Brandon Uranowitz's Third Time Is a Charm

---

There can be a stigma, even in the cozy Broadway community, against what some think of as “musical theater acting,” a dismissal of the overemoting melodramatics and frantic jazz hands that might stereotypically be associated with a song-and-dance routine. Brandon Uranowitz calls that distinction a fallacy—and he would know. After years of performing in musicals, he is making his début in a play on Broadway this season as Larry in a revival of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This opposite Keri Russell and a volcanic Adam Driver, earning him his third Tony nomination. “I’ve heard a lot of stories from people about directors that they’ve worked with who have literally said to them, ‘We’re not doing musical theater acting here, we’re doing acting,’ and I’m like, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ It’s all the same,” he says. “Doing a musical and doing a play are just two different doors to get into the same room. We’re still trying to get to a place of authenticity and truth and a real performance of a human being’s existence. Our job is to convince the audience, whether you’re singing or you’re in a scene or you’re doing a monologue or in Shakespeare. It’s all the same to me, so I’ve been frustrated with this notion that musical theater actors can’t do plays.”

In an industry where directors and producers can rely on their own biases and preconceptions when judging performers, Uranowitz says he has become familiar with the risks of being easily categorized. After appearing in shows like Christopher Wheeldon’s adaptation of the Gene Kelly vehicle An American in Paris and the revival of Falsettos—which led to his first two Tony nods—he explains that he had been “begging my agents to get me auditions for plays and coming up against a brick wall.” His latest nomination, then, has been a rewarding validation, along with his whole category, Best Featured Actor in a Play, which contains five performers who come from musical theater backgrounds. “It’s that not an epic mic drop,” he laughs, “I don’t know what is.”

As Larry, who is grieving the death of a close friend along with his roommate Anna, played by Russell, and Driver’s Pale, the deceased’s brother, the 31-year-old Uranowitz is also marking another first, portraying a gay character. Larry serves as the third wheel but also in some ways a catalyst for the central relationship between Anna and Pale, who become intertwined as a means to both share and mitigate their heartbreak. Openly gay himself, he says he found Larry’s use of comedy to deflect his pain familiar from his own upbringing. “He has very bleak circumstances that he is trying to navigate and I’m fortunate enough to have not had to cope with anything quite that devastating, but the way that he navigates them and the way that he protects himself from that grief and the anger and the resentment is with humor and wit,” he elaborates, “and I think any queer person will tell you that finding the humor in the darkest of situations is the best means of survival growing up. That’s how I tried to go day to day and minute to minute as a closeted gay kid in New Jersey. I was the funny one out of a necessity really to survive and get through it and be liked. When you feel like everyone around you is judging you or will judge you if they knew your truth, then you fear that you’ll lose everybody and that everybody around you’ll abandon you. So there’s humor to protect yourself and there’s humor to engage with the people around you to support you and like you and love you.”

Having been originally produced at a time before the “gay best friend” became a trope of sitcoms and romantic comedies, Burn This does seem to foreshadow shows like Will and Grace in presenting Larry as a bundle of zingers and quips, but Uranowitz argues that there is enough complexity in the character for him to bring out new inflections. “I think when it was written in the Eighties, he was a novelty,” he reasons. “I think Larry is closest to Lanford Wilson as a person and I think in order for him to be a little more palatable for an Eighties audience he made him the comic relief, but my goal in 2019 was to make him more than that. Of course, he has to be funny—that was how Lanford Wilson wrote him and you have to honor that—but my goal was to let the laughter and the humor be a byproduct of mining every bit of truth and humanity from him and from his relationships with the other characters on stage. That was our overarching goal, to be as real and authentic and truthful and human as possible.”

While the main relationship in Burn This is between Anna and Pale, the mere existence of a gay character as complex as Larry was a surprise on Broadway during its original run in 1987. The show shares its crowded category for Best Revival of a Play with two other works that spotlight gay life in New York, Ryan Murphy’s production of The Boys in the Band starring an all-gay cast and Harvey Fierstein’s semi-autobiographical Torch Song, a groundswell that Uranowitz says is both a vindication for stories that previously remained underground and a reaction to our threatening times. “When they were originally told, these stories were a huge act of courage. They were risky and because of that I think their audiences were extremely limited,” he explains. “They are beautiful, authentic, honest, important, historic stories about the gay experience but I don’t think they got the massive airplay that they deserved at the time. Now we’ve made leaps and bounds, but this administration is trying to push us back into the shadows and undo all of that. I think it’s an act of courage and an act of resistance possibly to this notion that the progress that we made was temporary, with other people telling us, ‘No, no, no, this is not reality. You had it for a second, but we’re going to take it away from you.’ I think it’s an act of standing our ground and shouting to them that we’re not going anywhere and we’ve always been here.”

Larry is in many ways a culmination of several important strands in Uranowitz’s life. He began performing at a young age while growing up in New Jersey before setting it aside, saying the constant touring—he once missed eight months of school for a Canadian production of Ragtime—made him lonely. A high school elective on modern American drama shifted his attention from musicals to authors like Eugene O’Neill, August Wilson, and Tennessee Williams. “The first play I remember reading for that class was Buried Child by Sam Shepherd,” he recalls. “I was floored by the entire thing and I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I still loved musical theater, but there was something so dark and so much deeper than what I had known theater to be when I read Buried Child.” Then still in the closet, he also saw plays as the only safe way for him to continue performing without inviting the scrutiny of his classmates. “I was not out and I was living this lie and I thought doing musical theater would out me, so I made a concerted effort to only do plays in high school,” he explains. “I was like, ‘I could try and be the cool straight actor. I can do that, that’s a persona I can pull off I think.’”

He went on to study drama at NYU, avoiding musical theater until his very last semester when he wanted to perform together with his best friend. As luck would have it, there was an agent in the audience one night, who signed both of them and started sending him out to musical auditions. “This entire industry is a numbers game,” Uranowitz says. “The more opportunities there are, the greater the chance of booking a job, so the fact that they had seen me do musicals just increased the numbers for them. There were just a lot more opportunities for me to audition and get my foot in the door through musical theater, but it was never really my intention to fully pursue that and have a career in musical theater.”

Uranowitz has been branching out into television recently as well, with cameos on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Fosse/Verdon, in which Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams play the eponymous artistic and romantic partners. On last week’s episode, Uranowitz portrayed Dustin Hoffmann during his time starring as the comedian Lenny Bruce in Fosse’s 1974 biopic. “They were never militant about having their actors do impressions of these people,” he explains about the show, on which a bevy of Broadway stars have played their own forebears. “It was all about finding their essence and bringing their version of that person to the surface.”

Now a veteran of the whole circuit, Uranowitz is heading to the Tonys early next month for the third time in five years, but he insists that this go-around is nothing like the others. “So many people have been like, ‘Is this old hat for you? and I’m like, ‘No!'” he laughs. “It’s not like winning Employee of the Month for a nine-to-five job where you are doing the same thing all the time. This is an experience and an event that occurs because of a unique job, so each time I’ve done it it’s been for a completely different role or character and job. It always feels new because the job that I’m doing is new, the character is new, the show is new.” The importance of this round, he makes very clear, is not lost on him. “There’s the saying that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity and I feel very fortunate and grateful to have had this opportunity,” he explains, “but I also feel like I’ve been preparing my whole life for it. I’m just trying to soak it all in because this is very much a watershed moment for me in my life as a gay man but also as an artist and in my career.”

Burn This continues at the Hudson Theatre, New York, through July 14.