Marathon Man: Brían O'Byrne at the 'Utopia' Finish Line

For the first time in four years, Brían F. O'Byrne will not be acting in a play when the Tonys roll around. But he's probably spent as much time as anybody on a Broadway stage this season. Every Saturday from 11 in the morning until 11 at night for the last two and a half months. Plus an almost nightly performance during the week of an almost three-hour play.

The Coast of Utopia had its final performance Sunday. The previous weekend it had its final marathon, in which the three plays in the Utopia trilogy, Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage, were performed back-to-back-to-back, except for meal breaks. There had been a marathon every Saturday except one since late February. And as Alexander Herzen, the one lead role among The Coast of Utopia's cast of 44, O'Byrne was both starter and anchor.

Oops, wrong analogy—that's relay races, not marathons. But O'Byrne was there at the beginning and end of each play, of each marathon. All three plays open with the same tableau: Herzen, in middle age, sitting in a chair, reflecting…on lives lost (he holds the glove of a deceased son), perhaps also on battles lost, and won. Herzen, one of Russia's pre-Revolution revolutionary thinkers whose lives are dramatized in Tom Stoppard's epic trilogy, is also in the final scenes of every play. He appears just briefly in Voyage, but Shipwreck and Salvage follow Herzen and his family from 1846 to 1868, from Moscow to Germany to Paris and Nice to Britain and Geneva.

BWW interviewed O'Byrne in a Lincoln Center greenroom last week, with the final marathon behind him and just two performances of each part of the trilogy remaining. He hadn't missed any shows, and is up for Tony and Drama Desk awards for his portrayal of Herzen. He'd also recently started working on the Showtime series Brotherhood, which films in Providence, R.I., where it is set. O'Byrne, who immigrated from Ireland in 1990, plays an Irish cousin of Brotherhood's central characters—two Irish-American brothers, one a gangster, one a politician—in the series' second season, which begins airing in the fall.

Another TV project of O'Byrne's premiered Monday night, PBS' American Experience: Alexander Hamilton, in which he has the title role. He's also in the movie adaptation of the off-Broadway play Bug, opening Memorial Day weekend. O'Byrne's other upcoming films include No Reservations and Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, with his Utopia costar Ethan Hawke. But not Doubt. It was announced last month that the film version of Doubt will star Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn, the possibly-pedophiliac-priest role for which O'Byrne received a 2005 Tony nomination and Drama Desk Award.

O'Byrne, 39, who played Clint Eastwood's priest in Million Dollar Baby, may soon be working more on screen than stage. His theater work has itself been something of a marathon: He's acted on Broadway in each of the last four seasons—in Utopia, Shining City, Doubt and Frozen (for which he won a Tony). He also did consecutive seasons of Martin McDonagh work in 1998 and '99, The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Lonesome West, both of which earned him Tony nominations. He talked about movies, marathons, moving and more in our interview.

How does it feel now that you're nearing the finish line?
Great. It's been a real, real, real, real long process. It felt like we were in tech for months and months and months. The first play had so much rehearsal that it was much more ready. After rehearsals for the first one, we ran out of time. We just suddenly didn't have enough time. The final show, we had 12 days' rehearsal time before we went into it. It was a really, really, really tough process. We were constantly aiming toward February 24—the first marathon. For me it was like opening night was February 24. Each time we opened a play, it fed the previous play, and it changed it. And when we saw all three together on the same day, we had an idea of the full piece, particularly for the characters who are running all the way through it. Since February 24, the play became ours for the first time.
It was an extraordinary journey. I don't think we're going to know what hit us until Tuesday, when it's all over.

How were the marathons different from individual performances of the plays?
The audience reaction. I think that is the real bonus to the marathon: that people's hearts are genuinely affected. Perhaps their heads get in the way on single-show days, when people are trying to figure stuff out. You don't need to do that with these plays, in an odd way, despite them being incredibly wordy and huge amounts of thought going on. When the audiences are in there for the entire day, they realize at the beginning that they can't study it with a magnifying glass. They have to sit there and accept the fact that we're going to tell this grand story, and at the end you will have taken everything in. When people come to see them individually, they feel like: I better really study carefully in this, because I'm not seeing the next one until two weeks' time, so I have to get whatever information, little plot points that Stoppard might put in that are going to have a payoff in another play. On the marathon days, people let it wash over them and they get this cumulative effect of this journey that lodges itself both in the head and in the heart. It really does work in a spectacular fashion on the marathon days.

Did this experience change you as an actor?
Oh, yeah! After this…I don't think anything will ever be scary again. That's what I have to remind myself: Anything after this is just peanuts. I started doing a TV show now. Yeah, there are long hours, but are you kidding me? Long hours? So what! You've got a trailer, you can go and sit down. You've got several takes. If you want to really challenge yourself, here's an eight-and-a-half-hour Tom Stoppard play—put it on, do it in rep, and put it on in front of 1,200 people who paid a lot of money to see it. That's a responsibility.
So I will be changed forever by that. It was a baptism by fire on several occasions. I got to face actor's nightmares, basically. Nothing to an actor is more terrifying than being…bad. Insecure, I should say, rather than bad—they usually go together. But we had a timetable here. We ran [through] plays once before we put them on the stage—we'd never run them before tech. And they're large parts and I do a lot of talking in them all. Particularly the final play, with 35 scenes. We just hadn't time to attend to them all. And I had to go out there and basically rehearse in front of an audience, which is very difficult because you don't know what's landing. In rehearsal, you can stop and go, "I think that worked?" and get confirmation from the director. You can do it again so you feel it. We didn't have that process—we had to do that in front of an audience.
It was such an accomplishment of [director] Jack [O'Brien] to get these up. I don't think people have any idea of how tough the process was to get these on—technically, to get them up on time was astonishing, and to play them in rep. And then once we got the play on, we'd take the next night off and have to do the other play without being secure in what we were doing. That focused concentration on getting it all up was astonishing. You have three lighting designers; the costume designer, who was just heroic in clothing so many people; and Jack, of course, having this larger vision of everything.
But we all got through it! And now we're at a stage…I never thought I could come in and go: Okay, what show are we doing tonight? We're doing [Part] 3? Fine. What's on, 1? Great, it's like a night off for me.

Doing three plays at once, with so many scenes in each, did you ever have a momentary lapse where you forgot what point you were at?
The first couple of nights we'd do a play…thank God for my dresser, Jim. I'd walk off the stage and go, "Where do I go? Somebody point me in the direction I have to go." And my dresser would go, "Here…" I'd go: "What do I take off?" "Put on this…"

What were some other challenges?
Initially, we'd be here day and night. One Friday afternoon we had off, and it was the first time—except our Equity day off—it was the first daylight time we'd had off in 175 days. I had to learn a lot of lines. I speak so much, in a space that is completely unforgiving. Initially, we had huge problems just being heard. It's three-quarters in the round, so technically it's an incredibly difficult show to do, because you have to start a sentence in one side and finish it in the other. You turn one way, [then the other], just throw it around, so you're constantly feeding people all the way around.
The day after a marathon, I found it difficult to talk. Not physically, I just don't want to talk anymore. My voice is tired. Out of sorts…just feeling, like, spent. Show 3, I probably talk more than 2. So when we do the third part on a Friday night, it's four shows in 24 hours. That's really tiring. In 3, I just talk nonstop. I'm usually tired vocally after 3 anyway, so to come in at 10 the following morning…holy f---!

Had you done a lot of research for the play?
I knew very little about European history at the time, despite my upbringing in Ireland. Our history education tended to very much look from an Irish perspective: Britain was doing this, so if Britain was doing this, this is what we were doing to try and get rid of the British. I was unfamiliar with a lot of things that were happening in the rest of Europe. I hadn't heard of Alexander Herzen, any of them—Belinsky [played by Billy Crudup], Bakunin [Ethan Hawke]. I'd heard of Turgenev, of course, but hadn't read any of his stuff. Then it was a question of educating myself. I've got a stack of books this high that I read cover to cover, and underlined—Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers, E.H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles, stuff on history at the time, and then all of his [Herzen's] writings, My Past and Thoughts and Letters From France and Italy and From Another Shore.

The Coast of Utopia deals with a period in political history. Do you consider it a political play in terms of it having relevance today or at other times in history besides when it takes place?
I'm sure it does. We were presented with this huge play, and an interesting thing happens when you're getting a historical context while learning all these lines as well—it certainly happens to me—you assemble all of this information, I put it all into this very small brain in a very large head, and try to filter that into playing the character. Then, all the problems of the play start to take over, and all that you've learned about this person tends to just seep out. Not even seep—pour out, because with seeping, at least something will be retained. And the judgments that you make in rehearsal—when you go, "Oh, this is of massive resonance to what's happening today"—that spark enthusiasm for an investigation is lost as well. It becomes more about what's happening on the stage around you.
It all starts coming down to this very small world of this person in front of you [on stage] that you're looking at and you're having a response to, and you're trying to be alive in that moment. Last week I turned to Jason Butler Harner [who plays Turgenev], we share a dressing room, and I had some historical question, and I realized I'd forgotten all this information. That's a very long way of responding to the question "Does it have relevance?" I'm sure six months ago I could have told you 150 things where I'm sure it was completely relevant. Now, I don't know, because right now, at the end of this long run, it's really about getting on stage and looking at this person and reacting. Next Tuesday or Wednesday, I'll start to look at this and I'll go, "What was that all about? Why did we do it?" We've certainly had politicians here. We've motivated people to go out and buy books about these political activists. Maybe in a few years' time somebody will say, "You know, I watched Coast of Utopia and some idea lodged in me that I couldn't get rid of…" Does it have ramifications? That's an audience question, really.

How did you get involved in the production in the first place?
Jack called. Ethan was cast and called me after Jack and said, "You should do this." Ethan is really the spirit of this whole production. He's an extraordinary man and a beautiful human being that is a bundle of enthusiasm and a positive force within the company…really the leader of the pack here. His enthusiasm is absolutely infectious, and so he called me up and started spouting about why he was so excited to do this. I was going on vacation; I had gotten the plays and I said, "I'll bring them to read." I started reading them and said, "This is not what I want to read on the beach!"
I came back and hadn't read them. Jack sat me down and said, "This is what I want to do…" and showed me the design of the piece. We had almost a two-hour meeting and then he said, "I want you to do it." He showed this design concept that he and Bob Crowley had come up with, and it was extraordinary.

You play another revolutionary named Alexander H.—Hamilton—in a new TV program. That's a coincidence.
I was shooting it during the day when I was in rehearsals for the first [part of Utopia]. I come on [stage] and go: "Hi, I'm Alexander H…" Every time I'd go on, I'd have to go [to myself]: "Herzen, Herzen, Herzen. Not Hamilton."

Coast of Utopia is your seventh Broadway play, and they've all been original works—no revivals.
My main passion is new writing. I'm not interested in doing plays that have been done before. "That's a great part for me, why don't I do it"—I don't think like that. I like to get a part and go: "Who the hell is this? This has never been done before…" and then interact with the writer and create something. It's like giving a dog a bone: You don't want to let go of it until you can work it out, or swallow the damn thing, you know? Crack it. There's an excitement with new writing—you get to work with the writer. It's a whole different creative thing to actually have input.

Speaking of working with writers…are you now at liberty to reveal what Doubt author John Patrick Shanley told you about whether Father Flynn was guilty?
I am at liberty to tell…but I choose not to.

Have you told anyone?
Loads of people. [Laughs] I told people initially, and then I was like: You know, I shouldn't tell anybody. I'll never tell anyone else, I don't think. It's better. You know what Shanley says: The name of the play is Doubt. When I knew I was doing the part, I called Doug [Hughes, the director] and said: "Do you think this would be a great idea—anytime we talk about the backstory, the actresses aren't allowed in the room?" And he thought that was a great idea, so when we started to talk about it, we said, "Okay, ladies, get out of the room." It was a fun game to play. And then, way into it, Shanley announced that what he told me was a lie. I responded: "That's fine, because I'm not playing what you told me." So we're just playing. I know what my Father Flynn did or did not do.

Were you considered for the movie?
No, I doubt it. It would be really fun if Cherry Jones and I were in the film. I was going to call Shanley: "Put me and Cherry in the movie, so we can just come in, concerned parents or something like that." Like, I think something happened, she thinks something didn't happen.

Have you been approached about revivals that you turned down because you prefer doing new plays?
I have been asked would I be interested for a couple of things. I have a couple of directors that I really like working with as well, and they on several occasions have floated ideas by me. I'm not saying that I wouldn't… I've never done a Beckett, and I'd love to. I went to the Samuel Beckett Centre in Ireland [Trinity College's drama department], and Beckett was the first writer that blew me away. I'd never known theater before, and the first play that was given to me was Waiting for Godot. I would just love to do Waiting for Godot.

Did you move to America to be an actor?
Not necessarily. I had gone to drama school, but I didn't think I was good enough to be an actor. I went to London because my girlfriend at the time was working there in a play. I won a green card [lottery], so I came over. I had worked here before going to college to earn some money to go to college. In construction.
I was here about five or six weeks and I got a job at the Irish Rep. The Irish Rep is basically the reason I'm an actor. They were doing a benefit, a Beckett night at the Public. My brother went and asked can we work backstage. I knew Ciarán [O'Reilly, co-founder of Irish Rep] from home—he lived six miles away from me in Ireland, and his brother is married to my aunt. I went to auditions the next week and got a part in Philadelphia, Here I Come! and that ran for six months, moved from off-off-Broadway to off-Broadway. Then I was in several of their next plays.

So you didn't grow up with showbiz dreams?
No, never. I had no idea. Who knew it could be done? Because it was a farming area, there was a lot of little events for kids and locals in the wintertime. Like shows that the local community would put on. I was involved in that, just to while away the winter nights, you know what I mean? So, I totally fell into it. But I never went to the theater, I didn't go to the cinema. There was no cinema near us growing up. I saw three movies in a cinema before I was 18. The first, I think I was 8, I saw Death on the Nile. Then I went to London for Christmas and I saw Grease and Watership Down.

What's next for you?
Depending on something that happens with my girlfriend, Heather [Goldenhersh, who played the young nun in Doubt]. If her show [the CBS sitcom The Class] gets picked up, I'm going to move to L.A. with her. It's kind of to keep me away from doing another play. But, in saying that, if her show isn't picked up, I'll do a play this fall, in all probability.
I've been doing theater for so long. There's kind of pressure on you to go and get a job on TV or film. Like, you're somewhat lacking if you just do theater. You don't have recognition being a theater actor. Joe Public doesn't know theater actors, really. You say you're an actor, and people look at you and you see a wave of pity descends on them—the terrible life you must be living.

Are you concerned about moving to L.A., since many New Yorkers hate it?
No, I like it out there. I did a film out there five, six years ago; I was there for three weeks—that's the longest. It seems lovely. You can have a nice lifestyle. I don't think anyone should be surprised by what they get out there. Everyone knows that it's different than here. You don't have that same vibrancy that we have, that you just bump into people on the street and have conversations about what's going on in theater and all the arts. It's a one-business town there. Fame is more important.
You get battered around in New York in order to make a living. I guess there celebrity can descend upon anybody. That's a very different thing. People from here seem to almost be embarrassed at the lack of weight over there—that they perceive, anyway. But I'm really looking forward to it. It would be great to travel around the West Coast, go skiing and all that, and not have to work six nights a week. I hope there's no earthquake when I'm there.

What did you have to get used to when you moved to the United States?
Nothing really. America is in the consciousness of every Irish person, because it's where everybody went when Ireland was really bad, which was only until 20 years ago. My great-grandfather was an American citizen. He was a tinsmith in Georgia; in 1867, he became an American citizen in Atlanta. Then he went back to Ireland. And his only son came over in the '20s and was a tram driver in Chicago. And he went back; after the Wall Street crash, he'd lost whatever money he had. So I grew up going up to my grandfather, where my grampa would have this trunk and he'd open it up and take out these little remnants. He would—it was a very, very rural area where I grew up—he would take out this admission ticket to the Empire State Building, and he'd show me this Empire State Building thing and start telling us about this place. How amazing and tall it was.
He'd take us up behind the house—I lived in the most beautiful part of Ireland—and he'd point off and we'd see the smallest island off in the distance and he'd say: "You see that there? That's the Statue of Liberty!" And we'd go, "Grammy, you went there?" "Yeah!" So I always carry this [takes laminated Empire State Building ticket stub out of his wallet]. Now it's not a big deal to go over and back. You no longer have to think of yourself in one place.

Photos of Brían in performance, from top: as Alexander Herzen in Part 3, Salvage; with Ethan Hawke in Shipwreck;
 as Doubt's Father Flynn; with Jennifer Ehle in Shipwreck. [Coast of Utopia photos by Paul Kolnik; Doubt photo by Joan Marcus]