Here's Yeardley!

Twenty years ago, a teenage actress who'd been in New York only a few months made her Broadway debut, as Jeremy Irons' daughter in The Real Thing. She's just returned to the New York stage for the first time since then, with the new show More at the Union Square Theatre. In between she's become famous as a costar of the longest-running sitcom in TV history.

Or has she? Yeardley Smith's anxiety about being "on the fringe" of fame is just one of the afflictions she confesses to in More, an autobiographical solo show she wrote that is currently in previews and opens March 22. Despite her long-lasting stint as the voice of TV's Lisa Simpson and an Emmy award for the role—plus memorable scenes in a couple of Oscar-winning movies (As Good As It Gets, City Slickers) and regular roles on two other sitcoms (Dharma & Greg and Herman's Head)—Smith has never been quite famous enough for, say, a profile in People magazine. As she tells it in More, a People article was at one point proposed, then postponed and ultimately canceled because one of her TV series went off the air. (The gossip mag may come calling again now that she's gone public about her lifelong battles with bulimia and depression.)

Smith also shares an anecdote in More about another incident that reminded her of her non-A-list status. She attended the 2003 Golden Globe Awards as a nominee yet was seated with the rest of the Simpsons party out of the camera's range—next to "a table of agents and managers!"—and had to slink through the crowd to say hello to Cynthia Nixon (whom she had understudied and then replaced in The Real Thing back in 1984), who got to sit up front with the rest of the glamour gals from Sex and the City.

In a similar vein, Smith told me in an interview in her dressing room following a preview performance of More, when Tony-winning actress Judith Ivey came aboard as director of her stage show, those around her reacted with comments like "Oh, that gives it instant credibility! [Pause] But no offense, Yeardley." Ivey, who makes her New York directing debut with More, was introduced to Smith by their mutual agent. "She has an uncanny ability to describe what is in her head so you understand it and translate it into what you need to do," Smith says of her director. "And she's very detail-oriented, and never lets anything go by."

Smith says she'd been hankering to return to the New York theater for some time, though the closest she'd come before More was consideration—but not an actual audition—for the role of Columbia in the 2000 revival of The Rocky Horror Show (Joan Jett got the part). She hasn't done much high-profile stage work in Los Angeles either, because the leading theaters there "all want to do a show that will move to New York," Smith says, "so they're trying to get a name, or something that will hook the audience."  

She's had disappointments in Hollywood, too: A TV development deal with Norman Lear's company went nowhere, she was cast in Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo but couldn't do it because of a scheduling conflict, all her scenes were cut from She-Devil (she played Roseanne Barr's character as a teen), she was fired from Say Anything and, more recently, she came thisclose to the teacher role in The Lizzie McGuire Movie. (On the contrary, she says in More, Lisa Simpson was "the easiest job" she ever got.) Rejection has been especially difficult for such a "sucking vortex of need," as Smith describes herself in More. But she's had nearly as hard a time enjoying her success, since it never lived up to her childhood dreams of paparazzi-hounded superstardom.

"Personality disorder," Smith bluntly diagnoses for her audience on more than one occasion in More when she recalls sabotaging her own happiness. The "disorder" may have stemmed from growing up with a repressed mother and distant father, and may have been manifested most graphically by the bingeing-and-purging she started in adolescence and gave up only last year, but it was so insidious as to preclude virtually any satisfaction with relationships or work for most of her life.

Smith has been able to steady herself in the last few years, thanks to maturity (she turns 40 in July), remarriage and finally getting treatment for her eating disorder. "I don't let [anxiety] run me the way it used to," she says. "I don't need it to be out of my blood forever; I just need it not to possess me and grab me by the throat." In the past, she says, "I took a lot of those near misses personally. I thought, of course it has something to do with me, when really it's way more random than that."

Doing her solo show has helped, too. "I've become a better actor in the sense that I am less apt to panic when I have a quiet audience. I've learned to trust myself and not take their quiet energy on, even though for a moment it might scare me.... Five years ago I wouldn't have been able to handle that." Smith continues, "This show has been a great gift. I've created an opportunity that's been much more fulfilling than I ever imagined it would be."

She started writing her show about three years ago, motivated partly by a creative writing class she had taken and partly by her lack of new movie and TV roles. "Originally I hoped I would never have to perform it, because that would mean I needed the work," Smith says. She started developing it in earnest a little over a year ago and performed it last summer and fall in workshops and backers auditions in New York, Los Angeles and Martha's Vineyard. At an L.A. performance she attracted a producer: Kevin Schon—an actor who, like Smith, has made a living largely by voicing cartoons (although they hadn't met previously).

Initially conceived as a mock Barbara Walters interview, Smith's show is now a monologue staged on a fully decorated set resembling an attic full of boxes, scrapbooks and other belongings—appropriate surroundings as Smith literally and figuratively rifles through the memories of her life and career. She maintains a buoyant tone throughout More, even during such unsettling segments as her meticulous chronicle, from grocery store to toilet bowl, of an eating binge. "I wanted to tell my story without it seeming maudlin or so self-serving that there was no universal appeal," says Smith. "I wanted it to be funny."

Now that she's back on the boards, Smith hopes more theater is in her future. She's outgrown the one role she always wanted to play—the title character in The Bad Seed—but says, "I would love to be on stage with somebody else." In the meantime she gets to play a great role in one of the all-time great television series.

"If one is to be identified with one single character, I can do way worse [than Lisa Simpson]," says Smith, who keeps a cardboard cutout of her animated alter ego both on stage and in her dressing room. She speaks proudly of Lisa, the intellectual 8-year-old activist: "I really love her. She reveals a great deal of her soul and heart, she has a lot of integrity and wants to do the right thing and wants to connect with people, and she has a strong sense of what is human kindness. It's really extraordinary for a character who is two-dimensional."

And it's extraordinary for a TV landscape littered—particularly on The Simpsons' network, Fox—with reality shows, where anti-Lisas prevail. "The reality shows all seem to be based on bringing out the worst in human nature: how can we screw each other the most, how can I embarrass you the worst, how can I set you up and pull the rug out from under you," Smith says, adding with a smile: "Those shows could use a little Lisa Simpson."

 

Yeardley Smith photo by Jean-Marie Guyaux. Lisa Simpson picture TM and copyright Fox and The Simpsons; all rights reserved. 

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