NEW YORK — One of the toughest things about appearing on Broadway might not be the acting or the hours. It’s squeezing your resume to under 100 words for your bio in Playbill. T.R. Knight tried to include all of it, initially.
“I was getting angry at myself for getting precious about what to include and what not to include,” he says. “I was like, ‘You are being ridiculous.’”
So instead of trying to fit in a career that has spanned Shakespeare and “Grey’s Anatomy,” a David Mamet play and “ The Flight Attendant, ” Knight changed direction.
“There once was an actor named Knight,” his Playbill blurb now reads. “Who knew his stage-left from stage-right/He went to do some TV/But now he’s happy to be/Back in front of the glowing footlights.”
What has lured him back on Broadway is the jaw-dropping prequel to the Netflix hit show “Stranger Things,” a play with levitating cats, shattered mirrors and Vegas showgirls.
Set in Hawkins, Indiana, 20 years before the events of the first season, “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” focuses on the creation of a monster, the villainous Vecna, played by — Louis McCartney. Knight portrays his father.
We are introduced to a shy, awkward teen Henry Creel — who later will be Vecna — as he moves to Hawkins and goes to high school. He has strange powers and worries a lot.
His father is not in a great place, suffering from PTSD and drinking too much. “I think he desperately wants to be a good husband and a good father, and I think he knows that he is failing at both,” says Knight. “He doesn’t have the tools to stop it.”
Knight was a “Stranger Things” fan even before he joined the play, looking forward to every season. He was asked to audition for a different character but was drawn to the father after reading the script.
“Although our damage is different, I felt that I understood that damage in a way that I did not understand this other character,” he says. “I just felt it strong enough in my gut that it felt like it could be a better match.”
“Stranger Things: The First Shadow” co-director Justin Martin says Knight is constantly changing his approach and always surprising, calling him a “Renaissance man in terms of his acting”
“It’s always about the work. He’s very much interested in very, very different characters and different styles of acting. And so he constantly is pushing himself. Every time he does the scene it’s slightly different,” says Martin. “He’s going, ‘What else can I find? What else could I mine?’ which I love in an actor.”
The “Stranger Things” play was also attractive to Knight because of its director: Stephen Daldry, the three-time Tony Award-winner who helmed “Billy Elliot: The Musical.”
Knight recalls being blown away by the way Daldry told the story without sentimentality of an 11-year-old boy who just wants to dance.
“The way he was able to distill that down in such a brutally beautiful, honest way left me — when I left that theater — I remember being both empty and filled up at the same time if that’s possible.”
Knight and his husband have moved back to the New York area after years in Los Angeles, wanting to do more theater, something he calls “home.”
“It’s still so challenging, still immensely challenging, maddeningly challenging to me — theater — but I love it,” he says. “I just missed it.”
Knight grew up in Minneapolis and spent two years at the city’s storied Guthrie Theater before moving to New York at 25. He became a household name in the hit ABC medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy,” which he left after five seasons.
He feels like a new chapter is opening, one with confidence and maturity. The move coincides with a change in his creative work and life.
“It’s an exciting time and maybe it’s a time where I can let go of a lot of the nonsense that I have maybe worried about — maybe? Do you like the way I said, maybe worried about in the past? The nonsense has kind of plagued me.”
