Every Day in the Theater With Raúl
Sondheim Festival Is No Walk In the Park for Twice-Cast Esparza 
July 7, 2002
By Ann Gerhart
 

When Raul Esparza was a teenage tourist from Miami wandering through the Kennedy Center, a stern usher refused to let him peek inside the dark Opera House. He begged, using charisma that must have been extensive even then, but the usher remained unmoved.

"I turned to my mother," he says, "and I said, 'One day, I'm gonna work here.' "

Now he is 31. He is an emerging Broadway star. But because he still carries that kid from Miami inside him, he burst into tears as he walked through the Kennedy Center on his way to his first rehearsal this spring.

He gives the story dramatic polish, but sees it from the other side of the stage door, too: "Now, I wouldn't want them to let anybody in the theater if I were rehearsing," Esparza says, laughing. His work at the Kennedy Center is exhilarating -- and exhausting -- and there's no place for stage-struck kids who want to bumble into rehearsals.

On leave of absence from Broadway's "Cabaret," Esparza is the only actor to star in two musicals during this summer's Stephen Sondheim extravaganza. For much of the past month, he has spent his days rehearsing for "Merrily We Roll Along," which opens Friday. His nights have been spent onstage in "Sunday in the Park With George" as the emotionally frozen painter Georges Seurat and also as the impressionist's great-grandson, a less tormented 20th-century artist. "Sunday" closed June 28; "Merrily" opens Friday.

"It's exciting as hell," he says. "It's also incredibly difficult." Three complicated characters have lived in his head and his limbs, each fighting for his own snatches of songs and lines and stagings. Arriving for an interview at the end of an eight-hour rehearsal, Esparza collapses onto a bench and curls his slight and pliable body into a fetal position. For a moment. Then he springs up and smiles. This is repertory at the highest level, and he considers it "a blessing."

In the past 18 months, the excellent parts and critical acclaim have been raining down. The role of Che Guevara in the touring production of "Evita" propelled him to move from Chicago to New York, where he landed the role of Riff Raff in the Broadway musical version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Off-Broadway, he marqueed in the autobiographical Jonathan Larson show "Tick, Tick . . . Boom," before moving to play the unsettling, sneering Emcee in "Cabaret," opposite Brooke Shields, Gina Gershon and Molly Ringwald.

"There is this raw energy that he possesses," says Eric Schaeffer, the festival's artistic director, who cast and directed Esparza in "Sunday." For his audition, Esparza sang "Finishing the Hat," a vehicle for the artist to display his manic creative powers and also his emotional sadness, "and he absolutely got me teary-eyed," says Schaeffer. "He has this determination and intensity. He is great about finding and searching for the detail."

Hal Prince, who produced the original version of "Evita" in 1978, saw Esparza in the national tour: "He has real star quality and huge energy. He's smart and quick and funny."

Esparza watches his burgeoning fame warily. Some reviews cited his Seurat as evidence of "a blazing new talent," while others faulted him as cold and robotic. Esparza tries to learn something from the complaints and remain aloof from the praise. "I see the reviews and the awards, and I say, 'Okay, that's nice. That's really, really great. We'll see.' I remember that I'm just a kid from a suburb of Miami who has had some nice opportunities," he says. "If you start to buy all that about yourself, it's horrible."

Born in Wilmington, Del., Esparza moved to Miami with his family when he was 3. Both of his parents had fled Castro's Cuba. His father's father, a government official, defected to the CIA in 1966. His maternal grandparents put his mother on a plane when she was 14.

"They said, 'Good luck. Go find your brother,' and she didn't see her parents again until she was 21," Esparza says. "I have tried to imagine that scene more times than I could possibly describe to you. I feel so much that my parents' stories about leaving Cuba and finding a life here became my stories." It is something he often talks about with his wife, Michele, who is also Cuban American.

"This world that we never lived in or have ever seen, we do not know it," says Esparza, "and yet we feel like this is our power and our culture and our home. We long for it. It's a weird thing." His preferred sustenance is Cuban food, and the music he loves best is the Cuban songs he learned from his grandmother and his parents.

He became "obsessed" with acting after an elementary school play, then dedicated himself to theater during his years at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in Miami. (Castro attended the school before it moved to Florida, but "he's not listed as alumni," says Esparza, "for some reason.") But he also played soccer and ran student government and did charity work and generally performed as the dutifully overachieving only child in a defiantly overachieving culture.

When he graduated from New York University with a double major in theater and English and a minor in psychology, he thought he might become a lawyer or a politician, "something where I could use my Spanish and feel connected to the world." It was the kind of thinking the Jesuits had instilled in him. But Michele and his parents encouraged him to try the theater. "They were very supportive," he says. "They said, 'Life is too short, so why don't you do something you love? You fail, well, you can fail at anything.' "

His optimism was sorely tested. While Miami was a hot spot for movie production, Esparza got little work in the industry because, with his blond eyebrows and green eyes, he "didn't look Latin enough," a casting convention that irritates him enormously.

Then he turned down a part to get married and have a honeymoon, "and then I didn't work for a whole year," he says. "I worked temp jobs. We moved a lot. And then I remember standing in front of my wife's office -- she was working as a paralegal in Chicago -- and I was thinking, maybe it is time to do something else. It was 1996. There was still this sense that being in the theater is a little absurd. My family was so very conservative Cuban, and they are all engineers -- father, uncle, grandfather, great-grandfather -- and I thought maybe I should do something more stable. And then the next day, I got hired for one show, and each Wednesday for four weeks in a row, I got offered another part, at, literally, the lowest point in my life."

He did straight plays steadily at Chicago's Steppenwolf and Victory Gardens and Goodman theaters. "Evita" was his first musical, and, ironically, it launched him on a trajectory that took him away from regional theater.

When he was cast as Che Guevara in the 20th-anniversary national tour, his decidedly anti-communist mother said, "Over my dead body!" His exile grandfather, who had supported the revolution and joined the Castro government before becoming disillusioned, was even more pungent. "I knew that son of a bitch," he told his grandson, "and he didn't sing and dance!"

But the song-and-dance Che worked for Esparza. The role led to his audition for "Rocky Horror," which he followed by creating Jonathan in "Tick, Tick . . . Boom!" That role won him an Obie award and a Drama Desk nomination. From there, he was to move on to a revival of Sondheim's "Assassins," until the show, with its lyrics about flying a plane into the White House, was scrubbed after Sept. 11. So he wound up in "Cabaret," to which he will return in the fall.

His expanding professional success has come with personal cost, and he has struggled to balance his work with his needs to have a home and a family. The road has wreaked havoc with his marriage. "It's very, very hard. The theater has done quite a lot of damage to our relationship," Esparza says, "and I suppose that is all I should say." But because he is such an emotionally searching person, he continues: "You really begin to have doubts about yourself and where you fit in the world and where your relationship fits in the world. The priest who married me said, 'Your values are very different from the values of the community you work in.' I seem to have a sense of being grounded and having a place to come home to. And often, you have to be by yourself. Life is nothing but the show, and you can become strangers to each other without realizing it."

The face is beautiful, but it is not perfect, and so he can make it infinitely malleable. Esparza has a high forehead and distinguished nose and huge green eyes that can bulge with manic intensity or reflect inner wounds or transmit a tenderness that makes someone watching want to be involved with him. He is eloquent and passionate, a relentless researcher of his roles and nearly naked emotionally.

He plays his characters by feeling them. "Both plays have had interesting reverberations in my life," Esparza says. "I see my life through the prism of the show I am putting on. I know the feelings of these characters," of the aching distance between Seurat and his mistress, Dot, "of having the conversation with the person you love more than life itself that you do not belong in this relationship. I know the feeling of being so sad and lonely that you end up working yourself into a stupor."

During "Sunday," Esparza was steeped in 19th-century France and let the impressionist paintings in the National Gallery of Art saturate his sensibilities. To prepare for "Merrily We Roll Along," set in the Broadway of the '60s, he has been reading about the Kennedy administration and prowling through the National Museum of American History, soaking up a sense of the nation then. "It's a great excuse to learn a lot, the theater is," he says.

Unlike "Sunday's" repressed George, "Merrily's" Charley Kringas is an ebullient lyricist. First produced in 1981, the musical closed after only 16 performances and rotten reviews. It has a dramatic problem: Sondheim's exploration of the nature of love and friendship among two songwriters and their female critic friend begins in their jaded present and moves backward to their hopeful and idealistic beginnings. They are introduced as unsympathetic at best, beastly at worst.

"I understand it begins in a place that drips acid," says Esparza, and he leans forwardly earnestly. "And I know it's hard to ask the audience to care about people who they have just met and who are behaving so badly. But this story has another message, which is not 'How did they get here?' The story goes backward so that it has a happy ending, not for the characters but for the audience.

"What Stephen is saying is, love and friendship go on beyond you. The choices you make today will affect you 20 years from now. The compromises you make now will change you. So be very careful. And the show says, 'Make the good choices.' It's a little morality play."

And for a minute he seems to be talking to himself.