Michael Oberholtzer discusses his Tony Award nomination joy and his upset over the video of him naked in Broadway play “Take Me Out.” TonyAwards
by the end. For me, that demanded a lot of work. I had to focus on all of that rather than how people were going to perceive what it was.” He laughed. “If I’m going to die on this sword, I’m going to die on the Richard Greenberg sword on Broadway.”
The fact that Shane is so apart from his teammates is not mirrored backstage, where the company has always been “tight” as co-workers and buddies said Oberholtzer, regularly going out for lunches together. “I have never felt the need to emotionally prepare in another room, or to ask people to leave. What felt necessary was developing the overarching camaraderie we have as a company.
Doing the show, and hearing the discussions about nudity, have made Oberholtzer think about attitudes towards the naked body more generally. “I don’t want to say the nudity is liberating because it’s not liberating but it’s like, ‘What’s the big deal?’ You start to realize—I’ve started to realize—the nudity question is more a reflection of other people’s values, mores, hang-ups, and insecurities.
As a company, Oberholtzer said, “We decided we were not going to let this event, this thing that happened, overshadow all of the sacrifices, hard work, and commitment that we have put into this story that we are all very proud of. We wanted to make people understand that.” Oberholtzer’s own feelings remain “complicated” around what happened, but he says he and the rest of his colleagues had been determined to “try to move past it.
Oberholtzer makes the point that—inconceivable until recently, with the proud voicing and embrace of all kinds of bigotry by right-wing politicians and online voices—“you could make the argument that someone like Shane Mungitt would now have a support group somewhere, there’d be a GoFundMe page for the guy, ‘this persecuted guy,’” as his right-wing supporters would say.
A friend acquired one of the first camcorders, and the two of them would go to a local library to film-style skits. He did an interdisciplinary arts degree at Columbia College Chicago, where he performed in plays and did a lot of dramatic, fiction, and screen writing, and developed scripts. Oberholtzer’s drama teacher suggested he go to New York and work with a teacher, Maggie Flanigan, who helped give him “a foundation and bedrock in acting.
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