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    Lloyd Suh’s Plays About the Past Speak Directly to Our Present

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    The 47-year-old playwright Lloyd Suh is having a moment, with a handful of plays that reveal how history can exact an emotional toll across culture and time.His latest, “The Far Country,” opens at Angel Island, the notorious checkpoint off the coast of San Francisco, and explores lives fractured by the Chinese Exclusion Act, a racist policy that severely restricted immigration of Chinese people and limited those in the United States from gaining citizenship.The play, running at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through Jan. 1, has been well received by critics. In her review for The New York Times, Alexis Soloski called it “an act, loving and sorrowful, of reclamation, salvaging the history of early generations of Chinese Americans.”His aim, Suh said during a recent phone call, is to prove “the way in which memory becomes hereditary because of the way it lives in the body, the way it lives in the family. There’s poignancy there, but power too.”This mission also plays out in his acclaimed “The Chinese Lady,” in which audiences learn of Afong Moy, who, as possibly the first Chinese woman in the United States, was exhibited across 1830s America. The story, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote in her review for The Times earlier this year when it played at the Public Theater, traverses “188 years of American ugliness and exoticization.”Then there’s his fanciful “Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery” — a metanarrative of Asian American history, set in Berkeley in 1967, a year before students there coined the term “Asian American” — which finds charm even in grotesque rebuttals of racist caricature. And an early one-act, “Disney & Fujikawa,” that dramatizes a 1942 meeting between Walt Disney and the Japanese American illustrator Gyo Fujikawa, whose family was held at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.Next up is “The Heart Sellers,” which debuts in February in Milwaukee and involves two housewives navigating feelings of isolation in a new country in 1973. The play’s title is a pun on the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which, by ending U.S. quotas on the number of immigrants from outside Western Europe, saw a dramatic rise in global newcomers — especially Asians.Shannon Tyo and Jinn S. Kim in “The Far Country,” at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through Jan. 1.Richard Termine for The New York TimesDaniel K. Isaac and Shannon Tyo in “The Chinese Lady” at the Public Theater earlier this year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBeyond its storytelling, “The Far Country” has reunited Suh with the actor Shannon Tyo, who originated the role of Moy in 2018 in a Ma-Yi Theater Company production of “The Chinese Lady.” She returned to the part for the show’s run at the Public.Suh and Tyo both said their continued collaboration is a testament to new creative and professional growth for Asian American theater workers made possible by diversity, inclusion and equity strategies as well as the broader racial reckoning in America that dovetailed with the pandemic.Having performed in “The Chinese Lady” both before and during the pandemic, Tyo explained the shift. “Prior to the pandemic, it’s almost like audiences didn’t believe us about our history of violence against our community,” she said. “The violence we’ve seen in our present is unfortunately what it takes to make our violent history come alive. People are more ready to believe us, ready to empathize.”In “The Far Country,” that sense of personal resonance and theater’s ability to refract a scene for different audiences — as was the case with Suh’s children’s play “The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra Go!” — was amplified by the show’s director, Eric Ting.The script subverts immigration, he said, by focusing on how “the only way the characters can achieve a place in the American project is by severing ties with their ancestors.” He added that Suh “is really focusing on the destructive force of capitalism, how it disrupts and destroys families.”Separate from bureaucracy and labor, one character notes, “there is more strenuous work: the work of being Chinese in America.”For the cast and crew, takeaways varied. Whit K. Lee, who plays both a translator and a detainee, said he wept when he first read the script. His maternal great-grandfather had been a translator for 19th-century Chinese railroad workers in Montana and his paternal grandfather was held at Angel Island when he was just 9 years old (separated from his mother, Lee said, the malnourished child used rice rations to lure, kill and eat a pigeon).“So much is lost because our ancestors didn’t want to pass down these stories,” Lee said. “‘The Far Country’ allows me to help tell the story that I was never taught in school. I’m very proud to be Chinese, Chinese American, American Chinese and American.”But Suh, who last week won a $100,000 prize as a recipient of this year’s Steinberg Playwright Awards, is not alone in his success.With his work, Suh says his aim is to prove “the way in which memory becomes hereditary because of the way it lives in the body, the way it lives in the family.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesIn spring 2020, Asian American theater professionals mourned nine plays that were scrapped or curtailed when live performance spaces closed amid the unfolding pandemic chaos. In the last six months, a number of works by Asian American playwrights have been produced Off Broadway, including Jiehae Park’s “Peerless,” presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters, and Daniel K. Isaac’s “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” a Ma-Yi Theater Company production at La MaMa. Several more are planned for the spring, including “Elyria,” the playwright Deepa Purohit’s Off Broadway debut at Atlantic Theater Company, and Hansol Jung’s “Wolf Play,” which, after an engagement last winter presented by Soho Rep and Ma-Yi Theater Company, will return to the stage in January at MCC Theater.The works are not only the fruit of prepandemic efforts to include more Asian American storytelling in theater, but also a reclamation of agency and identity following anti-Asian bigotry and violence during the pandemic itself.“There’s certainly a range of activity now and a quantity of work and a variety of work that feels pretty fresh,” said David Henry Hwang, who became the first (and remains the only) Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award for best play, for “M. Butterfly” in 1988.“There has been an increasing number of AAPI playwrights challenging what has come before,” Hwang added, referring to Asian American Pacific Islanders. “Asian actors have been largely employed by ‘The King and I’ and ‘Miss Saigon,’ which have Orientalist aspects, white supremacist aspects, and with ‘Miss Saigon’ is actually pretty racist.”By contrast, said Suh, “I want Asian American actors to feel like it’s for them, their ownership. Not just roles in plays.” Asked if he has any interest in revivals of “The King and I,” “Miss Saigon” or “South Pacific,” he offered a deadpan “no” before laughing. “I don’t think those are pieces where it’s possible to have any kind of take that is meaningfully transformative.”More recently, breakthroughs and opportunities have manifested in the revisiting of classic works: An Off Broadway production of Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance” this fall had an all-Asian-American cast and a “Little Shop of Horrors” revival in California was set in Chinatown. And newer works have found audiences nationally: Lauren Yee’s “Cambodian Rock Band” and Kristina Wong’s “Sweatshop Overlord,” which had Off Broadway runs in New York.“It’s exciting to me,” Tyo said, “that we could build our canon ourselves.”Suh added: “This industry can be a marketplace where plays have value as commodities, but with all these shows it’s a reminder that the power of theater is in the conversations it creates, how one play leads to the next. That’s how the conversation sustains.” More

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      Review: ‘The Far Country’ Brings a Neglected History Closer

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      Early 20th-century San Francisco and Guangdong, China, overlap in Lloyd Suh’s artful examination of the emotional price of immigration.A young man in a fine suit outlines the terms of the deal: The ocean crossing will be maddening, the detention that follows worse. Even assuming release, a person of Chinese descent will feel no welcome in America. The “Gold Mountain” that has been promised? It’s a mirage. And yet, if one wishes to pay for passage, the young man will offer — for a very high price — his American name and scant protection.This is the devil’s bargain at the center of Lloyd Suh’s fluid, artful “The Far Country,” at the Atlantic Theater Company. Set in the early decades of the 20th century, in both China’s Guangdong Province and San Francisco, it examines the cost — literal and emotional — of immigration. Those who have suffered in their pursuit of a larger, more prosperous life might, the play suggests, inflict that same suffering on others. Then again, they might also find redemption.The drama, directed with sensitivity and spirit by Eric Ting, begins in 1909. Han Sang Gee (Jinn S. Kim) sits at a table in an interrogation room. A more recent iteration of the Chinese Exclusion Act has made his citizenship tenuous, and Gee must substantiate his American birth. He has difficulty proving his status to a skeptical white interrogator (Christopher Liam Moore), as his papers have been destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. But a sympathetic interpreter (Whit K. Lee) gives him subtle aid. (Translation is another interest of Suh’s.)Most spectators’ sympathies will incline immediately toward Gee, owing both to Kim’s sturdy affability and to our innate compassion for anyone demeaned or distrusted by officialdom. But Suh and Ting aren’t interested in easy answers; there’s a more sophisticated moral calculus at play here.Citizenship is, among other things, a moneymaking tool. Its possession will lead Gee to China, where he can offer others the chance at an American life, however constricted that life may be. In Guangdong, Gee encounters a widow (Amy Kim Waschke) and her teenage son, Moon Gyet (Eric Yang, in an impressive Off Broadway debut). Moon Gyet, in his turn, will make a vexed proposal to a young woman (Shannon Tyo, a Suh regular, always dynamic).Clint Ramos’s set, with shadowed illumination by Jiyoun Chang, appears simple at first: a square platform backed by a dark mirror. But no element — walls, floor, mirror — is exactly what it seems. Like our sympathies, the set shifts and shifts again. Fan Zhang’s rumbling sound design suggests layers below the surface.As with Clint Ramos’s shifting set, no element of Ting’s production is exactly as it seems.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt the center of the play’s overlapping worlds is Angel Island, a detention center that opened in 1910 as a curb to immigration. The majority of its detainees were Chinese men, men like Moon Gyet, who undergoes his own interrogation there. Some eventually gained entry; others were deported. In 1970, nearly three decades after the center had closed, a park ranger discovered poems etched into its walls, lyrics of despair and love that had re-emerged from beneath putty and paint. Here is one: “Nights are long and the pillow cold; who can pity my loneliness?/After experiencing such loneliness and sorrow,/Why not just return home and learn to plow the fields?”Like Suh’s other plays (“The Chinese Lady,” “Charlie Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery”), “The Far Country” meditates on ethnicity and identity. It is also an act, loving and sorrowful, of reclamation, salvaging the history of early generations of Chinese Americans. These men left their fields for the same reason almost any immigrant does: the promise of a better life. Suh is specific in his imagining of the particulars of the Chinese American, but as America is a nation of immigrants, there is space here for others (including others like me, whose great-great-grandparents came from Eastern Europe) to trace vestiges of their own histories.“The Far Country” ends in 1930. That ending isn’t necessarily abrupt. But it does feel somewhat arbitrary. Why not 1950? Or 1970? There is so much more history to recover. More love. More promise. More pain. Moon Gyet claims that the strenuous physical labor required of an immigrant is nothing compared with the work of being Chinese in America. This takes patience and focus, he says. A serious mind and a necessary grace. Suh possesses these qualities in full. He has more work to do, more stories to tell.The Far CountryThrough Jan. 1 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: In ‘Peerless,’ Elite College Admissions Are Something Wicked

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      The playwright Jiehae Park’s sly and polished adaptation of “Macbeth” transports the characters from the Scottish heath to the halls of a Midwestern high school.Toil and trouble? That’s how you brew a witch’s charm — and gain admission to elite schools. M has perfect SATs, a zillion Advanced Placement credits and extracurricular activities for days, but her application to her dream college has been rejected. So what’s a girl and her scheming sister to do? Commit murder. Maybe more than one.These are the broad outlines of “Peerless,” the playwright Jiehae Park’s sly and polished adaptation of “Macbeth,” which is being presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters. Transported from the Scottish heath to the halls of a Midwestern high school, “Peerless” places the tragedy’s moral quandaries into the mouths and miniskirts of M (Sasha Diamond), a senior, and L (Shannon Tyo), her twin. L is a junior, having stayed back a year to increase their chances of getting into what they refer to only as “The College,” which accepts only one student from their school per year. But those plans go awry when The College accepts their classmate D (Benny Wayne Sully) instead. D has a lower G.P.A., but he is Native American. Though M is a girl and Asian American — “double minority,” as she puts it acidly — she believes that D outranks her in terms of racialized admissions policies.From left, Diamond, Benny Wayne Sully, and Tyo. The play is content to absorb the themes of “Macbeth” without providing corollaries for each of its plot points.James LeynseSmartly — because Park is very smart — the play is content to absorb the themes of “Macbeth” without providing corollaries for each of its plot points. There’s no Birnam Wood here, no spots to out. Macbeth’s bestie, Banquo, is now BF (Anthony Cason), M’s barely there boyfriend. Instead of the three witches and Hecate, there’s only a single classmate known as Dirty Girl (Marié Botha, delightful), costumed by Amanda Gladu in a witchy black trench coat. The set, by Kristen Robinson, shows a school hallway at an angle, with cutouts for a living room and a bed, as needed, while Mextly Couzin’s flashing, deep-hued lights nudge the environment toward the uncanny.In place of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, Park writes in sharp, staccato rhythms, with short lines that drive through the scenes a few syllables at a time. The actors, under Margot Bordelon’s direction, tear through them like so many high-carb snacks. (This is a feature of the adaptation: Who needs a dagger when you have a victim with a tree-nut allergy?) They’re having a very good time. In the case of Sully’s manic, excitable D, arguably too good of a time. Bordelon gives her young cast the trust and space to show what they can do, which, in a homecoming scene, includes some very silly dance moves.Not every part of “Peerless” works. There’s a lot of talk about M and L’s twinness and their ability to switch places, but Tyo, excellent in “The Chinese Lady” and nicely malign here, and Diamond, a fine actor last seen in “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” look very little alike. And as Park spends a lot less time than Shakespeare probing psychology and motive, the characterizations come across as thin.At times, the production suggests a richer and spikier play about the ways in which members of Gen Z rehearse, perform and weaponize identity, and about the sacrifices that we make in the present to secure an increasingly insecure future. There are arguments — fruitful, if undigested — about prejudice, both external and internalized. But “Peerless,” nasty and glossy, lives mostly on its impish surface. It’s something wicked, certainly. It could be much more.PeerlessThrough Nov. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Chinese Lady’ Casts a Long Look at Hate

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      Lloyd Suh’s play is a riff on the arrival of the real Afong Moy, possibly the first woman from China in the United States, and a lens on contemporary racism.Afong Moy is known as “The Chinese Lady,” but really she is just a girl — 14 when she arrives alone in New York in 1834, brought by a pair of merchant brothers who struck a deal with her father in China to put her in a museum for two years, on display.Possibly the first Chinese woman in the United States, she is marketed as a curiosity. Crowds pay to ogle her as she brews tea, eats with chopsticks and walks around the room on her bound feet. It’s a performance of cultural identity, and she is happy to enact it — enthusiastic, even, at the start. Cheerfully naïve, unsuspecting of the world’s cruelty, she views herself as an educator, fostering understanding.“Thank you for coming to see me,” she says to her gawkers, who are also us: the audience at the Public Theater, watching Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady,” a moving and often sharply funny riff on the story of the real Afong Moy, traversing 188 years of American ugliness and exoticization in 90 swift, heightened minutes. A two-hander, it hopes with all its battered heart that we will, by the end, see Afong in her full humanity, and through her see this nation with clearer eyes. But it is not optimistic.“The Chinese Lady” was first staged in New York in 2018, when Ralph B. Peña directed a profoundly affecting, smaller-scale production for his Ma-Yi Theater Company at Theater Row, on 42nd Street. That was of course before the pandemic — before an American president scapegoated an entire population by calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” and before physical attacks on people of Asian descent became an ever-present threat in New York and across the country.Peña’s current Barrington Stage Company-Ma Yi production, presented by Ma-Yi and the Public, retains the same gorgeous cast, with Shannon Tyo as Afong and Daniel K. Isaac as Atung, her cynical, deadpan interpreter. (Cindy Im and Jon Norman Schneider play the roles at some performances.) On Junghyun Georgia Lee’s gilt-framed set — simpler and more capacious than the one she designed for Theater Row — the show is more anguished, more mournful, more urgent than before, and sometimes that makes it heavy-handed.History is told through the eyes of Tyo’s character, Afong Moy, who arrives in the United States to be on display at a museum.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTyo and Isaac’s chemistry, though, has only deepened. In their bickering, their loneliness, their not-quite-solidarity, they remain entirely winning and occasionally devastating. (From here, proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the show.)When they are cut loose from each other, after decades of symbiosis — and years at a P.T. Barnum museum — there is no more forlorn sight than Atung alone, a tiny cog in Barnum’s exploitative machine.Long gone by then are the glamorous days when Afong toured to far-flung American cities and met a president — “your emperor, Andrew Jackson,” she calls him, to us. (If that’s an endearing misunderstanding of his title, it’s also a pretty accurate read on his expansionism.) In a revolting re-enactment, we watch him touch her foot: a cowboy barbarian looking down on her even as he sexualizes her.Afong, for all her childlike naïveté when she first arrived, has always been hungry for knowledge of the United States. She speaks of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Manifest Destiny; the Chinese men building the railroad out West; the people who were already living on these lands in 1492. She finds the country fascinating, and its self-mythologizing wildly overblown.It is not the place where she thought she would spend her life; she believed she would return to her family, not make a home in a place where she is not sure she belongs. When she realizes she will have to do that utterly on her own — breaking out of the box where American culture wants to keep her, under its hostile gaze — she becomes a roiling force of indignation and self-determination.That happens in the play’s penultimate scene, and Tyo absolutely kills it. So it’s unfortunate that the final scene undermines her with ill-conceived design.As Afong recounts horrific 19th-century acts of brutality against Chinese Americans, projections (by Shawn Duan) that had been subtle and mostly static throughout the show start flashing historical headlines and illustrations, then news coverage of contemporary anti-Asian attacks.The impulse is understandable — to make utterly clear that Chinese Americans, long the targets of racist violence, are still menaced as outsiders in their own country. But the intimate power of Suh’s text and Tyo’s performance would have made that connection potently on their own.The production’s final, upstaging image is a wall of disembodied eyes: a digital crowd, creepy and cold. It’s meant, presumably, to expand our sympathy into the wider world. But whatever moral reckoning the play sets in motion occurs between Afong — living, breathing avatar of generations — and the audience. Yet the lights go dark on her.We do, by the end of the play, fully see Afong Moy. In that last moment, let us look.The Chinese LadyThrough April 10 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Daniel Isaac, 'Billions' Actor, Cedes the Spotlight While Quietly Commanding It

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      Daniel K. Isaac, a theater actor with a steady gig on the series “Billions,” is appearing at the Public in Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady.”“I’m the type of actor who won’t take up the most space in the room,” Daniel K. Isaac said.This was on a weekday morning, at the Public Theater, an hour or so before Isaac would begin rehearsal for “The Chinese Lady,” a play by Lloyd Suh that runs through March 27. Isaac perched at the edge of his chair — arms crossed, legs crossed, chest concave, occupying the bare minimum of leather upholstery.“It’s a big chair,” he said.Isaac, 33, a theater actor and an ensemble player on the Showtime drama “Billions,” combines that reticence with intelligence and warmth, qualities that enlarge every character he plays. (On this day, he was dressed as a New Yorker, all in navy and black, but his socks were printed with black-and-white happy faces.) With his sad eyes and resonant voice, he is an actor you remember, no matter how much or little screen time or stage time he receives.Isaac, left, and Shannon Tyo in Lloyd Suh’s “The Chinese Lady” at the Public Theater, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Chinese Lady” is inspired by the life of Afong Moy, a Chinese woman who came to America as a teenager in 1834 and was exhibited as a curiosity before disappearing from the popular imagination. Isaac plays Atung, her translator, who made even less of a dent in the historical record. “He exists as a side note,” Isaac said.Isaac created the role, in 2018, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company. Even in a two-hander, he rarely takes center stage, ceding that space to Shannon Tyo’s Afong Moy.“I am irrelevant,” Atung says in the play’s opening scene.Isaac relates. In the first decade of his career, he felt ancillary, in part because of the roles available to Asian American men. He still feels that way. But now, in his 30s — and with his debut as a playwright coming later this year — he is trying to be the main character in his own life.“I don’t think I’ve ever had the big break or the large, hugely visible or recognizable thing,” he said. “My life has been a slow burn, a marathon rather than immediate sprint.” Isaac ought to know: He recently trained for his first marathon, and then posted cheerful selfies — of him in his NipGuards — to Twitter.Isaac with Tyo. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIsaac was born in 1988, in Southern California, the only child of a single mother who had immigrated from South Korea. At her megachurch, his mother heard a story of a pastor who suffered from stage fright. And because she imagined that Isaac might one day become a preacher — or a lawyer, or a doctor, who might have the occasional lecture — she signed him up for the church’s drama troupe.In high school, he participated for the first time in secular theater, playing a gambler in “Guys and Dolls.” He loved it. “There’s nothing like the community of theater, or what I still call the church of theater,” he said. This was also a time when he was struggling with his attraction to men and voluntarily undergoing conversion therapy. Theater, by contrast, allowed him to experiment with his identity, to try on different ways of being.“It became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more,” he said.He finished high school at 16 and went on to study theater at the University of California, San Diego, where he accepted his sexuality, which led to an estrangement from his mother. (They’re still working on it.) After graduation he moved to New York City and found restaurant work. He had set his sights on classical theater because peers had told him that, as an actor of color, he might find more parts there.“I was trying to imagine, could I be the token Asian in a project?” he said. “And would that be enough?”Seven years, some Off Broadway plays and a few episodes of television later, he landed a small part in the “Billions” pilot. He didn’t think much of it. He knew that plenty of pilots didn’t take. And he’d been killed or written off in ones that did. But “Billions” took, and his character, Ben Kim, an analyst who became a portfolio manager, remains alive. Isaac has appeared in every episode. (Still he didn’t quit his restaurant job until midway through Season 2. And technically, the restaurant told him to go.)Dhruv Maheshwari, left, and Isaac in “Billions.”Christopher Saunders/ShowtimeThe showrunners of “Billions,” Brian Koppelman and David Levien, hadn’t had huge plans for the Ben character. Once they understood Isaac’s intelligence and versatility, they expanded the role. “Daniel is a fearless actor, and that gives us huge freedom,” they wrote in a joint email.There’s a sweetness to his “Billions” character, which contrasts with the macho posturing of his colleagues at an asset management company. And that sweetness, as his co-star Kelly AuCoin said during a recent phone conversation, is all Isaac. “He could not be a more lovely or positive person,” he said. “He emanates love.” AuCoin broke off, worrying that his praise sounded fake. Which it wasn’t, he assured me. Then he broke off again. Isaac had just texted to wish him a happy birthday.For Isaac, who tries to do theater in between “Billions” shoots, taking on the role of Atung felt personal. And it felt important, not only as a way to explore who these characters were, but also as a means to reclaim their history.“Daniel understands the sacrifices made to get him where he is, and it imbues his work with a sense of purpose,” Ralph B. Peña, the play’s director, wrote in an email.Isaac says that theater “became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn 2018, playing Atung, and reckoning with the weight of what men like him had suffered, felt painful. “I think I took it a lot more personally,” Isaac said. In the intervening years, anti-Asian prejudice, fueled by misinformation around Covid-19, seemed only to increase, which has made the work feel even more necessary.“If art has any capacity to make space for understanding, or empathy, or can be more than just entertainment, which I hope and live by, then I want to share that,” he said.Isaac has a way, in conversation and seemingly in his life, of taking the emphasis off himself and putting it onto the work, his colleagues, the world. That’s why he started writing plays.“Because then I could literally give the spotlight to others,” he said. “And sit in the shadows and still experience something and the joy of creation.” Ma-Yi will produce his first play in the fall, “Once Upon a (Korean) Time,” which explores the Korean War through the medium of Korean fairy tales.Tyo, his “The Chinese Lady” co-star, would like to see him find his light. They often help each other film auditions, so she has seen the range of what he can do. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “He’s very good at it. He’s very good at surfer bro. There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”He is trying, he said. And at the risk of sounding what he called “extra woo-woo,” he thanks theater for helping him to try. “I credit the theater community because that’s where I felt safest and saw people being fearlessly themselves,” he said. “That gave me permission to try to step toward that in my own journey. And I’m still doing that.” More