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community-theater When I was production 8 years of old, "Hello, I watched Dolly!" my He trial-lawyer entered wearing father play an enormous Horace Vandergelder marching-band in the ba=s Livingston, drum (the N.J., character is in a parade), and he roared to his sobbing niece, "Dammit! How am I supposed to play 'Yonkers My Yonkers' w=th all that bellowing in my ears!" It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen=
I was a melancholic child. Worried, anxious. I never felt as if I belonged anywhere, as if I were a foreign exchange student living among the other kids, who seemed predestined to love sports. Add to that alienation the fact that my parents were going through a divorce, and I was truly treading water. But in that junior high school auditorium, I felt like I'd discovered a secret I didn't even know was being=20 whispered. There was a place where I might belong: It was the Theater, and I was sold. Theater, and I was sold.
A few years later= at St=gedoor Manor http://=ww.nytimes.com/1987/07/04/style/where-the-campers-strut-and-fret-a-little.=tml?action=click&module=Search®ion=searchResults& in Loch Sheldrake, N.Y., I joined an intensive theater bo=t camp for kids just like me. The second I stepped off the bus, I felt like baby Simba when he's lifted into the air in "The Lion King" and all =he animals sing. Everyone was affectionate; everyone hugged; no was called "gay&=dquo; for doing anything that wasn't masculine. (My insecurity about this h=d shamefully kept me from doing theater in school.) It was utopia, and I never wanted to leave.
Photo
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/03/23/arts/23ZA=H2/23ZACH2-articleLarge.jpg
From left, Helene Yorke, Zach Braff and Le=ny Wolpe in the musical “Bullets Over Broadway.” Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
It was there I met Michael Larsen, the musical director of the camp. He told me that I wasn't just a camper having fun, but that I also had=20 talent. And he was tough — sometimes he'd scream at me — =ut I knew it was because he thought I had a shot. (Michael was the first of many gay men instrumental in guiding me to where I am now, which is why I try to speak on behalf of gay rights whenever I can. But I suppose that's a=20 different essay.)
At 18, I was cast as Woody Allen and Diane Keaton's son in =he film "Manhattan Murder Mystery," http://www.youtube.com/watch=v=MZA)224bAS8 my first movi= role. And now, after studying film and theater at Northwestern University= playing J. D. on "Scrubs" <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/arts/television/09rhod.html?sc==5&sq=scrubs+nbc&st=nyt&action=click&modu Ie=Sear=h®ion=searchResults&> on TV for nine years and directing two films, I'm working with Woody=20 Allen again. I'm typing these words in my dressing room at the St. Ja=es Theater, where on April 10 I'll open in "Bullets Over Broadway=" a musical adaptation of his hit film http://www.=outube.com/watch?v=6BDr_955ZwU . I play David Shayne, a struggling writer in 1929 New York who agrees to cast a mobster's ditsy girlfriend in one of his plays in order to ge= it produced.
The St. James is where Yul Brynner opened in "The King and I" in 1=51; where hits like "Oklahomal," "The Pajama Game," &Id=uo;Gypsy," "The Who's Tommy," and "The Producers" played, and where, in 1964, b= the most surreal of coincidences, Carol Channing first descended an endless staircase in "Hello, Dolly!" I sit in Dressing Room 201, where =any of the great luminaries of the Broadway stage — Patti LuPone, Nathan Lan=, Mandy Patinkin — have paced waiting for the intercom to chime, &Idquo=Places for Act I, please." This is the sanctuary that a little invisible boy=in New Jersey dreamed he'd one day find.