Jennifer Aniston promoted to management

Los Angeles - Jennifer Aniston is trading in her office space for the open road.

The actress has signed on to star as a traveling saleswoman in the comedy Management, which will mark the directing debut of The Laramie Project scribe Stephen Belber, who also penned the film's screenplay.

According to Variety, Aniston's character sells cheap generic art—pieces of flair, if you will—to nondescript businesses and motels. Steve Zahn is set to play the slacker motel manager she has a one-night stand with who ends up following her all over the country.

Although he was already an established playwright, things started falling into place for Belber in Hollywood after he shopped his script for the upcoming newscaster-talks-to-God flick The Power of Duff. Jamie Foxx is attached to star. He has also collaborated on episodes of Rescue Me and Law & Order:SVU.

In addition to The Laramie Project, which dealt with the aftermath of the murder of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard and was later made into an HBO film, Belber wrote the stage drama Tape, which dialogue-happy Richard Linklater adapted for the big screen in 2001 with a cast consisting entirely of Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman.

Zahn can currently be seen in theaters costarring as an escaped POW in the Werner Herzog nail-biter Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale. Up next for the 39-year-old character actor is the comedy Strange Wilderness, in theaters next January, about a few animal lovers who head to the Andes in search of Bigfoot. Zahn will also appear in the CBS miniseries Comanche Moon, based on the Larry McMurtry novel.

As for Aniston, her last cinematic romp, 2006's The Break-Up, was a big hit at the box office but may have ended up hitting a little too close to home. It's unlikely that the actress will find much art reflecting life in the upcoming slate of projects she's reportedly attached to, however, which includes the prison-break thriller Wanted, The Senator's Wife and the Coen Brothers caper Gambit.

Earlier this year, Aniston returned to prime-time for the first time since Friends ended in 2004, to play a rival editor to Courteney Cox's tabloid-dish diva on FX's Dirt.

The 38-year-old Emmy winner will also executive-produce, and possibly star in, the period musical Goree Girls, a true story about eight women locked up in a Texas penitentiary in the 1940s who form one of the first-ever all-female country-western groups.