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Jack O’Brien wasn’t sitting long at a nice matinee on the Upper West Side before pulling out his iPhone to read the boldface names of everyone who spoke at Tom Stoppard’s funeral last year. He also listed people he watched from a distance but never got a chance to talk to, such as Mick Jagger.
“You can’t believe the people who were there,” he says.
O’Brien, 86, is a lighthearted writer who has worked as a director in the theater since the 1960s, during which time he won four Tony Awards, including hairspray, And there are enough anecdotes to fill at least two memoirs. He was the American entrusted with leading productions of Stoppard’s plays. invention of Love And Coast of Utopia, The three-part epic for which O’Brien won his third Tony Award. “I still haven’t gotten over her death,” he says, eating his French toast and making out with the waitress, who keeps coming back to see if we’ve had enough coffee. “I liked it best. As they say.” heiress, I was taught by the masters.”
A death, as it happens, brought O’Brien unexpectedly into television late in life, with almost no acting credits, certainly not onscreen. in the third season of return back, He plays Tommy Tomlin, the new hairdresser to sitcom star Valerie Cherish; Robert Michael Morris, who played his friend and hairdresser Mickey in the first two seasons, died in 2017. The show’s co-creators, Lisa Kudrow, who plays Valerie, and Michael Patrick King cast O’Brien after watching a YouTube interview with her. drama advertisement Remembering his career during promotion roommate, The play he was directing starred Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow (who lives near him in Connecticut). “I’ll do whatever anyone says,” he says. “I talked for 50 minutes.” King contacted O’Brien through mutual friend Victor Garber, asking if he had ever thought about acting. “I said, ‘Is this the idiom bucket list ”What do you mean?” O’Brien recalls. “I’m at the point in my life right now where I just say ‘yes’ to everything.”
return back is an outrageous comedy – O’Brien is a fan, but “it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable; the words Flattery Comes to the fore” – about Valerie’s efforts to regain relevance in a brutal industry. Taking on the relatively new universe of reality TV, it premiered on HBO in 2005. It was then canceled, developed a cult following, returned in 2014, and is now back nearly 12 years later for one season, believed to be its last, in which Valerie ends up on an AI-written sitcom titled how’s that?! She needs someone to do her hair and meets Tommy while shooting a no-budget indie film at the retirement home where he lives. Like O’Brien, Tommy is also short-tempered and ready for anything, especially a good lie. On his first day on set, Tommy takes off his hat to reveal a bright red hairpiece. “If anyone asks,” he says nonchalantly, “I’m 70 years old.” “It’s adorable,” says O’Brien. “And he based that wig on Robert Redford!”
The character of Tommy was not written as a replica of Mickey, and O’Brien played him accordingly. He is less gentle, more direct, than his predecessor.
The show’s third episode, which serves as a tribute to Morris, Tommy, and Valerie, as she deals with her sense of loss and her frustration that she doesn’t have the exact wig she wants. “I’m her truth teller, which is a very different kind of support system, and that’s basically what I do in life,” O’Brien says. Tommy’s honesty is somewhat like a director’s honesty. “I’ve sat across from some of the greatest actors we’ve produced in 60 years,” he says, “and it’s not like you can learn it by osmosis, but you can recognize it when you see it.” You can say, ‘This is the truth.’
O’Brien got his start in theater at the University of Michigan by writing full-length musicals and fooling around with plays for his fraternity, but mostly gave up acting – he points to his scalp – because he started going bald at age 22. (He once tried a hairpiece, and it slipped out of place in front of Helen Hayes at a pool party. “I saw Ms. Hayes go” – he says, imitating a huge gasp. “I went into the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and said, ‘Jack, this is not who you are.'”) After graduating, he worked for Alice Rabb and Rosemary Harris’s famous APA Repertory Company and a Directed a calling-card revival. porgy and bess In 1976. He has since bounced from one project to another, coming back to acting only when absolutely necessary. In 1990, during the run of the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, he participated in a love letters When no one wanted to work the week of Thanksgiving. He remembers his co-star Michael Learned asking him to cry at the end of the play. “Inauguration night, I cried and everything,” he says. “But then, as soon as I thought I’m good at it, I couldn’t do it again. That’s why I can’t see the rest To return back.“
As a director, O’Brien has followed a path that is intentionally difficult to summarize. He’s not one to leave any trademarks, nor does he develop a sense of self-centered mystery, which means, he jokes, he’s just not interesting enough to make good copy. (Talk to Joe Mantello instead, he suggests, referring to the director Wicked On Broadway: “He’s Got to Be the Richest Man, So He Doesn’t Do It” to pass To work.”) But it is possible to point to some key sources.
O’Brien is known for coaching selfless comedy from a performance – in hairspray, He told his actors to write ‘You’re not funny’ on their makeup mirrors so they could trust the script. With Stoppard, his goal was also self-consciousness, or at least a little heat. “I found him to be one of the most fascinating human beings I have ever known,” says O’Brien. (He tries to imitate Stoppard’s stentorian way of giving notes, then says he can’t pronounce; he tells me that Ethan Hawke, one of the stars utopia, Could have done it better.) “And I thought, Where is it on the page? The British love that intellectual bent,” he says. ”Americans have to feel something to be engaged or we think it’s fake. So I focused on harnessing that part of it.
O’Brien is enjoying his brush with a new medium, even if indecisive about maintaining it. He compares his rise to stardom to that of John Houseman, another director who helped launch O’Brien’s career and eventually get him in front of the camera. paper chase In 1973. But O’Brien made it clear that he wasn’t going to turn to Hollywood completely. She has her own complaints about long days of filming on television and tongue-twisting repetitions in front of the camera, such as “I did hair for the guests.” I am this!,” which was Tommy’s role on Valerie’s ’80s sitcom.
And anyway, he’s got more Broadway left. Recently freed from the use of a cane after suffering an ankle injury on Marsha Mason’s Porch, he is working on three plays as well as a musical and is in talks about a 25th anniversary revival. spray Next year. He’s still hyped about his last Broadway outing, shocked, which was nominated for nine Tony Awards in 2023 and is now touring.
In Nice Matinee, O’Brien wears a hat that says Be Shocked. He notes that we’re sitting in front of the booth where he used to meet John Lithgow and wondering how his turn in screen acting would be received on Broadway. So far, the reviews seem positive, “so I have to say I think it’s okay.” But subsequent information is difficult to predict. “You know, the actors will tell you” if they have notes, he says. “Especially if you are a director, actor Desire Let me tell you.”
