Luckett, in the Showtime movie The Reagans (2003). Between 1998 and 2003, she was introduced to a wider audience through her role as Evelyn 'Grams' Ryan on the teen television drama Dawson's Creek. Alongside the four main young stars of that show, she was the only actress to appear as a credited regular throughout the show's six-season run, appearing in 74 of 128 episodes. Peil continued in the theatre while branching out into television and film. In 1992 she portrayed the beggar woman in Sweeney Todd at the Paper Mill Playhouse with George Hearn as Sweeney and Judy Kaye as Mrs. Lovett. That same year she appeared in the premiere of Romulus Linney's Democracy and Esther; an adaptation of Henry Adams's novels Democracy: An American Novel (1880) and Esther (1884) into a single play. She starred in the premiere of another play by Linney in 1993; the role of the psychoanalyst in Spain. In 1994 she starred in three one act plays by Edward Albee presented collectively under the tile "Sand" by the Signature Theatre Company: "Box" (1968), "The Sandbox" (1960), and "Finding the Sun" (1983). Peil won an Obie Award in 1995 for her work in three non-musical plays Off-Broadway: Paul Rudnick's The Naked Truth (as Nan, 1994 at the WPA Theater), A. R. Gurney's A Cheever Evening (as Peaches, 1994 with Playwrights Horizons ), and Craig Lucas's Missing Persons (1995, as Addie with the Atlantic Theater Company). She returned to the role of Nan in a revision of The Naked Truth, now retitled The Naked Eye, at Harvard University's American Repertory Theater in 1996. In 1996 and 1997, she toured in Gurney's play, Sylvia with Charles Kimbrough and Stephanie Zimbalist. In 1997 she appeared in the celebrated revival of George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner's June Moon at the Ohio Theater in SoHo. That same year she portrayed Hesione in Pierre de Marivaux's The Triumph of Love at the Yale Repertory Theatre (YRT). Peil played evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover in a 1998 off-Broadway revival of the Irving Berlin – Moss Hart revue As Thousands Cheer at the Greenwich House Theater. In May 1999, Peil portrayed Judith in the YRT's production of the Noël Coward play Hay Fever. She played the beggar woman in Sweeney Todd at the Kennedy Center in 2002 and in the spring of 2003 she played the mother of