Brandon Uranowitz plays a Jewish immigrant in Encores! “Ragtime” – The attacker

“America is one giant Shtetl, where I swear life is wonderful,” a man sings in Yiddish as he and his young daughter approach Ellis Island: “A shtetl iz america / A mekhaye, khlebn.”

These are texts of a Yiddish theater people song as they appear in the 1998 musical Rag time. Latvian Jewish immigrant Tateh and his daughter promise each other that America will be a country free of bloodshed and cruel autocrats. A choir of Italian and Haitian immigrants sing along to the song in their own language as the group makes its way to the Lower East Side.

In the encores! revival of Rag timeopening tomorrow at the New York City Center, Brandon Uranowitz plays Tateh, a widowed Jewish businessman longing for success in “Amerike.”

Uranowitz performed Rag time before he was even bar mitzvahed. As a preteen, he starred in the original Toronto production of Rag time before transferring to Broadway. While turning down an offer to be an understudy on Broadway, Uranowitz said so Rag time opened his eyes at a young age how theater can tell compelling, powerful stories.

Since then, Uranowitz has built a formidable career playing complex Jewish roles on stage and screen. He played Adam Hochberg American in Paris and therapist Mendel Weisenbachfeld in the 2016 revival Falsettos. In 2023 he won one Tony Award for his dual role in the epic family drama Leopoldville.

Rag time returns at a tense moment in American politics. The play’s themes of xenophobia and factionalism are especially salient with national elections just a week away.

I spoke with the Tony-winning actor about playing Jewish characters on stage, and what it means to return to Rag time as an adult, and in today’s dissonant United States.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

SAMUEL ELI SHEPHERD: One thing I really like and appreciate about your career is how you have so often played explicitly Jewish roles on stage. Was it always your intention to play Jewish roles, or was that something you fell into?

BRANDON URANOWITZ: No, it’s something I got myself into.

I had a very complicated relationship with my Jewish identity, especially where it intersected with my gay identity. I grew up in a Conservative synagogue in New Jersey. There may have been homosexual members of the party shuffleboard, but they weren’t out and I didn’t know them, so I didn’t feel particularly welcome there.

Fast forward many years later, when I graduated college thinking I could play whatever I wanted, it became clear very quickly that unless Jewish was in the character analysis, I wouldn’t play it. That further complicated my relationship with that identity, because I resented being limited to this one thing.

SHEPHERD: Since when do you stop hating it?

URANOWITZ: It burst wide open when I had to do that Leopoldville and telling my family’s story, that I finally understood my purpose as an artist. That my purpose as an artist wasn’t just for me. It’s for other people who look like me, grew up like me, and are just like me. That is my responsibility.

Once I removed the ego from the equation, I started to really explore and interrogate and explore what being Jewish really means to me.

I think, especially because I grew up in a Conservative synagogue, that Judaism and Jewish identity were intrinsically tied to belief in God, and the practice of prayer and Siddur and Torah and all those things.

I realized that that’s not actually what being Jewish should be. Being Jewish can mean so many different things to so many different people. And for me it’s about family, values ​​and acceptance.

This (Rag time) feels like it came at just the right time in my life. It wouldn’t have been right for me to step into this man’s shoes if I hadn’t taken that journey with my identity. And I can now really live in the head of this person and in the being of this person, without ego.

SHEPHERD: You told me when you were doing it Leopoldville last year about the satisfaction of being in a production where you saw your own family history represented on stage.

Rag time is of course a completely different story Leopoldsdadtand it speaks to Jewish identity and immigration in a completely different historical context. Still, do you see some of your own family history represented in Tateh?

URANOWITZ: I mean, he immigrated here before World War I, and my family immigrated here during World War II. But that optimism, that hope, there is a connection between the two. I think hope and optimism are at the root of our survival as a people. I mean, I’m only here today because of my family’s hope and optimism in the face of terror, horror and violence.

I don’t think optimism is unique to Tateh in any way. I think it’s in our DNA.

SHEPHERD: I heard that recently Tateh is Yiddish slang for the word ‘father’. There’s also some Yiddish in the show. Do you have any connection to the Yiddish language?

URANOWITZ: My father knows a lot of Yiddish. My great aunt, who I knew very well, was one of the few Holocaust survivors I knew. She spoke mainly Yiddish. She read Yiddish newspapers. She read Yiddish books. And so I heard it a lot in the house.

My family is also the product of the Jewish assimilation efforts after World War II. I think in an effort to assimilate, Yiddish wasn’t a big part of growing up. I heard it growing up, but no effort was made to teach me.

SHEPHERD: Would you ever try to learn it now?

URANOWITZ: While I am not necessarily committed to educating myself, I deeply believe that it would be tragic to lose it. It would be like Italians losing the way of making pasta by hand, you know? I believe in the continuation and celebration of the old world.

SHEPHERD: Rag time ends – spoiler alert – with Tateh marrying the character “Mother,” a US-born, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The two hit it off after their children became friends. Tateh works his way up from an illustration dealer on the Lower East Side to a successful filmmaker in California.

In your Tony Award Speech Last year you told me how Leopoldsdadt warns against the “false promise” of assimilation. I have to ask, you think Rag time sends a pro-assimilation message with this ending?

URANOWITZ: Our incredible director Lear deBessonet talks about Rag time are about ‘the promise and the wound of America’. I think Rag time is unique in that it can capture the need for a melting pot and the need for isolation within your own cultural group.

I also don’t know if they were necessarily fully aware of this when they wrote it, but it’s an interesting look at whiteness and the proximity of whiteness and the Ashkenazi Jewish proximity to whiteness. Tateh assimilates because he is a Jew. Coalhouse and Sarah (both black characters) do not have that privilege.

There is that question: Is assimilation a worthy endeavor? Because assimilation only moves into the more dominant culture, and there are people who can never do that. I struggle with the idea of ​​assimilation and the idea of ​​sacrificing your own “culturalism” for the sake of integration.

SHEPHERD: What’s it like to be inside? Rag time do you feel different now from the play you did as a child – both in terms of how you’ve changed and how the world around you has changed?

URANOWITZ: Young Brandon’s experience with the show was so childlike. There was only curiosity and wonder. I like to think that I still go through my life with curiosity and wonder, but I also go through it with cynicism. I walk through it and question everything around me. I go through it with my own political values, ideals and principles.

And as an adult Brandon, it strikes me that a piece I wrote as a child is still so incredibly prescient. This version specifically, with this cast, with this director, choreographer and musical director, especially in the middle of one of the most consequential elections in our lifetimes.

It just feels huge and enormous and important and extraordinary and exciting and scary and all that. I feel very privileged and honored to now be able to tell this story.