Larry Owens Loves to Practice

Like many millennial artists, Owens is a multihyphenate. “The economy mandates,” he says, that he sing, act, write, and do comedy. He won a Drama Desk Award in 2020 for his lead role in the original Playwrights Horizons run of A Strange Loop, has made recurring guest appearances on the sitcom Abbott Elementary, and, on September 9, he’ll premiere his one-person show, Gypsy 3000, at Joe’s Pub. 

The musical content of the evening is gonna come from the musical Gypsy, but the surrounding material is like a TikTok come to life. You never know what the next passage is gonna be. I think of the show as a dramaturgical companion piece to the upcoming Broadway production starring Audra McDonald. Mama Rose is this gay icon. And so, obviously, she’s a part of my life as this theatrical tentpole, but she’s also something that before, gender-wise, I never really thought to touch and obviously, age-wise, is a long ways away. But the music is so indelible to American culture. I want to sing those songs in public.

We have three rehearsals.The first was to decide the keys we’ll sing in. The second was to synthesize the company, put the elements together, and then the third will be a final musical rehearsal.

It’s really an almost indescribable process directing oneself. The rehearsal process looks like play. It looks like having fun. It looks like a lot of repetition. It looks like a lot of rigor. I feel anxiety before I rehearse. The moment before rehearsal is where all of the unknowns exist and the feat of the climb can psych you out. But once I get into the material, I realize that I know the grooves of these experiences and I chose it for a reason. I am upping the ante every time, you know, that I try to build a show; I do want to continue to innovate for myself and for my audience.

I have a physical and vocal warm-up by Liz Kaplan, the greatest voice teacher in the world. That is the most religious part of my preshow ritual. There might be some character-journaling that I do to provide depth and specificity, to parts that are maybe tricky or harder for me. And then a lot of it really is relaxing. There’s a very crude saying from my theatrical training at Steppenwolf, which is “Don’t blow your wad.” So I really am just trying to trust all of the work that I did in rehearsal while I’m backstage. And I need to let the audience have the experience of the ups and downs. And then I’m actually in the controlled experience of all that I’ve created and rehearsed from the outside.

I actually think I love rehearsal more than performance. Rehearsal is limitless options. It’s blue skies. It’s, it’s best idea wins. And then when you go to performance, you’ve taken the choices that you’ve chosen, and then the only way to edit or refine is to get back onstage the next night. So you have to hope that you have a next night. And the thing about theater is that it’s ephemeral. So it’s a race toward the ideal execution. If people linger after a show, then it’s really good. If people linger, then it’s like they don’t wanna shake off the experience just yet. And that’s one of my best nonverbal communicators that we have something here.