Amanda Peet turned 40 last year deeply disillusioned about her acting career. After early success with off-kilter film performances as a would-be assassin in “The Whole Nine Yards” and a drug-addled mistress in “Igby Goes Down,” she was mostly getting offers to play peripheral roles — girlfriends, wives, ex-wives. (Her furrowed brow was no match for the end of the world in “2012.”) And she couldn’t help resenting bigger stars who were nabbing plum cable series “that used to be for those of us who were waiting to do TV,” as Ms. Peet put it.

So she changed up her game, as she used to do under pressure playing high school soccer, and rekindled an early passion for writing. Guided by the playwright Neil LaBute and a few other friends, as well as her husband, David Benioff, a creator of HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” Ms. Peet wrote a full-length play to star in: “The Commons of Pensacola,” about a rudderless daughter confronting her mother over the Madoff-like crimes of her father.

And then came a turnaround where Ms. Peet surprised even herself: Once she felt her play was actually decent, she gave up the role and pursued one of those bigger stars — Sarah Jessica Parker, who is now in preview performances with “The Commons of Pensacola” in a Manhattan Theater Club production at City Center, where it opens on Nov. 21.