Zoe Kazan hasn’t had a vacation since June. That might sound like a bad thing, but for an actor, especially one just a few years out of college, it’s actually pretty great.

After making her Off-Broadway début in 2006 in the New Group’s production of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Ms. Kazan has had three back-to-back gigs this fall. First was “100 Saints You Should Know” at Playwrights Horizons, followed by “Things We Want,” again at the New Group. Currently, she is making her Broadway debut in the Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba.” In between her theater projects, she shot “Revolutionary Road,” in which she plays Maureen Grube, the earnest, somewhat pitiable secretary with whom Frank Wheeler (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) has an affair.

Onstage, what is most striking about Ms. Kazan is her naturalness. Unlike a lot of young actors, she doesn’t try too hard, and she seems very comfortable onstage, even in a long nude scene, such as she had in “Miss Jean Brodie.”

In person, what’s striking is how clearly she knows what she wants. Having grown up around the movie business — her grandfather was the director Elia Kazan, and her parents are both screenwriters — Ms. Kazan knows what happens to young women who ride their looks and pert sexiness to early fame: Eventually, they get dropped.

After graduating from Yale in 2004, Ms. Kazan moved to New York, intending to “live” for a year and then go to graduate school in acting. An agent at the Gersh Agency had seen in her a play in Los Angeles and said to let her know if she did anything in New York. When she did a reading with Kathleen Chalfant, the L.A. agent sent a colleague from Gersh’s New York office, Jennifer Konawal. Although she wasn’t looking for an agent at the time, Ms. Kazan said in a recent interview, she and Ms. Konawal clicked so well that she decided to work with her.

She “understood who I was, and more important, didn’t misunderstand who I was,” Ms. Kazan said. “I had met with a manager before who said, ‘We need to get you sexier pictures’; ‘We need to sell you as x, y, z …’ [But] she wasn’t looking to sell me as anything,” she said. “We agreed on what actors we would like my career to be like and what actors we didn’t want my career to be like.”

Asked to elaborate, she said: “There have been a lot of girls over the 120-year history of the movie business who get disposed of when they hit a certain age.” The problem isn’t talent, she added, but being mismanaged. “I think it’s extremely dangerous to be labeled as an ‘It’ Girl, or even as a pretty girl,” she said. “I want to be working until I can’t work anymore.” The stage roles she has played so far have been very different, ranging from Sandy, the smart, plain girl who ultimately brings about Miss Brodie’s downfall, to Marie in “Little Sheba,” the pretty young boarder whose sexuality shatters the fragile peace of the Delaneys’ marriage. If Sandy is too cerebral and self-conscious for her own good, Marie is just the opposite. “Marie has this one line where she says: ‘I’m sort of glad I never knew my father. Mom always let me do pretty much as I pleased,'” Ms. Kazan said. “That’s it, that’s all the personal history you get. And I felt like there’s a reason for that: When someone doesn’t talk about the bad things that have happened to them, it can be out of shame, but [it can also be] an unwillingness to look at yourself.”

She added: “Michael [Pressman, the director] and I sat down and talked about, ‘Oh, girls who have no father figure often learn to ask for love from men in a way that’s sexualized, because their primary relationships with men are sexual. So she’s asking for fatherly love from Doc, but she’s asking for it in this sexual way, and she’s not aware of that.”

The research she did for “Revolutionary Road” on the 1950s — particularly on the sexual icons women of the period tried to model themselves after — came in handy for “Little Sheba,” as well. “I looked at Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield,” she said. Maureen is “a small-town girl coming to the big city, getting her hair specially cut and picking out the right clothes.” When handsome Frank Wheeler starts pursuing her, Maureen falls for him, and she is devastated when he breaks off their affair.

“I felt really protective of her,” Ms. Kazan said of Maureen. “I didn’t want anybody else to play her, because I felt someone else might make fun of her.”

After “Little Sheba” closes, Ms. Kazan is planning to take a break. She had been cast as Iris Allen in the DC Comics movie “Justice League of America,” but, according to reports by entertainment outlets, that movie has been put on indefinite hold due to the writers’ strike.

Ms. Kazan and Ms. Konawal are also waiting for the strike to end to start submitting two screenplays Ms. Kazan has written. Asked if she would like to collaborate with her parents someday — her father wrote “Reversal of Fortune,” and her mother most recently wrote and directed “The Jane Austen Book Club” — she said she might.

“I didn’t want to start my career by working with my parents,” she said. “That’s an invitation to cruelty.”