MORE.(The Talk of the Town)

What you don't know about Yeardley Smith is probably a lot. She itemized examples last week, before a rehearsal for her autobiographical one-woman play, "More" (which she wrote), at the Union Square Theatre: "You don't know that I was in 'She-Devil,' with Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep, because all my scenes were cut out. You don't know that I did a remake of 'Journey to the Center of the Earth'--Emo Philips was in it--because the film was never released. You don't know that I was in 'Say Anything,' with John Cusack, because I got fired before they started shooting and the producer's daughter got my role." You also don't know about her steady work in a number of television pilots, because "they didn't go." She concluded, "In the last decade, the luck of the draw? Not so lucky."

That's one way of looking at it. But you could also say that Smith's very specific, yet not uncommon, childhood dream (which comes up several times in "More")--of being a world-famous star, besieged by adoring fans, and decked out in a strapless gown and opulent jewels--has been abundantly fulfilled. For the past fifteen years, Smith has played a leading role in "The Simpsons," as the voice of Lisa Simpson, the girl Hamlet of suburbia. As Lisa, she appears nightly on millions of TV screens around the globe, dressed in the very getup that she pictured as a kid: a strapless gown (even if it's red, not gold lame, as she had hoped) and an elegant necklace (a pearl choker, alas, not diamonds). She even won an Emmy, in 1992, although, since it was just a voice-over Emmy, nobody noticed. She hid the award in a closet for nine years.

Lately, though, she has been taking her Emmy to work. If you've seen a woman on the subway carrying a D'Agostino bag with gold wings poking out the top, it was probably Smith. The statuette is a prop in the play. ("I have to carry it in every day, because we don't have a safe for it," she explained.) It appears in the segment about a group-therapy class she took called "Shame," in which participants were asked to act ...