How Do You Play a Sympathetic Bigot?
Michael Oberholtzer talks about his Tony-nominated turn as a prejudiced baseball pitcher in Take Me Out
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“I hope I leave the audience with some feelings,” says Oberholtzer. “It’s so satisfying to talk to people after the show who are very conflicted about what they saw and my character.”
So, how does the actor tap into the complicated mind of Mungitt, a baseballer of confusion and rage? He started with Greenberg’s script, which gives the laconic Mungitt a Deep South dialect. That gave him a blueprint. “It’s incredibly helpful to an actor, knowing how to put sounds into your mouth,” Oberholtzer says, adding that the character is akin to “an abandoned, neglected, wounded animal whose life is being flushed down the toilet. I don’t know if that’s being empathetic or sympathetic, but it’s the way I understand.”
Michael Oberholtzer, Bill Heck and Jesse Williams in 'Take Me Out;' photo by Jeremy Daniel
Linda Cho’s costumes were also part of his creative process, which continues to this day. “You are always developing it,” he says about finding the character. “It becomes like a jacket that you love, and you just keep wearing it. And the more you wear it, the more you love it.” Pulling up his (literal) pants and boots helped him with Mungitt’s physicality, which was incredibly important since he’s a character of few words. “You put this stuff on and you start to move a different way,” Oberholtzer says. “He’s an athlete, he’s a pitcher. So, there’s a certain bravado.”
Not everything the actor tried was a home run. Oberholtzer threw a lot of ideas at director Scott Ellis and not everything stuck. For example, he suggested that Mungitt have a hairstyle like baseball player Bryce Harper’s ‘do: buzzed on the sides with a tail in the back. But that look is in right now, and Mungitt is decidedly unhip. “Instead of fighting for it, I said, ‘Okay,’ and we went back to the drawing board,” he says. “I wasn’t too precious about anything, and over time, we made a really great composite of what I hope to be a pretty dimensional and believable human being on stage.” Considering his accolades and Tony nod, Oberholtzer is clearly batting a thousand.
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Linda Buchwald tweets about theatre at @PataphysicalSci. Follow TDF at @TDFNYC.
Top image: Michael Oberholtzer.
tweets about theatre at @PataphysicalSci. Follow TDF at @TDFNYC.