Theresa Rebeck (Emily Anne Epstein for The Observer)

The NBC drama Smash, returning for its second season early next year, offered a backstage look at a fictional Broadway production. Much of the show’s dramatic tension involved the musical’s writers’ effort to tell an honest story in the face of intense market pressure.

Creator Theresa Rebeck didn’t realize it at the time, but she was also writing her own epitaph as the program’s showrunner.

Like the Broadway musical at its center, Smash was also subject to intense commercial forces. The first season’s finale, in which the newly minted star belts a tune called “Don’t Forget Me,” turned out to be Ms. Rebeck’s last episode. Her departure was announced in March.

She rebounded quickly. By June, Ms. Rebeck, a prominent playwright—her Mauritius ran on Broadway in 2007 and her Seminar in 2011—was headed back to the Great White Way with a new play, Dead Accounts, which opens Thursday at the Music Box Theatre. The story of a Cincinnati family dealing with the ghosts of the past, its production boasts a rather Smash-ian twist: it's the second Broadway production starring Katie Holmes.

Ms. Holmes is in the midst of a comeback of her own, having just survived the biggest and most contentious celebrity divorce of the past decade. That she’s chosen a serious turn on Broadway as her next chapter is particularly interesting, in that she is largely playing a supporting role.

“They just have to be able to act,” Ms. Rebeck said of casting celebrities. “I understand why it’s important to theaters to have actors of some visibility. I do. They just have to be really careful that it’s somebody that can do the part.”

Ms. Holmes’s character, Lorna, is quiet, small and very Midwestern, a compulsive dieter who receives a visit by her brother (played by two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz), back in town after a mysteriously lucrative time in New York.

It’s a little like Ms. Rebeck’s own experience, in fact—a quick return to the theater after her no doubt well-compensated, if creatively bruising, brush with prime-time television.

Smash, it should be noted, wasn’t just any show. Executive produced by Steven Spielberg, who had been developing the idea for years, it came with a reality-TV twist: if the musical within a series was deemed worthy, it would actually be produced on Broadway (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). The pilot, which is said to have cost NBC $7.5 million to produce, was heavily promoted during the Super Bowl. It was an event.

Reviews and ratings were solid, at first. But both began to take a negative turn as the weeks went on.

The problems on Smash, Ms. Rebeck said, stemmed from producers’ demands that the characters behave in ways their creator thought incoherent.

“One of the points of contention last year was that the network thinks they have the right to say to the writer of the show, ‘We don’t want her to do this. We want her to do this,’” Ms. Rebeck recalled. “And I would sometimes say back to them, ‘She would never do that.’ And they’d look at me like I was crazy, and I’d be like, ‘Nope, it’s not crazy, it’s just who the character is.’ You have to respect who the character is. It has its own internal truth and you can’t betray that. And if you don’t betray that, it will not betray you. There is this sort of sense that if you don’t fuck with the muse—if you don’t fuck with the muse, the muse will stand by you."

Ms. Rebeck compared her function on Smash to that of an architect, but noted that NBC viewed her more as a general contractor. “If they say, ‘Take the wall out,’ and you say, ‘I can’t take the wall out, the building will fall down’—but they don’t want to hear that! It turns into bigger questions about power and art, power and storytelling. Is power itself bigger than storytelling? And I would say no.”

Hardly an innocent when it comes to negotiating the tricky terrain of art and commerce, Ms. Rebeck was an Emmy nominee as a producer of NYPD Blue, and has plenty of experience balancing the dictates of the muse with the demands of network suits. “The better executives understand that there’s supposed to be tension and respect, but a lot of them are just like ‘Do it. You don’t own it. Just do it.’ That’s not a level playing field; you can’t have a true discussion. You just get a lot of money. Everybody has to make those choices. Absolutely everybody. Sometimes I see movies and go, ‘Oh. Ew. Did Julia Roberts need another $20 million? Because it’s the only reason she would be doing that.’ Why did that person do that? It must be for the money.”

Dead Accounts, which is set in Ms. Rebeck’s hometown of Cincinnati and was first produced in that city’s Playhouse in the Park, is about people rather like Ms. Rebeck’s family—or even herself, had she not made an early escape (she compared herself to Ms. Holmes’s character, who is less brilliant than hard-working). Both siblings deal with an ailing father, perpetually vacillating in health offstage, a meddling, overbearing mother who just wants everyone to be happy (played by Jayne Houdyshell), and shared memories that mean far more to sister than to brother. He’s left the region behind and would prefer not to be back at all.

Though Ms. Rebeck has a fondness for certain aspects of the Midwest, she came to the East Coast for college, attending Brandeis, and soon wound up in New York: “I really was the person who was desperate to get out of Ohio on some level,” she said.

The politics seem to have been especially grating—the abortion issue, for instance. “Somehow people got sold this bill of goods that as long as you are pro-life and other people are pro-choice, that gives you a sort of moral superiority,” she said. “You don’t have to think of anything else.”

Growing up, she said, she never quite fit in. “I was not really ‘of that place,’” she explained. “Then I came to New York, and I don’t really feel of this place either, though there’s certainly much more here that suits my temperament.”

Her temperament also lands her between two poles artistically—more pragmatic than most Pulitzer-nominated playwrights, yet artsier than many TV showrunners. “In the theater, it’s a kind of clubby environment,” she noted. “I didn’t go to an Ivy League. There’s a thing in New York: ‘Did you go to an Ivy?’ ‘Did you go to Yale?’ “Oh, you’re from the Midwest.’ ‘Oh, you’re a girl.’” With advanced degrees from Brandeis and limited interest in postmodernism and other dramaturgical trends, Ms. Rebeck felt out of place in the city, where she’d arrived with her then-boyfriend, now-husband in tow (he’s from Kansas).

“There were a lot of obstacles to overcome,” she went on, “but people seemed to respond to my plays. There was a place for them, but not really a place for me.”

Did it hurt her prospects, this outsider status?

“No,” she said. “It hurt my feelings. It didn’t hurt my career.”

Ms. Rebeck is very conscious of Eastern snobbery. Her family, her characters and her star (Ms. Holmes is from Toledo, a jaunt up I-75) all come in for mockery from pretentious city slickers.

“[Midwesterners] see the culture—and I have to say I don’t think they’re wrong about this aspect of it—as kind of degrading,” she said. “The way sexuality is portrayed, so much violence, the carelessness. I respect their impatience with that aspect of the culture. At one point I said to my husband, the networks would put kiddie porn on if they were allowed.” (Ah, for those halcyon days when a glimpse of Det. Andy Sipowicz’s butt was deemed risqué ...)

Smash is hardly kiddie porn, but it did represent Midwesterners as rubes and New Yorkers as savvy: when the show’s protagonist of sorts, Karen Cartwright—who’s utterly blind to the dynamics of power that run the theater world and New York in general—returns home to Iowa, she’s greeted by parents who ever-so-gently try to crush her dreams. While Ms. Rebeck noted that the show was never intended to focus so heavily on Karen (played by Katharine McPhee), she added, “People found her to be a very attractive character, so they asked me to write that. I was okay with it. I was like, I’ve got that in my back pocket.”

'Grace' star Paul Rudd

Chaplin

Barrymore Theatre

Opens September 10

In the footsteps of the Judy Garland biographical play End of the Rainbow tramps Chaplin, a musical about the life of Chaplin. Unlike other attempts to illuminate the lives of showbiz legends--a subgenre that also includes Master Class’s portrayal of Maria Callas--Chaplin is to have a cast of 22 in what surely will be splashy musical numbers. Rob McClure, previously of Avenue Q and, well, the La Jolla out-of-town tryout for Chaplin, takes on Charlie in a production that is likely to showcase every element of the actor’s legendary film career but for the silence.

Grace

Cort Theatre

Opens October 4

Paul Rudd, suddenly more prolific than he’s ever been with TV and film gigs, is headed back to Broadway. (He previously played second fiddle to Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain--but now he’s the star!) Mr. Rudd is to play one-half of an innocent couple moving to Florida in order to start religious-themed motels; his better half is to be played by Kate Arrington, whose real-life partner, Oscar nominee Michael Shannon, joins the fracas as the pair’s new neighbor, while legendary TV fixture Ed Asner plays an exterminator. (With all these mainstream stars, is this a Broadway show or the SAG Awards?)

Cyrano de Bergerac

American Airlines Theatre

Opens October 11

It’s been five years since the last Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac, and theater writers have been storing up nasal puns since then. (Who nose if this will be a success? We’ll be sniffing for hints from the producers! Etc.) Tony-winner Douglas Hodge straps on the prosthetic nose for the title role of the lovesick, prohibitively ugly French nobleman, while Clémence Poésy is to allure as Roxane, the not-so-obscure object of desire, and onetime Spider-Man villain Patrick Page makes us all glad he survived that production as he plays Cyrano’s erstwhile ally Comte De Guiche. We smell a good night at the theater!

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Booth Theatre

October 13

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Edward Albee’s rollicking domestic nightmare, the New York stage welcomes a production by way of Chicago and Washington. Tracy Letts, who moonlights as a Pulitzer-winning playwright, is to take on George, while Steppenwolf star Amy Morton (previously, too, a Tony nominee for Mr. Letts’s August: Osage County) has been honing her piercing shriek as Martha. Both actors appeared in the original production, which earned raves from local critics--and surely they’re ready for the big time--the three-hour play is the sort of marathon you can only really train for by two years and three cities’ worth of practice.

'Dead Accounts' star Katie Holmes

The Heiress

Walter Kerr Theatre

Opens November 1

Taking over the role of Olivia de Havilland and Cherry Jones? That’d be ultra-fast-rising starlet Jessica Chastain, who, like Paul Rudd, is taking a break from her prolific film career to portray Catherine Sloper. Catherine, originally a character in Henry James’s novel Washington Square, possesses that Jamesian fragility, shyness, and moth-to-flame attraction to callous villains; the character is set to inherit an enormous fortune, but is so taken aback at the love of a churlish fellow that she may just squander it all. Ms. Chastain’s Broadway debut will be watched closely by all those who love and/or envy her, but with support including castmate David Straitharn and director Moisés Kaufman, Ms. Chastain may not return to her day job anytime soon.

Annie

Palace Theatre

Opens November 8

Little girls of New York, begin beseeching your parents for tickets. After a long search, the producers of what may become the season’s most lucrative revival found their girl--preteen brunette Lilla Crawford is to strap on the red wig and belt out “Tomorrow” in the latest Annie. Though it’s toured the U.S. frequently, the saccharine show hasn’t been seen on Broadway since its 1997 revival. It’s not entirely for kids: James Lapine, a frequent collaborator of Stephen Sondheim’s, is to direct the production, while two-time Tony winner Katie Finneran assays the role of Miss Hannigan. Ms. Crawford, get former red-wig-wearer Sarah Jessica Parker on the phone to discuss how to be deal with newfound fame!

Glengarry Glen Ross

Schoenfeld Theatre

Opens November 11

Al Pacino, who starred in the film production of Glengarry Glen Ross as young, robust Ricky Roma, is showing his age: he’s coming to Broadway this season as Shelley Levene. Levene, scholars of David Mamet will surely recall, is the once-great real estate salesman who has grown unable to generate good leads (much as an actor of Al Pacino’s caliber has, for years until just now, been unable to get a lead on a role that required much more than senseless bellowing). The cast is rounded out by the high-toned likes of Bobby Cannavale and Richard Schiff; the “Coffee’s for closers” monologue is from the film and not the play, but we can dream it’ll be included.

Rebecca

Broadhurst Theatre

Opens November 18

Daphne du Maurier via Alfred Hitchcock via Christopher Hampton! The well-loved playwright and screenwriter has adapted into English the book of a musical that played Vienna in the mid-2000s, recounting the twice-told tale of a second wife who must confront the ghost of her new, controlling husband’s former wife. As in du Maurier’s novel, the naive protagonist is never named but for “I”; Jill Paice is to attempt to make a name for herself in the role. The directors are about as prestigious as Mr. Hampton; Michael Blakemore won two Tonys for directing a play and a musical in the same year back in the day, while Francesca Zambello is an opera director with, one presumes and hopes, a flair for the dramatic.

Dead Accounts

Music Box Theatre

Opening Date November 29

When we think about Broadway’s breakout ingenues of the past decade, our minds don’t immediately leap to Katie Holmes’s turn in All My Sons in 2008. She was... fine? Certainly her time in New York, and exposure to paparazzi therein, engendered a high-water mark in the sales of “boyfriend jeans” nationwide. But the stage is apparently a safe place for Ms. Holmes, as it’s to Broadway she returns for her first new role post-extremely-notable-divorce. The midwestern woman trying to start over while living with her parents is to play a midwestern woman trying to start over while living with her parents. Well, Ms. Holmes is from Toledo and her character’s from Cincinnati. And her parents, we read, are in off and on. No matter--the play’s by super-prolific Theresa Rebeck, and could allow for a Kidmanian career renaissance.

The Anarchist

Lyceum Theatre

Opens December 2

A new work on Broadway playing blocks away from a revival of his best-loved work, and a daughter who’s one of those TV Girls? Could things get sweeter for David Mamet? Well, there was the little matter of actress Laurie Metcalf dropping out of the role of a women’s-prison warden in The Anarchist, the newer of his two currently produced plays--but no matter. Debra Winger removed herself from exile to drop in for the role, and Patti LuPone, playing a radical prisoner pleading for her own parole. Mr. Mamet’s neoconservative bent may well inform just how we see the role of the anarchist played out onstage, but we’d forgive Mr. Mamet anything!

My, how things change!

The unwilling Vanity Fair cover girl and tabloid culture's summer star is to appear in the new play Dead Accounts, which just announced its full cast. Ms. Holmes has surrounded herself with a coterie of respected performers significantly less renowned for non-artistic endeavors. The male lead is Norbert Leo Butz, a two-time Tony-winner; the other stars are prolific character actress Judy Greer, Coast of Utopia star Josh Hamilton, and Tony nominee Jayne Houdyshell, who just appeared in Broadway's Follies.

It seems that Ms. Holmes is interested in reinventing herself as a real Broadway actress--that All My Sons, with its all-movie-star cast and classic script, was a significantly  safer bet than Dead Accounts. Since the newly divorced, newly intriguing actress is sure to sell tickets on her own merits, choosing a new play with less famous performers is a good way to use her fame for good--all while ensuring she'll be the one in the spotlight throughout.