For these Orlando theater makers, ‘Significant Other’ has personal significance
I ask actor Jared-Austin Roys, starring in New Generation Theatrical’s “Significant Other,” if he is single.
“I currently am…,” he says, pausing with an actor’s sense of effective timing. “… unless you know a guy!”
Readers, I promise my interviews are not part of a dating service — but the question was pertinent because the relationship status of Roys’ character, Jordan, is at the heart of “Significant Other,” a dramatic comedy by Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews”).
Jordan, you see, is definitely single. And “Significant Other” looks at what happens when in a group of friends everyone starts pairing off — except for one person. In Harmon’s play, Jordan watches his best gal pals get hitched while Mr. Right eludes him.
Roys can relate to feeling the odd man out. Growing up in Auburndale, outside Tampa, “I was the only out and proud gay man in my high school at the time,” he says. “I had limited dating options — and by options, I mean nobody.”
So, like the play’s Jordan, he watched “the ebb and flow” of his friends’ romances.
“You see them hold hands,” he says. “I didn’t have that.”
For Alexander Mrazek, who’s directing the New Gen production, the story hit close to home when he saw it during its 2015 Broadway run.
“A lot of my gal pals were getting married, and I wasn’t seeing anybody,” he says — prompting thoughts of “What was I going to do if I couldn’t find anybody to be with in that way.”
The play requires Mrazek to balance moments of high drama with comic interludes in a constantly flowing narrative without traditional scene breaks.
“It’s important to me to find moments that are truthful; because of the truth, they become funny,” Mrazek says. “You’re going to laugh, then be tense about what happens, then sad, then back to laughing — like life. You’re going to connect and think, ‘Oh I remember having these conversations with my friends.”
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Part of the show’s humor will come from Al Milburn, who plays Evan — a character “so perfectly annoying in every way but so funny you want more,” says Mrazek.
Milburn, who understudies Jordan and also plays two other parts in the show, sees the play as “soaked in the truth of life.”
“It’s really hard when people grow up, and it feels like they leave you behind,” Milburn says. “We all have our own timelines in our lives.”
Roys’ timeline brought him to Polk State College in Winter Haven and then the University of Central Florida where he “got a taste” of gay dating.
“Then I moved to Orlando,” he says with a laugh. “Bam! Queer Central.”
He and his cast mates are having fun in rehearsals, but at the same time finding something deeper in the story.
Roys is coming to the end of his 20s, like Jordan in the play, so he shares some of his fictional counterpart’s concerns.
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“I am having these crises: Am I ever going to get married? Am I ever going to find love?” he says. “It does get emotional at some point.”
For Milburn, whose gender identity is nonbinary, being cast opened a floodgate of emotions.
“I was crying, telling people I get to be seen as male-presenting characters,” the actor says. “There’s going to be nonbinary people who come to the show and say, ‘Hey that could be me.’ That means a lot.”
That audience connection is what Mrazek set out to create when casting the show with a variety of races, gender identities, sexual orientations and body types.
Despite the cast members drawing on their deeply personal feelings, Mrazek says anybody will be able to relate to the show. After all, who hasn’t longed for love or tried to be happy for a friend while fighting back internal insecurities?
“I want everyone in the audience to look up and say ‘I see someone who looks like me up there,'” Mrazek says. “Everyone can feel these feelings. Everyone is strange, complicated, weird and quirky in any shape or form.”
‘Significant Other’
What: A New Generation Theatrical production of Joshua Harmon’s comedy
Where: Orlando Family Stage’s Black Box Theater, 1001 E. Princeton St. in Orlando
When: Aug. 4-12
Cost: $15-$20
Info: newgentheatrical.org
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