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Will Brill, 37, a Menlo Park-raised actor, took home a Tony Award for best performance by an actor in a featured role during Sunday night’s awards ceremony.
His first-time Tony win was for his role as Reg, a bassist who struggles with sobriety and pending divorce in the play “Stereophonic.” The play, which received several other Tony nods including Best New Play, was written by David Adjmi, directed by Daniel Aukin and features music from Arcade Fire’s Will Butler.
Stereophonic is set in the Bay Area in 1976 and follows a band on the verge of its big break as its members record an album and deal with issues in their personal lives. Critics have compared the tumultuous band portrayed in Stereophonic to the real lives of Fleetwood Mac.
In an interview with The Almanac on Tuesday, June 18, Brill reflected on the path that led him to his first Tony win, and the influence that growing up on the Peninsula had on his theater career.
As a young actor, Brill was able to practice his theater craft at local organizations like San Jose Children’s Musical Theater, Palo Alto Children’s Theater and Peninsula Youth Theater, as well as in the theater departments of the several local high schools he attended.
Besides Broadway plays, you can see Brill in Netflix’s “The OA,” Prime Video’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and the historical romance mini-series “Fellow Travelers.”
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Almanac: How are you feeling in the wake of your first Tony win?
Brill: I am still recuperating. I got to bed very, very early on Monday morning, and I’m still kind of letting it all land on me. I have to take my Tony Award to the theater today for a photo shoot, and I have to send it off to get engraved so it’s in a bag in my hallway. It’s been there since I got home. It’s really trippy to keep thinking like, “oh, there’s a Tony Award in this apartment somewhere.” I’m fielding, just like so many congrats and DMs and voicemails. … I’m really comfortable being an effusive, affectionate person, but receiving praise and accolades and affection is not my strong suit. So I’m trying to receive it all, but it’s a challenge.
Q: You first started working on Stereophonic a number of years ago, in 2015 or 2016, is that correct?
A: That’s right. I met the playwright, David Adjmi in 2015 when he had done the very first workshop with actors for it, which was at New Dramatist in Manhattan. I met him afterwards at a cafe, but I didn’t start working on the show until the following February. But he did say to me in the cafe … out of the blue: “I have a feeling you’re gonna be in this play.” Which was weird because he had never seen me act before, and … didn’t know who I was and didn’t know I existed until like five minutes earlier. So then I workshopped the play in 2016, but then I didn’t workshop it again until last year when I did a reading of it.
Q: How has it been to watch the evolution of the play, cast and the crew over time?
A: It’s been exciting but also heartbreaking at times. I mean, it’s been the same creative team, somehow magically has always been the same group of people. It’s been the same director, sound designer, songwriter, music director, set designer, since before there was music or words. … David had assembled this group of collaborators just on the strength of the idea.
So the first couple of workshops were really, really fun and special. So much so that when I did the reading of it last year, I had been … heartbroken to not be asked back for so long. I was worried that I wasn’t going to work on it again.
And when I was finally asked back, and five of the seven cast members were different from who they had been, I was really scared that the play wouldn’t work in the way that I had foreseen all those years ago. I really wrestled with whether I wanted to embark on this with a whole new group of people, and fortunately, my girlfriend talked me into it, and now I’ve won a Tony Award, and (Stereophonic) won a bunch of Tony Awards. I feel very lucky to still be with it.
Q: Does it feel like a full circle moment to win your first Tony for a play set so close to where you grew up?
A: Yeah, absolutely. Getting to think about the Bay Area while working on this show was really special to me. I love the Bay Area so much, I loved growing up here. I actually have a tattoo of California on the back of my right arm that I got two years after that first workshop. I have always loved California, and I’ve always had the thought that if I could act from any city in the world, I would live in San Francisco. … I really love the Bay, I miss it tremendously all the time.
Q: Critics have compared some of the material in Stereophonic to Fleetwood Mac, and several members of Fleetwood Mac famously went to Menlo-Atherton High School. Did that influence your performance in any way?
A: I’ve thought about it a lot. The Bay has such a very cool, very rich history of music. And you know, I went to four high schools in the Bay Area because I had an early brush with the legal system in high school, but the second high school I went to … was M-A, where Lindsey and (Stevie) were. … I know that Joan Baez lived in the Bay for a while. …
I’ve thought about that a lot throughout my life. … I was raised around a lot of that music. And from an early age, I had this awareness of what a special place the Bay Area was.
The Bay Area is so arts friendly. Also, the fact that my parents were so supportive and willing to let me pursue the things that I wanted to was not lost on me. What a sort of cosmic lucky card I had drawn. I think part of the beauty of the Bay Area is how it fosters so much creativity.
Q: Would you tell me a little bit more about your early experiences in theater in and around the Menlo Park and Palo Alto area?
A: When I was five, my family had a Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant with the whole (extended family) there. … At some point during Thanksgiving dinner, I got on a table and out of nowhere, just announced to everyone that I was going to sing my song. It was some song that I had learned in my kindergarten class. … And my parents were like oh, he should be in childrens’ theater.
And so they took me to San Jose, where San Jose Children’s Musical Theater still is. … And I was in a production of The Velveteen Rabbit and met a couple of kids who became my best friends for life. … After that, I just kept wanting to do musicals. And God bless my parents, they drove me half an hour there and half an hour back like six days a week for years until I got my driver’s license. … I did probably 20 musicals at SJCMT, and met other guys who would go on to be on Broadway. Alex Brightman and I did a bunch of shows together, and Nick Spangler was a buddy out there.
And then I started branching out and did a show at Palo Alto Children’s Theater. Danya Taymor also did shows there and Danya is now directing. She just won a Tony for direction of “The Outsiders,” which is next door to the theater that I’m in doing Stereophonic.
Actually Danya’s theater teacher at Paly, was this woman named Kristen Lo, who is now the theater teacher at Gunn High School where I did my senior year of high school. And Kristen brought 50 students from Gunn out to New York a couple of months ago and they all got to see both my show and Danya’s show, which was really, really special, … a lovely way to keep in touch with the hometown.
Q: Is there anything else you want to say about your experience working on Broadway or winning a Tony?
A: In no particular order, I would like to thank — from San Jose Children’s Musical Theater — Kayvon Kordestani, Doug Santana, Shannon Self, Kevin Hauge and Mark Philips. These people really believed in me and gave me incredible license to go really far.
And then my high school theater teachers were Barry Woodruff at Woodside High School. And then really the king of kings, the guy who really convinced me that I could be an actor, was Jim Shelby at Gunn High School.
Actually when my friends and I all graduated high school and moved to New York, me, Dan Moyer and Grayson DeJesus, we started a theater company called Shelby company because we all loved Jim so much.
Those people still live incredibly, incredibly large in my brain. And without them, and without the patience of my brothers and the insane support of my parents, I for sure would not be living in New York and winning Tony Awards. I’ve been super lucky to be championed by some really cool, really talented people.
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