Actor shares his late-blooming career in one-man comedy ‘My Son the Waiter’
Looking back at the unexpected path of his life and career, Brad Zimmerman says he was “born to try to get excellent at something.”
“My Son the Waiter: A Jewish Tragedy,” which he will perform at the Manatee Performing Arts Center in Bradenton, is his comedic retelling of how he got to star in his own play around the country.
He loved sports “but I didn’t want to practice,” Zimmerman said in a Zoom interview. In high school, he took an aptitude test and had no idea of what he wanted to do, but he felt like a sports guy. “In high school all I did was sports, girls and Clearasil.”
A college theater class required him to audition for a school play. He got cast in the lead and was asked to audition for other shows. He liked the attention and started finding some direction. He eventually went to Penn State after college on an assistantship, but left after two years thinking he was just delaying going to New York and pursuing his acting career.
Like so many before him, he started waiting tables and doing auditions, waiting for the opportunity that would launch his acting career. It just took longer than he expected. At age 42, Zimmerman said he took a comedy class and slowly started developing material about being a waiter “and my mother saying things like, ‘How much longer do you think you’re going to give the acting?’ She plays a huge role.”
Zimmerman waited tables for the better part of three decades and it provided his sole income for more than half that time. “I stopped when I was 53 and actually had to go back to it very briefly when I was 58. Luckily, one of my tapes was seen by some guy who was starting a management company. He saw it and thought it deserves to be in a theater.”
He started getting some paying gigs and got hired as an opening act for Joan Rivers, George Carlin and other high-profile comedians, when a friend suggested he write a one-man show, putting his stories together in a more theatrical format. He started it in 2005, and by 2013 he found producer Philip Roger Roy and started touring the country until everything stopped for the COVID pandemic.
“I would have loved to have been famous, but it’s the journey not the destination,” he says now. “Better late than never.”
When the show opened off-Broadway in 2014, The New York Times wrote that after serving many meals to restaurant patrons “he brings us the story of his failure, and it’s pretty delicious.”
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Building his shtick serving one table at a time
Zimmerman says he was not born to be an actor. “I was born to hit a baseball” but he didn’t work hard enough at it. On stage, he discovered a different kind of talent for “holding an audience for 80 minutes. This show has gotten so much better because I’ve gotten better. I couldn’t have done this at 30 or 40. I didn’t have what Christian Bale or Al Pacino or DeNiro have. They were born to it.”
For about 15 years, his sole income came from waiting tables at a variety of casual restaurants. At some point, he started “acting” as a waiter.
“I have a shtick that I developed over years. I’ve honed it where I can be very funny with customers and that served me extremely well,” he said. “I would walk up to a table and say, ‘Really nice to see me.’ Bar none, that would be the start of a nice conversation.”
‘My Son the Waiter: A Jewish Tragedy’
Written and performed by Brad Zimmerman. Runs April 3-7, Manatee Performing Arts Center, 502 Third Ave., West, Bradenton. Tickets are $71.50. 941-748-5875; manateeperformingartscenter.com
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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: In one-man show, actor-waiter recalls ‘Jewish Tragedy’ of his career
