NEW YORK — The last time Alison Pill was on stage, she gave a searing portrait of a woman confronting the man who sexually abused her.

In the play before that, she was a wannabe Irish terrorist who shoots three men's eyes out and ends up soaked in blood.

This time, she's in a nice, quiet play about stamps.

Well, not exactly.

In "Mauritius," Pill finds herself in yet another multilayered, challenging role — a young woman looking for a new start by selling a potentially valuable stamp collection. This being a Pill project, though, it's not all that placid — as is clear from the dark bruises on her arms from all the on-stage tussles.

"It's fun," she says happily. "In this one, I get to stand up to people and figure out a conclusion for myself on my character's own terms."

Pill's turn in Theresa Rebeck's "Mauritius" follows roles in David Harrower's "Blackbird" earlier this year, and her Tony Award-nominated run last year in Martin McDonagh's "The Lieutenant of Inishmore."

"They're such a dream to play," she says. "The reason I play them is because those parts are the most interesting — and damaged in so many different ways. Dealing with the way different people deal with damage is really fascinating."

The darkness of the parts seems to belie the actress herself: a long-limbed, cherub-faced blonde who is just 21, laughs easily and seems remarkably down-to-earth.

She is predisposed to making up voices and mimicking accents — her Galway lilt from "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" is pitch perfect and works well in Irish bars. "Sometimes my non-actor friends will be like, 'Could you stop with the accents and the voices,"' she says, sheepishly. "I do accents that I make up for no apparent reason. It's fun. People forget how to play. It should be remembered."

Her looks and talent have sparked a thriving film career, with roles in "Pieces of April" and "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen."

Pill, who began her career as a ballet dancer and later found her way into acting without formal training, has even tackled a TV series, NBC's now-cancelled "The Book of Daniel." But the transplanted Canadian, who now makes her home in Manhattan's East Village, keeps returning to the stage, as much for the cash as for the thrill.

"The parts out there in film, a lot of times are a little more simplistic for people my age," she says. "There's not as much poetry in the language. You don't get to play with words as much."

That's good news for people like Mandy Greenfield, associate artistic director for production at Manhattan Theatre Club, which has produced Pill's last two plays.

"These are not easy things to step into," says Greenfield. "It's almost, in a weird way, that the harder it is, the more attracted she is to it."

Greenfield first met Pill when she auditioned for "Blackbird," watching with a huge measure of respect as a relatively young actress commanded the stage and made her feel like she was hearing the dialogue for the first time.

"What she can access and what she can unleash in herself is exceptionally rare for an actress not only of her age but her relative experience," Greenfield adds. "She's incapable of emotional dishonesty on stage."

Sometimes that honesty comes with a cost for Pill. "I have such compassion for my characters that sometimes I just don't want them to go through what they're going through," she says.

Pill won a Drama Desk Award as part of the ensemble of Neil LaBute's "The Distance From Here" in 2004 and starred in an off-Broadway production of "None of the Above."

Her latest role puts Pill in the middle of a roiling five-person drama centered on two potentially rare stamps from the nation of Mauritius. Pill's character, Jackie, who has watched her mother die of cancer, wants to sell the little slips of paper, but must first grapple with a shady buyer, a talkative broker, a mousy expert and her own estranged half-sister.

Joining Pill on stage are Bobby Cannavale, F. Murray Abraham, Dylan Baker and Katie Finneran. Pill says she's happy to have the company after the "two-person horror show" of "Blackbird" opposite Jeff Daniels, where she played an abuse victim.

"You know, no matter how well we got along, it wasn't really the play where you wanted to go for a post-show drink with your castmember," she says. "The last thing we wanted to do was look at each other. This one, I'm having such a blast with these actors."

Rebeck, the playwright of "Mauritius," had watched Pill in her previous plays and said she yearned for the young actress to become her Jackie.

"You need an actress who is willing to inhabit that darkness very, very fully," Rebeck says. "There's a ferocity about her that inhabits both the vulnerability and the rage."

Not all is dark in Pill's career. Movie audiences will get a chance later this month to see her in the comedy "Dan in Real Life" starring Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche and Dane Cook. During filming in Rhode Island, she was joined by other stage veterans Dianne Wiest, John Mahoney, Amy Ryan, Norbert Leo Butz and Jessica Hecht.

"The theatrical community was raided," she says.

Though she's not sure what her next theatrical step will be after "Mauritius," Pill does have some hopes. She'd like to take on the Bard, even if that means another tragedy.

"I've got to do some Shakespeare soon. Really. I would like to do something more classical at some point," Pill says. "It would be nice to interpret something older."