

It never did work out, but maybe I was relieved. Safely back in Pittsburgh, doing the interview by phone a few days later, I could feel her no-nonsense barbs over long distance. It's hard to find the right balance between admiration and provocation.

"Elaine Stritch at Liberty," with a script co-authored by John Lahr, New Yorker theater critic, playwright and profiler of the stars, played to great applause on Broadway in 2002. Then Stritch took it on the road to London and other American cities.

Was it one-night stands, I incautiously asked. "Not at all! Four weeks, six weeks, what the traffic would allow," she corrected. And how much of it will you do in Pittsburgh? "All of it," she snapped.

In fact, she denies that reactions to the show differ by region. "There were good houses, medium houses, better houses. But I don't believe people respond differently and I don't vary my performance."

Doesn't the degree of sophistication vary? Aren't some cities more savvy?

"I don't find that one single bit. Oh, maybe there are a few people in Milwaukee who have never heard of me, but once I get off the stage, they know who I am."

I paused to catch up on my note-taking. "I'm surprised you aren't recording this," she said. My machine's on the fritz, I started to explain. "Don't tell me your problems," she cut me off. "I have enough of my own."

Those problems are much of the stuff of her entertaining, tartly frank show. Show-biz anecdotes provide most of the fun, considering that she worked with Coward, Ethel Merman, Erwin Piscator, George Abbott, Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim, you name it. The dark comes from alcoholism that began in her teenage years and from failed love relationships. Like "Zip," the wry Rodgers and Hart showstopper she sings, her show is skilled comedy, promising a surface striptease but delivering an unexpected view of her mind and heart.

Other songs also serve as frames for extended sequences, such as the show-opening "There's No Business Like Show Business," studded with funny anecdotes, including one about the Trinity Theater in McKeesport. The songs inevitably include two by Sondheim -- "The Ladies Who Lunch," which Stritch famously sang in the 1970 premiere of "Company," and "I'm Still Here," which she never sang in "Follies" but could serve as her personal anthem.

"I'm not touring to make a name for myself," she says. "I don't need the money. The only reason is to have an effect on people and say something that might help their lives."

Basically, that's to get up and go and be less hard on yourself. She hopes to provide "inspirational courage -- delivered with a lot of entertaining stuff. I wouldn't dare to try to get anything across to an audience if the entertainment value had to suffer. I don't teach anybody a lesson unless it's with a big laugh, and maybe the message tunes in a day or two later."

On the whole, she says she's as comfortable in one medium as another. "I don't care, as long as it's a good part." But in a Broadway career going back to 1946, her favorites aren't the musicals for which she's mainly known, but "Delicate Balance" and "Bus Stop."

"I love straight plays better than musicals. They're less work. Musicals? Forget about it! They're very, very hard work.

Not that hard work scares her -- witness her solo show. Pittsburgh is in for a treat.