Considering the fact that Pablo Schreiber plays not one, but two characters in the play “Dying City,” it’s a relief to find that having lunch with him is a simple affair. He doesn’t leap out the door, only to reappear a second later as a different man, nor does he ricochet schizophrenically between two menacing personalities. Instead, his 6-foot, 4-inch frame stays solidly in his chair at Esca and he gives every appearance of being a nice, straightforward guy — whose own arsenal consists simply of a wide grin and the tendency to say things like, “Yum.”
He’s maintaining his sanity rather well, though nightly at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse theater he must incarnate both Peter, a beguilingly selfish, gay actor on the verge of hitting it big, and then — in flashbacks — his twin brother, Craig, a Harvard-educated soldier who died under dubious circumstances in Iraq. All this on a stage that rotates for the entire hour-and-a-half performance.
But make no mistake — neither character is far removed from the truth. “Peter and Craig are warring aspects of my own personality,” says the 28-year-old actor. “The journey of the play is trying to figure out which side of me is stronger.”
Luckily, “it’s been cathartic,” he says. “It’s put to rest some of my old demons — patterns of behavior that I had in the past and things that I would like to try to not continue.” None of the characters created by playwright Christopher Shinn have the advantage of being morally admirable, but that didn’t scare Schreiber. In fact, it’s what drew him to the play in the first place.
“The message of the play seemed to me to be that we are living in this country right now with a very high level of violence. We have a violent administration who are doing violent things in other countries on our behalf and we are sort of standing by and allowing it to happen,” says Schreiber, himself an environmentalist who rides his bike everywhere possible. “In all the things I do, I try to look for things that are speaking about something that’s happening in the world currently,” he continues. “Especially in live theater, because you get to have a dialogue with the audience about what the world is like and the Iraq war is obviously a huge part of the national conscience right now.”
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Schreiber’s no stranger to a bit of political activism, having been raised in a tiny British Columbia town where most of the 300-person population consisted of conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War and “hippie parents.” At 12, his parents divorced and he moved to Seattle with his father, an acting instructor. But, despite the family proclivity (his brother is actor Liev), Schreiber was initially only interested in treading the boards of a basketball court. However, “as basketball became less of a reality for me, acting was kind of the only thing that I really knew how to do besides that,” he jokes.
At least his athletic background still comes in handy: In this play, “there’s a lot of running and stripping,” he says, laughing, since he has mere seconds to transform from one character into another. He’s also put on 20 pounds of muscle and cropped his hair, military-style, in order to differentiate himself from the lanky kid he played in last year’s acclaimed “Awake and Sing.”
After the “Dying City” run ends on April 28, Schreiber is planning to take a break from the New York stage, where he has been almost nonstop for the past three years. Though his focus is shifting back to television and film (he’s also working on screenplays and hopes to direct his own movies), he isn’t planning on moving westward from the Red Hook, N.Y., building where he lives with his “brother’s brothers,” — i.e. Liev’s three other half-brothers. And Schreiber is tackling Hollywood with the same blithe confidence he seems to bring to everything. “The requisite for being a movie star is so specific — it’s based on things like how you look, your size,” he says. “I try not to think about that. Interesting people make interesting actors,” he insists. “I’m not saying I won’t possibly be a movie star — who the hell knows? No one can forecast that.”