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Hello, Gorgeous: An Interview with Buyer & Cellar’s Michael Urie

With expert comic timing and devastating charm, Urie plays an out-of-work gay actor who’s hired to work for Barbra Streisand.

Hello, Gorgeous: An Interview with Buyer & Cellar's Michael Urie
Photo: Joan Marcus

Last month, Michael Urie ended a sold-out run of Jonathan Tolins’s playful comedy Buyer & Cellar at Off Broadway’s Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, after winning several accolades, including a Drama Desk award for Best Solo Performance. He’s back for a return engagement, currently playing at the Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village.

In recent years, Urie has become a familiar face on and off Broadway (The Temperamentals, Angels in America, The Cherry Orchard, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), but he’s best known for his four-season stint as a fashion designer’s assistant on Ugly Betty. He recently directed his first feature film, He’s Way More Famous Than You, in which he also plays a character loosely based on himself. Later this month, he will be seen in a supporting role in the wacky comedy Petunia, starring Christine Lahti.

As the 32-year-old Texas-born actor describes it, his career path owes much to a series of happy accidents so far. “I grew up in front of the TV and, at age nine, I wanted to be a director,” he recalls. “But then I kept getting cast in plays in school so I thought, ‘Maybe I am good at this.’ Then, somebody suggested that I audition for Juilliard, which I thought was crazy, but I decided I might as well try. At Juilliard I fell in love with the classics and when I graduated, I would have just been happy as a clam going from regional theater to regional theater playing the great parts in Shakespeare and Chekhov. I mean, I would kill to do Shakespeare in the Park, but I can’t get arrested there!” It was playing a classical role on stage that led to his big break on television. “I was doing a wacked-out version The Revenger’s Tragedy with the Red Bull Theater Company in a basement, where I looked like David Bowie and acted like Caligula.” His performance caught the eye of a casting director, who the actor learned was currently casting a TV pilot which had a small part for a character described only as “bitchy gay assistant.” Urie says, “I thought, ‘I bet I can do that.’” It was meant to be a one-shot deal, as the character was supposed to be replaced every week since the designer, played by Vanessa Williams, would fire her assistant every week. “Vanessa and I got along immediately,” Urie reports. “I made this choice that I was obsessed with her character and I would emulate everything she did, which she loved. So we started playing together. And she would give me tips; if you stand close to me, you will be in this shot. And by the end of week they put me in the cast photo. And, of course, the rest is history.”

In Buyer & Cellar, with expert comic timing and devastating charm, Urie plays an out-of-work gay actor who’s hired to work for Barbra Streisand, in a basement shopping mall constructed in the superstar’s estate in Malibu. The only factual element of Jonathan Tolins’s whimsical fantasy is the actual existence of a subterranean street of shops that Streisand had built in her barn to display her collections, described in her lavishly produced 2010 coffee-table book My Passion for Design. Urie talked to us recently about what it’s like playing the fictitious store manager of Babs’s personal shopping mall.

How did you get involved with Buyer & Cellar?

I was a fan of Jon’s work from way back. I knew his play Twilight of the Golds in high school because we used that piece all the time in our speech and debate tournaments. Then, last fall, completely randomly, we both started working on Partners, the short-lived sitcom for CBS. He was a writer for the show. That’s when we really got to know each other, when he showed me this script which had another actor attached to it at the time. So I read it as a friend. Then, cut to the actor who wasn’t available and Jon asked if he could attach me to the project and pitch it around. Then something got postponed at the Rattlestick [the company which had previously presented Tolins’s Last Sunday in June] and they decided to put the play on in March. It was the shortest incubation period of any new Off Broadway play. The last new play I did in New York, The Temperamentals, took seven years from the first time I read it to when we finally produced it.

Jon says that his last play, Secrets of the Trade, took 14 years to get on stage. I think he started writing Buyer & Cellar over the summer and finished it probably in July or August 2012. He kept tinkering and it changed a lot while we were in rehearsing. He was great about tailoring it for me. Every once in a while he would say, “You are saying the line wrong, but I like what you’re doing so I’m changing it in the script.” I would say, “Okay, but don’t tell me what it is, otherwise I’ll start saying it right!”

Did he talk to you about how he came to write the play?

I think it came out from a joke, honestly. Jon read the book when it came out and he said to his friends, “How would you like to be the guy who works down there?” And that spawned this idea. He wrote it initially as a kind of short story and someone said he should turn it into a one-man show. But it’s written like a seven-character show, and I’m the lucky son of a bitch who gets to play all seven characters.

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What’s it like doing your first solo show?

It’s terrifying. Now I know it’s manageable, but I still get really nervous before I start, almost every performance. The rehearsal process was very challenging. Because when you’re in a play with other people, no matter how big your role, there’s time to think while the other people are talking, or when you are off-stage. In this, literally, they couldn’t rehearse anything without me. Whenever I had a break, I needed to lay down on the floor and actually take a break.

A couple of nights ago, I completely forgot the word “litigious”—in the prologue. It was like it had been erased from my mind. I was like, “Did I have stroke? Am I screwed? Is this going to happen for the next 99 minutes?” I was fine, the rest of the show was fine, but, of course, that was a night the playwright and the director were there and I was like, “Oh, they’re going to think I have lost my mind.” It was very strange.

Sounds like it could get very lonely out there…

Nobody can help me, nobody at all. The first time we had the invited dress I skipped about a half a page—not an important page. As I kept going I thought about whether there was any way to go back and pick up that stuff, but, of course, the lights and the sound had moved on with me. So I just kept going. There are a few little hidden notes on the set. Just in case something goes terribly wrong, I can wander and take a peek, but I’ve never had to do that, thankfully. It’s a weird feeling, as if you’re in a little box, completely alone. You can’t even go to the restroom. I have stashes of water, but the play goes so quickly and I speak so fast and so nonstop it would be very jarring to take a drink of water. So I don’t do that either.

I’m very interested in seeing the play in the new space with twice as many people in the audience. But it really is like telling a story to someone, or in this case, a collective. And each night it’s totally different. Some nights they get it immediately, other nights I have to really feed it to them. Some nights they love the story so much I have to shut them up. And some nights it’s really quiet. The fun of this is that I get to act with them and I change based on them. It’s getting know a group of people every night, like making new friends every night. And it’s a workout. I don’t have to go to the gym as much. It’s funny, speaking so quickly and loudly is really good for your abs.

In the play, your character Alex’s boyfriend has an intense love/hate relationship with Streisand. Are you a Barbra queen?

I would say that I’m more of one now than I ever was. My mother is a huge fan and I remember when I was 14 she got Barbra’s comeback concert on CD and we listened to it. I remember loving it and also learning a lot from it. My mum explained to me why it was such a big deal and why every song elicited such a strong reaction from people. She hadn’t been on stage in 30 years or so. This was 1994. I have vivid memories of that. And since I’ve been doing this play, I’ve gone back and watched her movies. I’ve been re-watching Funny Girl; my God, she’s just brilliant in that movie. But the movie that I watched most for this play was Meet the Fockers, because, to me, her scenes with Ben Stiller feel the most like the scenes in this—just the way she commands him and how he’s nervous and awkward.

How did you set about portraying Streisand on stage?

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As I say in the beginning of the play, I’m not going to do an impression. Really good impersonators can be uncanny and really funny impressionists, like on SNL or in drag shows, they hang their hat on one or two funny things. I wanted the comedy of Barbra to come out of her behavior and not from gags. So I didn’t want to cross my eyes for instance. I just don’t want to gild the lily when it comes to sharing the fun of her idiosyncrasies. I’m only emulating her. So it’s a few faces here, and a few cadences there, the fingernails. I think what I focus on the most is the rhythms.

Do you think that you will meet her some time?

I hope someday that I can meet her. I don’t know what she’s really like. I feel that in private she’s probably more like when she’s acting than when she’s being interviewed. I have the sense that she’s more truthful as an actor. I was able to take gems—the voice and some of the cadences—from some of her interviews, but I kept going back to the movies, because I felt that’s more her. At the end of the day, she really considers herself an actor more than anything. And it would make sense that she would give the most of private part of herself as an actor. Watching Funny Girl and Meet the Fockers, she’s so alive and real and spontaneous; she listens. I don’t really see that when she’s on Inside the Actors Studio. She’s clever and witty and she makes good points, but she’s not alive and spontaneous, which is what I wanted for this show. She play-acts with my character. I didn’t want the withholding Barbra, because even in the in-depth interviews it feels like she’s withholding. I mean we all do—no offense! It’s still work when you’re being interviewed, whereas acting is more like play.

Buyer & Cellar is now playing at the Barrow Street Theatre.

Gerard Raymond

Gerard Raymond is a travel and arts writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in Broadway Direct, TDF Stages, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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