Tony Winner John Benjamin Hickey Shares His Coronavirus Experience & The Future of Plaza Suite

In addition to binge-watching Babylon Berlin ("I'm obsessed. I am actually starting to irritate my friends."), John Benjamin Hickey has been spending his time at home recovering. The Tony winner shared his experience about being sick with COVID-19 on #LiveAtFive: Home Edition. "The day after they closed Broadway down, I was feeling funny," he told Broadway.com's Paul Wontorek. "I went to my doctor, got tested, got my positive results back a few days later and spent two weeks really, brutally sick." Don't worry readers, he recovered and is now, "two-and-a-half-weeks symptom-free and feel great," he said. "I never felt like I needed to be in an emergency room or in a hospital. I had a doctor monitoring me the whole time. Given everything we're hearing, I consider myself profoundly lucky. It is a brutal, brutal sickness." 

Hickey had been slated to do double duty during this Broadway season. On January 4, he exited the production of Matthew Lopez's The Inheritance, where he was acting, to begin directing his married pals Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick in an eagerly anticipated revival of Plaza Suite by Neil Simon. He passed the torch of playing Henry Wilcox on to his friend Tony Goldwyn, who appeared in the production through its final performance. Scheduled for a March 15 closing, the moving play had its last performance on March 11 as a result of the Broadway shutdown.

Looking back on The Inheritance, which offered apanoramic view of gay life in New York City and the legacy of the AIDS crisis, Hickey thinks it feels more timely than ever in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. "The lessons you take from that play are about how easy it can all be gone tomorrow," Hickey said. "History will be very, very kind to that play."

Hickey has compared The Inheritance to his Broadway debut project: Love! Valour! Compassion! by the prolific playwright Terrence McNally, who passed away from coronavirus complications on March 24. "He was my hero and mentor," Hickey said of McNally. In Love! Valour! Compassion!, Hickey played a gay man named Arthur Pape, "who has this great line: 'I shouldn't be gay: I hate opera. I can throw a ball.' I was always sort of like that guy. I would thank Terrence for giving me the part that was closest to who I was as a human being," he said.

While taking time to reflect on his mentor McNally and his experience with The Inheritance, Hickey is also excited to look ahead. The lights of the Great White Way went out on the evening of Plaza Suite's invited dress rehearsal. But after an encouraging run in Boston, rest assured: he's still got Parker and Broderick running lines in quarantine. "I call them once a week, and I say, 'Have you run your lines this week?' And they say, 'Yes,'" Hickey said with a smile. "When Broadway comes back, we will all want to get to work as soon as possible. It's such a beautiful and unexpectedly heartbreaking and moving play. The two of them together really had a kind of electricity that people just loved so much in Boston. We were so looking forward to getting to do it in New York, and we still are, of course, when the time comes. New York is not New York without Broadway."

Watch the rest of Hickey's #LiveAtFive: Home Edition interview below.