Michael Stahl-David

Currently: Making his off-Broadway debut as a high school senior who reluctantly accompanies his professor father and stepmother to Kigali, Rwanda, in 1994, unaware that the mass murder of 800,000 people is about to begin.

Hometown: Chicago

Windy City Beginnings: For a stagestruck child, Chicago is an ideal place to grow up, and Stahl-David got a head start in the well-known drama program at Lincoln Park High School. "Casting directors would come to school," he explains, "and I was auditioning for movies, pilots and commercials." But by senior year, he says, "I wasn't really on track. I was messing around with graffiti art and wasn't sure I wanted to be an actor anymore. I thought I wanted to be a history teacher." A workshop production of a play about racism got him back on track, along with an invitation to join Steppenwolf Theatre's summer training program, where he took improv classes with Mandy Patinkin's cousin Sheldon—who just happened to chair Columbia College Chicago's theater department. "The school encourages working, as opposed to a conservatory [method] and [Patinkin] said, 'You need to stay in the city and audition.'" Good advice: By the time Stahl-David earned his B.A., he had acted at Steppenwolf, Victory Gardens and the Goodman in Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?.

Go East, Young Man: Though he praises the "purity" of the theater scene in his hometown, Stahl-David's eye was always on New York, particularly after a memorable weekend trip four years ago. "My grandma had some frequent flier miles that were about to expire, so I came to New York and saw two plays in a day," he says. Before catching the Broadway production of Take Me Out, he snagged a ticket to Stephen Adly Guirgis' Our Lady of 121st Street. "I was really impressed by this one actor who had a scene in a confession booth, smoking a joint while he was talking to the priest," he remembers. "That was Ron Cephas Jones, and now I'm sharing the stage with him in my first off-Broadway play, which is very, very cool."

I Will Survive: Stahl-David's first NYC survival job, at Starbucks near Lincoln Center, "just made me miserable," he says now. "I wanted to work in the basement restocking instead of upstairs dealing with extra foam." More lucrative was a stint as a pedi-cab bike taxi driver, "carrying businessmen and tourists to and fro around midtown." One day after work, he pedaled over to an audition for the NBC pilot The Black Donnellys and came away with the role of Sean, the youngest brother in a family of impossibly good looking Irish mobsters. The show lasted only 13 episodes but took the young actor's career to another level. "One of the greatest things was learning to feel comfortable on a set," he says. "And a series changes things quite a bit in terms of money."

First Stage: Since moving to New York, Stahl-David has played Peter in The Diary of Anne Frank at Paper Mill Playhouse and acted in a development production at the New Group. "I feel very safe on the stage," he says simply. "I like the environment of a rehearsal room, with just the cast and the director and the stage manager." Luckily for him, Roundabout assembled a top-flight cast for The Overwhelming, including Sam Robards and Linda Powell as Stahl-David's father and stepmother, James Rebhorn as a jaded U.S. embassy official and Jones as a Rwandan doctor caught in a dangerous political situation. "I can access the awkwardness and the emotional moodiness I had at 17," says Stahl-David, who frequently plays teenagers, "although I'm not nearly as troubled as this kid. It's a fun role to perform because I love playing with Chris Chalk [as the family's Rwandan servant]. And I enjoy feeling that I'm smarter than my dad!"

Issues and Answers: During rehearsal, director Max Stafford-Clark assigned each cast member a book about the tragedy in Rwanda to share with the rest of the company. "Literally, we all had to do book reports," says Stahl-David, who gave an oral presentation on Seasons of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by BBC journalist Fergal Keane. "In some ways, the audience goes through the same thing as the family in the play—trying to sort through conflicting points of view and not being sure who to believe." Personally speaking, Stahl-David feels sure his own parents—both civic-minded physicians in Chicago—will approve of his current gig. "My family isn't tuned into pop culture so they didn't care that much [about The Black Donnellys]. But a story like this that has meaning and is likely to spark dialogue is exciting to them."