rare find; Broadway's newest darling, Alison Pill, squares off against Bobby Cannavale in Mauritius, writes Adam Green.

Byline: Adam Green

I am sitting across the table at a theater hangout from the lovely-OK, adorable-21-year-old actress Alison Pill, who is explaining her knack for getting under a character's skin. "I always think that I'm just like my character and that my character is just like me, which I'm sure can be a little alarming for people who know me," she says. Her hair pulled back to accentuate her wide eyes and snub nose, she seems more like your friend's precocious kid sister than a preternaturally accomplished performer.

In her brief career, Pill has won critical hosannas, been nominated for a Tony, and scared the bejesus out of New York audiences in a series of life-or-death showdowns with dangerous men. As a trigger-happy Irish tomboy in 2006's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, she wound up in a Mexican standoff with her I.R.A. terrorist boyfriend. In last season's punishing Blackbird, she played a young woman confronting the middle-aged man with whom she had an affair at twelve. Now, in Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius, Pill returns as a wounded, scrappy girl locked in a battle royal with three bullying philatelists and one double-dealing half-sister over some rare stamps. "I love playing these intense characters who are not easily likable and are driven to fight," Pill says. "It's great therapy."

A native of Toronto, Pill made her stage debut at nine, screaming, "You drank blood, Abby!" in The Crucible, and went on to a TV career, playing, she says, "everybody's daughter." After high school, she moved to New York and landed the part of an amoral hottie in Neil LaBute's play The Distance from Here. Since then, she's won a reputation as a performer who inhabits her roles so fully that, as Ben Brantley wrote, "you're afraid she may lose herself there."

With Mauritius, Pill will be losing herself in a ferociously entertaining ensemble piece that bristles with the energy of a playwright hitting her stride. A former writer for NYPD Blue, ...