Canadian-born actor Alison Pill is making her mark in the New York theatre world. (Scott Wintrow/Getty Images)

Alison Pill whisks through the stage door of New York City Center, looking more like a teenager showing up for a tennis lesson than the star of an off-Broadway play. She is wearing a tank top and scraggly jean shorts and her nose is stuck in the paperback Dead Until Dark, a vampire mystery she started earlier in the day and is already halfway through.

“Alan Ball’s doing a series based on it for HBO and my friend is in it,” she explains as she stuffs the novel in her scuffed-up pocketbook. “[The book] is kind of trashy, but it’s good. It’s pretty sexy for teens.” When I suggest that she is going through her own pretty-sexy-for-teens moment, the 21-year-old cackles appreciatively. “Yeah, I’m all about the vaguely inappropriate these days.”

Pill is currently co-starring in Blackbird, David Harrower’s deceptively spare drama about the long-term effects of child sexual abuse. Pill plays Una, a young woman who confronts Ray (an exquisite Jeff Daniels), the man she had an affair with when he was 40 and she was 12. As those numbers would suggest, their tryst has wrought insurmountable pain; there’s plenty of ground to cover in the play’s 90 jittery minutes.

One day, while in a doctor’s office, Una opens a trade magazine and sees a picture of Ray — now “Peter.” She drives six hours and shows up unannounced at his office. After serving a prison sentence, Ray moved to a new town and assembled a new life — he now works at a nondescript pharmaceutical company, wears cheap suits and tells nobody his real name, or what he’s been through. Una, on the other hand, has stayed put. (The town where Una lives is never revealed — nor, for that matter, is the country.) Una has turned into a self-described “ghost,” forced to withstand the glares of her fellow citizens and unable to make any of her relationships work.

Una and Ray haven’t seen each other in the last 15 years, but the damage inflicted by their tryst hasn’t abated in the slightest. By the end of the play, it’s unclear what Una came in search of — revenge or salvation.

Pill was sent the Blackbird script last year, when she was appearing in Martin McDonagh’s black comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore. “When I first read Blackbird, I said, ‘There’s no way I can play a 27-year-old. Have they even seen me?’” Pill recalls, sitting erect in a seat in her dressing room, a bare-bones suite that she has decorated with a stack of Atlantic Monthly back issues, a bulk-size box of Emergen-C packets and a cot for between-show naps. “This role is so hard, in so many ways, and I just couldn’t fathom jumping on board to something so intense.”

Pill, seated, appears with Jeff Daniels in David Harrower's play Blackbird at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. (Joan Marcus/Manhattan Theatre Club)

All it took was one audition with director Joe Mantello for Pill to decide that she ardently wanted to play Una. The producers, however, weren’t immediately convinced that the scrawny, moon-faced Pill had a womanly enough aspect to pull off the role. It took some persuading before the producers were sure that her acting ability justified casting her. “We all discovered I become another person,” Pill says, shaking her elbow-length hair out of its high ponytail, “so it worked out.”

The 21-year-old Toronto native started out as a serious ballet student, but moved into acting at the age of 11 after realizing she had no chance of making it as dancer. She enrolled in a professional children’s school that allowed her to take on film and television work, and while her financier father held down the fort, she and her mother travelled around the country so Pill could appear in a variety of Canadian film and television productions.

Her big break was being cast as Katie Holmes’s sister in the film Pieces of April in 2003; she appeared alongside Lindsay Lohan in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen a year later. Since then, Pill has moved to New York’s East Village and had her pick of productions, from Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme film Dear Wendy to a Neil LaBute play about violent parents to a Steve Carell romantic comedy due out this fall. Last year Pill’s career got another lift when her performance in Lieutenant of Inishmore was nominated for a Tony.

Pill says that her role in Blackbird is, in many ways, her hardest yet. “Not just the magnitude of it, but not being able to leave the stage and regroup,” she says, as her character is onstage for the entire duration of the play. “There were a couple of early shows when I walked on and, after a few minutes, I wanted to walk off and start over again.”

To prepare for the role, Pill researched the effects of childhood abuse and sexual addiction. “I had to look at this relationship as a past thing between two lovers and try not to judge it the way I wanted to,” she says, fiddling with a hair elastic around her wrist. “It’s very hard to still feel complete adoration for this man, despite the fact that you know this girl’s life is ruined, and that no matter what, she’s still connected to him.”

As Una and Ray hash out what happened, we come to see Ray isn’t the prototypically creepy child molester. He doesn’t even fit the bill for a pedophile — he just happened to fall prey to one 12-year-old’s persistence. He first met Una at a barbecue at her parents’ house; she was sitting by herself and pouting, subtly angling for his attention. “You were a neighbour’s daughter who was annoyed at the world that day,” Ray tells her, going on to remind her of all the other ways she used her charms to lasso him: sticking notes under his windshield wiper, calling his then-girlfriend names, crouching in the bushes and beckoning to him through the branches.

“I think she’s sane,” Pill says of her character, “I think she’s completely sane, but she just has this desire, like so many people do, to figure out why it was so easy for him to leave her. And I think that is something universal. She’s funny and she’s interesting and she’s smart and she’s sarcastic, but at the same time, she’s never stopped being 12.”

The play unfolds with frequent tone shifts and hairpin turns, without an intermission. Though the characters keep coughing up the word “abuse,” it’s hard to believe either of them sees what happened as a clear-cut example of it. Harrower has said that he was inspired to write the play after reading about Toby Studabaker, an American ex-marine who ran off with a 12-year-old girl he met on the internet. Blackbird premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2005. Last year it opened in London’s West End, where it beat out Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll and Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon for the Laurence Olivier award for best new play.

Pill and Daniels use all their powers to keep this pas de deux evenhanded. Their body language speaks volumes — with hunched shoulders and slumped limbs, Daniels is the personification of bottled-up rage and middle-age submission. Una jerks around awkwardly, clutching her purse close to her stomach. She is so tightly wound, the audience can practically feel the knots in her back.

“That’s something I love in theatre,” says Pill, who sits stock-still during the duration of our interview, with one of her legs wrapped around the other like a vine. “You are acting with your whole body, and your shoulders are up to your ears. During the first week of previews, my Pilates teacher said, ‘OK, we’re not going to do much today, because your neck has disappeared into your shoulders.’” She laughs. “It’s gotten a little better, but it’s pretty taxing.”

In the play, the word “pedophile” is never spoken, but it comes out of the characters’ mouths, anyway, in the form of pauses and ellipses. Shifting from clinical to romantic, their 90-minute encounter probes a string of uncomfortable questions: What if Ray really isn’t inclined to pounce on children? What if he and Una had truly been in love? What if they still are?

After a recent performance, an audience member, a victim of child abuse herself, approached Pill to tell her how the production had resonated with her. “We were just talking about how this feels like love to these children,” Pill says. “And that at the end of the day, this was a first love, and you can’t take that away.”

Lauren Mechling is a New York writer.

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