In the wake of My Girl and its 1994 sequel, roles for the young actor grew scarce. “I thought I was done with show business,” Chlumsky admits during a break from rehearsing her latest project, Marissa Kamin’s dark high-school comedy The Fabulous Life of a Size Zero. “I had all the negatives of the industry rushing into me, and none of the positives were around anymore.” So after graduating from the University of Chicago, she moved to New York and passed through a period she refers to as her “prelife crisis”: writing about food and travel, working for the Zagat organization, editing sci-fi and fantasy books. “It was really fun on paper,” she says. “But for some reason I wasn’t at peace.”

The acting bug, she realized, would not stop buzzing in her ear. “One day, after a whole bunch of mayhem and crying, I was like, All right, I need to get back into show business,” Chlumsky recalls. Her family, which has long roots in entertainment—her grandfather and his wrestling bear were an opening act for the Three Stooges for years—gave her good advice on the subject. “When I got back in the business, my father told me, ‘Never tell anyone you’re not working,’ ” she says. “So I just did theater anywhere I could, with anybody that would let me be up on a stage.”

And Chlumsky does mean anywhere. Now 26, the articulate and still-adorable actor has had no qualms about starting at the bottom, and her résumé reads like a receipt for the Off-Off dues she has paid: from low-budget classical theater (The Changeling, The Trojan Women) to such gross-out romps as Twelfth Night of the Living Dead. (“It’s super humbling to get the biggest laugh you’ve ever gotten just by drooling blood onstage.”) Things have been picking up: On television, she has played a bad nanny on Law & Order, and Tina Fey’s romantic rival—a.k.a. “the Other Liz”—on 30 Rock; she has also landed starring roles in the upcoming CW sitcom Eight Days a Week and an indie satirical-horror flick called Blood Car.

This constant flow of work, she says, is helping her mature as an actor. “To make the transition from kid to adult, you need to learn some kind of craft,” she observes. “Acting has to be truthful, and kids are truthful by nature. But when you’re an adult you’ve got all this crap, all this baggage. You learn the craft so you can become like a kid again onstage.”

The Fabulous Life of a Size Zero is playing at DR2 through Jul 1.