Inside the actor’s Tony-nominated performance in “Clybourne Park”

Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

You can soak up the transgressive, expertly choreographed chaos of Clybourne Park, now on Broadway at the Walter Kerr, without noticing its nods to a certain classic of 20th-century theatre. But if you miss the references, don’t worry. You’re in good company.

“I probably shouldn’t admit this,” says Jeremy Shamos, “but when I did the initial reading of this play, I didn’t realize it was based on A Raisin in the Sun.”

More than any other member of the seven-member cast, Shamos, who just received a Tony Award nomination for his performance, might be expected to have the CliffsNotes to Lorraine Hansberry’s canonical 1959 drama. Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play uses Raisin as a springboard to depict five decades’ worth of racial misunderstanding and mistrust in a middle-class neighborhood of Chicago. And Karl Lindner, the milquetoast bigot that Shamos plays in the first act of Clybourne, is the only direct carryover from Hansberry’s script.

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How the actress became an action heroine for “Peter and the Starcatcher”

There are eleven men in the cast and only one woman, but still, Peter and the Starcatcher is a boon for female audiences.

In Rick Elice’s action-adventure play, now at Broadway’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre, we learn the origin story of Peter Pan, Captain Hook, and all the other characters from the familiar classic. As they’re performing, the actors create the entire world, using ropes and sheets to suggest ships and islands and turning their own bodies into hallways and doors. The jumping, posing, and tumbling give the play a uniquely physical magic.

And Celia Keenan-Bolger is jumping with everyone else. She plays Molly, a clever girl who works with her father to keep magical “star stuff” from falling into wicked hands. In the midst of a mission, she meets a group of orphaned boys who have been captured by a cruel ship’s captain, and naturally, being brave, she rescues them. One of the boys is Peter (Adam Chanler-Berat), and as they become friends, they help each other through swordfights, ocean rescues, and the scary moment when you fall in love.

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Tug Coker as Larry Bird

How playwright Eric Simonson made theatre out of basketball stars

In the space of eight years, Larry Bird and Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. won a combined six NBA championships. Bird and Magic, as they’re still known worldwide, represent a combined 13.5 feet of grit, skill, and nearly unprecedented basketball smarts, resulting in perhaps the most storied rivalry in modern sports.

According to playwright Eric Simonson, they also represent “the better angels of the collective unconscious of the country.” That’s how he describes the joint protagonists—bitter rivals turned battle-scarred friends—of his play Magic/Bird, which is now in previews at the Longacre Theatre.

Simonson, who is reteaming with the director (Thomas Kail) and producers of the football-themed play Lombardi, would appear to be an unlikely candidate for go-to sports scribe. His resume includes adaptations of Moby Dick and Slaughterhouse-Five, collaborations with poet/playwright Ntozake Shange and African choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and a documentary short about the radio dramatist Norman Corwin that won an Academy Award in 2006.

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A new play takes its time at MTC

How long does it take to build a fire? Make a can of soup? Repair a table that an angry drunk smashed to pieces?

To find out, you can time the scenes in Regrets, Manhattan Theatre Club’s carefully paced new drama, now at City Center.

Set in Nevada in 1954, the play follows life in a “divorce camp.” Sixty years ago, Nevada had the most liberal divorce laws in the country, so men would move there just long enough to establish residency and split from their wives. Sometimes, they lived in special campgrounds, forming temporary communities of the listless and the lonely.

In Regrets , the community mixes card games and beer runs with unpleasant secrets, and the consequences get heavy. If we feel those consequences, it’s arguably because the play takes its time defining them. Scenes are long and conversations are rich, and if someone sweeps the floor, he sweeps the entire thing. This creates a methodical calm, even as emotions flare.

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A playwright crafts Broadway’s “End of the Rainbow”

Peter Quilter started writing End of the Rainbow in 2001, and now that it’s in previews at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre, he’s on draft number 33.

The play is about Judy Garland (Tracie Bennett), but it isn’t traditionally biographical, chock full of facts and figures. Instead, Quilter focuses on a single night in 1968.

As he’s honed the script, he’s relied on feedback from audiences around the globe, including Australia, Scotland, Poland, and Finland. “People in those countries particularly had to be able to go and see the show with no knowledge of Judy Garland and no particular interest in Judy Garland, but they had to be satisfied by two hours of storytelling,” he says. He adds that keeping them engaged often meant cutting historical information.

In November 2010, End of the Rainbow opened on London’s West End, where it played for six months and earned several Olivier nominations. It all happened so fast, Quilter says, that he didn’t make many changes to the script. Those would come when the show landed at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis—Garland’s hometown.

Guthrie audiences were surprised to see the star portrayed as pill-popping, vulgar, and at times, violent. “I think we had to earn them in Minneapolis,” Quilter says. “I think when we started each performance, particularly early on in the run, there was a sense of: ‘What are you doing to our Judy Garland? We don’t want to see her at her worst. We only want to see her at her best.’”

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