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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The actress stars as a blind corporate climber in “Lonely, I’m not”

Olivia Thirlby is mostly known for her girlish likeability in films like Juno and The Wackness, but when she strides on stage in Lonely, I’m Not, the new Paul Weitz play at Second Stage, it’s clear she’s nobody’s sweetheart.

Thirlby plays Heather, a corporate analyst who’s strong-minded, iron-willed, and resistant to showing weakness. She also happens to be blind, but that’s had no bearing on her drive for success.

For the actress, playing a character who can’t see is far less daunting than playing a woman who operates from her left brain. “This is the most challenging role I’ve played, and it’s not just because of the blindness,” Thirlby says. “It’s finding parts of [Heather] that I understand.”

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Bryce Pinkham and Da’Vine Joy Randolph shape Broadway roles

“I get scared every night. Every single night.” So says Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who’s playing psychic Oda Mae Brown in the Broadway musical Ghost.

It’s easy to understand why she’d be nervous. For one thing, Ghostis based on the beloved and well-remembered 1990 film about Sam Wheat, a ghost who asks Oda Mae to help him find his killer and protect his wife, Molly. It’s also the very definition of a modern major musical. High-tech effects, sophisticated video projections, and a rock score by Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard all make it feel larger than life.

Still, the actors need to deliver to grounded performances. Even in a show about ghosts, they need to seem human.

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The Tony winner fights death in “The Lyons”

Sometimes, an actor has to play a character more than once before he’s happy with his performance.

Just ask Dick Latessa (pictured above left), whose forty years of theatre experience include Cabaret, The Will Rogers Follies, and a Tony Award-winning turn as Wilbur Turnblad in Hairspray.

Currently, Latessa’s on Broadway in The Lyons, Nicky Silver’s dark comedy about a family that’s trying to make peace before Ben Lyons, the patriarch, dies. And sure, there are tender moments, but they always devolve into shouting matches about drinking problems, ancient grudges, and the romantic potential of a cancer patient down the hall.

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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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