Charles Socarides
Currently: Sweetly channeling the spirit of A.R. Gurney as Eddie, the mildly rebellious son of a Buffalo WASP family, circa 1946, in the playwright's warm and winning autobiographical comedy Indian Blood.
Hometown: New York City. Socarides grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side and attended private school, first in the city Allen-Stevenson, an all-boys' primary school and then in New Jersey Lawrenceville, a co-ed boarding school. He was surrounded by the type of well-to-do WASPs depicted in the play, "but I wasn't as steeped in it as Eddie," Socarides says. "We weren't in that stratosphere of the crazy, strange, wealthy people, but I got to see a lot of it; I definitely had stuff to draw on." After two years at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, he dropped out and began studying acting privately. "The theater is where I feel most myself," he says, "so I made a commitment to staying in New York."
Art Imitates Life: Socarides' resume includes understudying Pablo Schreiber in Awake and Sing! alas, Schreiber never missed a performance and the initial workshop of Jon Robin Baitz's The Paris Letter as a young man who undergoes psychiatric treatment to "cure" him of being gay. In an eerie coincidence, the character of the psychiatrist was based on Socarides' real-life father, a controversial analyst who died last December at age 83. His parents split up when he was nine; father and son share the same name. "I came in for the audition and Robbie [Baitz] was completely floored," he says, adding, "I'm proud of my work in the play, but I'd rather not make a big deal about it; my dad never knew about it and passed away this past winter." After a change in the play's director and venue, Socarides never appeared in a production of The Paris Letter.
Mirror Image: How intimidating was it to create a character based on the life of a celebrated writer like Gurney—and have the playwright watch the process unfold? "There's a sense of responsibility," Socarides says, "but after a while you stop thinking about that. You just think, 'This is so cool!' It's given me courage as we've gone on." Luckily, the mild-mannered Gurney didn't feel the need to put his two cents in. "He's not controlling at all," Socarides says. "He's just there as a resource to answer questions."
Master Class: Over the course of the 90-minute, intermissionless play, Socarides shares a scene, one-on-one, with almost every other actor, including such heavy-hitters as John McMartin and Pamela Payton-Wright as Eddie's grandparents and Rebecca Luker and Gurney vet Jack Gilpin as his parents. "If they were panicking about me having the lead part, they never let me know it," he says with a laugh. "I was nervous in the beginning because my part is so big and relentless, but they're all cool, normal people. They work hard and they're mind-blowingly talented and yet you can have a conversation with them afterward. What I've learned is that if you have a really good partner, you can relax and just play the scene. It's an amazing journey for me every night."
Happy to Be Here: Speaking with Broadway.com the day his overwhelmingly positive reviews came out with three photos in The New York Times, no less!, Socarides declared that he didn't plan to read any of them. And he's not thinking about the breakout potential of Indian Blood, either: "I'm just happy to have a part!"