I chatted with Evan Andrew Horwitz about his career and his new play “Tiny Beautiful Things”
Talk about your background, where you grew up, etc
I was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut. Not unlike Baltimore, although much smaller, it’s a town with an astonishingly rich cultural and artistic life, in many ways anchored by a handful of world class universities. And like Baltimore, New Haven has a somewhat checkered reputation that I think makes a lot of folks overlook how much it has going on! I was so lucky to grow up with access to theaters that were also community hubs like Long Wharf and Yale Rep, and it makes spending time at Center Stage feel like a kind of homecoming.
When did you know you wanted to be an actor?
I had a rather fabulous great aunt who lived in Manhattan who took it upon herself to give my siblings and I a cultural education. This meant a lot of museum visits and classical music and ballet that we dreaded and found deeply boring. But it also meant the Big Apple Circus and Broadway. It’s unbelievable, in retrospect, how lucky we were to be exposed to all that. The moment when I think it crystallized for me was seeing Bernadette Peters in Annie Get Your Gun maybe 25 years ago. The musical was problematic then and probably shouldn’t be produced ever again, but Bernadette absolutely floored me. She made it look like there was absolutely nothing that could possibly be more fun than being onstage. I remember thinking—that! I want to do that!
What was your favorite film of 2022 and why?
I’m pretty embarrassed at how few of great movies of 2022 I’ve seen! Like most of us, I fell out of the habit of going to the movies during the pandemic and there are some, like Everything Everywhere All at Once, that I’m desperate to see, but it feels criminal to watch it on my TV! But, of what I actually did see, I think my favorite film was Tár. I basically love everything Cate Blanchett does because she makes enormous choices that feel like they should be way too big to work onscreen, but somehow they do, and phenomenally. The movie is also about how power corrupts and can make monsters of us all. And it’s particularly interesting to me that it’s set within an arts institution. There are still a lot of people in theater, despite a lot of upheaval over the last few years, pretending that power hoarding doesn’t exist and isn’t corrosive. People like Ken-Matt Martin and Stephanie Ybarra have been leading the charge towards a different model of working. But there are still a lot of Lydia Társ in this business who continue to get away with every kind of abuse of power imaginable, despite all this overblown talk cancel culture and this idea that theater makers are somehow inherently progressive. They aren’t. As in the film, there are a lot of people with deeply conservative, even authoritarian impulses clinging to some major levers of power in this business. All that said, it’s also one of the most deeply funny films I’ve ever seen.
Do you ever get nervous still when you audition or go out on stage opening night?
Of course! Auditioning is pretty much always terrifying for me, because as much as I can know intellectually that they want me to be right for the job, it still feels very much like a judgement of talent and looks and basically me as a person. I’m trying to get better at that. I get a different kind of nerves before going onstage, but that’s the fun kind, the Christmas morning kind, knowing that we have something really thrilling to share and that we’re about to go on a journey together! In this show in particular, the cast and crew and staff have created this beautifully supportive environment so I know a lot of people have my back if I screw something up or something goes wrong. And also, weirdly, the fact that this play wrestles with many high-stakes, huge life questions helps put what we do into perspective. It’s humbling. Sharing these stories is important, but the stakes aren’t life and death for us!
Theaters were shut down for a bit during lockdown. What is it like being able to be back?
It’s such an ecstatic experience to be back it’s difficult to put into words. There was a long stretch—and in talking to my colleagues, I know I’m not alone in this—when I genuinely did not know if I would ever set foot on a stage again. That certainly wouldn’t have been one of the top line tragedies of the pandemic, but it forced me to reckon with the possibility I would never get to do this again. So, now, to be back is just inexplicably thrilling. It’s more fun for me than it’s ever been. I’m being slightly melodramatic (I’m an actor after all), but there’s nothing like staring into the abyss that makes you savor every moment when you’ve made it out. It occurs to me that’s in part what this play is about, so something feels apt about that.
What is “Tiny Beautiful Things” about and who do you play?
As I’ve hinted at, it’s a play about perspective, humility, forgiveness for yourself and whatever or whoever has caused you suffering because it’s all a part of the journey toward becoming more human, more empathetic. It wrestles with a lot of gigantic life questions that I think a lot of us have simmering in the back of our minds all the time—questions about love, sex, death, trauma. What I love about this play, and Cheryl Strayed’s advice column that it’s based on, is that it doesn’t provide pat answers to those questions. There are no answers, there is only learning and striving to do more, be better, love harder, reach further than you think you are capable of reaching. The incredible, incandescent Erika Rose plays Sugar, our advice columnist. Erika has a way of finding sagacity, searching, enormous empathy, and surprising decisiveness in her deeply felt, nakedly human performance. It’s staggering and so mesmerizing sometimes I forget I’m supposed to be acting, too—don’t tell anyone! Caro Dubberly, KenYatta Rogers, and I all play a whole assortment of people writing in to Sugar asking for advice. These are all based on real people’s letters, which is a humbling responsibility— these are real people’s lives! But it’s also great fun to get to play a range of characters in situations from the extremely silly to the deeply harrowing. It’s rare to get to use so many of the colors in my palette, so to speak, in one play, so that’s a real treat.
If you could eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?
At the risk of alienating this city famous for its crab, I think I’d have to say shrimp cocktail. I am obsessed with shrimp cocktail. To me, there is nothing more fun or more delicious. It makes me feel like I’m on glamorous vacation for a few minutes, like on an old cruise ship or something. I have a problem with shrimp cocktail, I really do. Like a small part of my brain is always thinking about when I can have shrimp cocktail. So it really would be great to know I could have it for the rest of my life. Are you offering?
Are you excited about the show playing in Baltimore?
Hands down, on of the best parts of working on this show has been getting to explore Baltimore. It seriously rocks. I don’t know what I’ve been doing with my life, but somehow I had never been here before and I’ve been having the best time. I’m based in New York, so it’s always a treat for me to come to a place where people are actually nice and incredible food is actually affordable and there are, you know, trees. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve spent some time looking at Zillow and daydreaming about a really good life here. But first I need to find the best shrimp cocktail in town!
“Tiny Beautiful Things” plays Center Stage until April 2nd! Buy tix