This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Jeryl Brunner: From Shakespeare to Schwartz, from Fossey to Alvin Ailey, from San Thom to Burelis, from McNally to Faye. It happened to the greats, it still happens every day. When lightning strikes is the moment you know when lightning strikes, where you're meant to go. You can stand and tell your record, do whatever you like. You'll never forget the moment when lightning strikes.

[0:25] Jeryl Brunner: Hi, this is Jeryl Brunner, and you're listening to When Lightning Strikes, where we talk about the tingly mic drop moments that led you to becoming an artist. Mitchell Winter currently plays a little boy in Wolf Play at MCC Theater, written by Hansol Jung and directed by Dustin Wills. The play, which had a sold-out run at Soho Rep, is presented by MCC Theater in collaboration with Ma-Yi Theater Company. A graduate of Yale School of Drama, some of Mitchell's other credits include Dracula, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Mr. Robot. Welcome, Mitchell.

[1:16] Mitchell Winter: Gerald, hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm doing well. How are you?

[1:19] Jeryl Brunner: I'm good, good. It's such a joy to have you on the show, especially since I just love Wolf Play so much, and it breaks your heart, and it's funny, and it's so many things, this play. To me, I read that it's about family, it's about connections, it's about love, it's about a child who's looking to belong. Can you talk about when Wolf Play came into your life and what you thought of it?

[1:55] Mitchell Winter: Sure, yeah. Wolf Play came into my life actually a couple of years ago. I knew Hansol; we had worked together before. We went to school together at Yale, actually. I'd done a couple of workshops of the play, and I remember the first time reading it, I was like, what is this? This is so interesting and cool and weird, and such an amazing way to frame a story like this. But I didn't know how to do it or what it would look like, and so the early rehearsals and workshops were really just kind of playing around and seeing what it was, trying to figure out what it was a bit. It really wasn't until the Soho Rep production happened that I kind of jumped on board fully with the piece and got the chance to go through a full rehearsal process on the show, and that's really where we collectively found our way of telling the story.

[3:21] Jeryl Brunner: How would you describe it? Because I was trying to figure out how I could describe it. Maybe I'll let you describe it for people who might not have seen the play. How would you, what would you say if somebody asked, what is it about? Because you almost don't want to reveal too much because the element of surprise is so profound.

[3:49] Mitchell Winter: Right. Yeah, I mean, it's a tough question to answer because the play is about so many things and exists on a number of levels. I think one way of talking about the play is describing how Hansol came to write it, which was, you know, she read an article years ago about these Yahoo groups and Facebook groups where people would put up kids for adoption. It was essentially like a black market for adoption. So, you know, people would adopt a child and then decide that it wasn't working or they didn't want it, then re-adopt or re-home. Not to speak too much for her, but she read that story, and it affected her a lot and wanted to write about it, but wanted to write about it in a way that dealt with the material in a way that people could watch it and care about it or see it in a new way, I guess.

Essentially, the play is about a Korean boy who is adopted and then re-adopted, essentially. The story is told in an unexpected way. There's a character who I play who runs through the whole show, who speaks as the boy but then is kind of like a custodian of the story, if you will. It's hard to describe; he's a little like a narrator, a little like an MC, a little like the boy himself, a little like the thought bubbles of the boy, you know, the voice of the boy.

[5:51] Mitchell Winter: Yes. So yeah, it's kind of really fluid. It's actually not specified what the character is. People see the show and come away with a different kind of idea of who my character is and how he fits into this boy's life and in the life of the play.

[6:14] Jeryl Brunner: Yeah, you play so many iterations of this character in different scenarios. It opens, or close to opens, where here you are, a little boy, adopted child from Korea, being what's called re-homed. A family decides that it's just too much to have you and finds another family via a Yahoo message board, and this poor child is being dropped off. What's so profound is that you, the child, is a puppet, right? Who you play with and you imbue him with so much humanity, so much sensitivity. Your heart is breaking for this child. Sometimes I had to say, oh wait, it's a puppet, because you give him so much life. There are moments where you put him away, and you're kind of jolted and thinking, oh wait, but this is a child. In my mind, you became that child, and it's so profound.

[7:39] Mitchell Winter: Right. I wanted to read something in the New York Times. Lavine Kumar wrote, he said, "Winter's double feat as an energetic narrator and a sensitive puppeteer is so nimble that the boy often appears to be a separate living thing, endearing one moment, a terror the next." I thought that really encapsulated it so beautifully.

[8:12] Jeryl Brunner: You are a terror, and then you're the most lovable child. I think, my God, to create that from a puppet, you know, an adult, you as an adult creating that in the puppet.

[8:29] Mitchell Winter: Right. Yeah, I mean, the puppet was incredibly well designed and made by Amanda Villalobos. It's brilliant the way it's kind of been put together. I had an amazing lady, Lake Simon, who was also on the production, who was a puppeteer, who gave me some kind of coaching and guidance and really is like a guardian angel for me on the show because, you know, prior to this show, I'd never really worked with a puppet before. It was really a baptism of fire, and she taught me so much and helped me so much with it. There's these people around me that helped me a lot with it. I think what's amazing about a puppet is there's something about a puppet that we see and we endow and we give so much. Our imagination just kind of goes there, and very quickly, actually, it's incredible how quickly we as humans can imbue an object essentially with so much meaning and character and humanity. It's a collective action of me doing things to make it happen, but also the audience's imaginations taking the leap and jumping there.

[10:07] Mitchell Winter: In terms of how I had to kind of move between the things, you know, it says, I mean, that you said the review said nimble. I think there is a real fluidity between the two, me and the puppet, and that kind of fluidity only comes about when you think about children and kids. They go from crying to laughing to scared to okay so quickly, really instantly, and it's so fluid. For me personally, I had to have a certain real childlike sort of openness, open-heartedness to be able to just basically rebound or yo-yo between two different things and then also become one with the two things as well. At the beginning, it was incredibly challenging, but it was so fun and rewarding and surprising. I feel such an attachment to the puppet.

[10:15] Jeryl Brunner: It's astounding to me that you haven't had puppeteering before this. So how did you get cast? I know you said you and Hansol knew each other from Yale, but how did the casting happen here? I think it's hard enough to be an actor and then to add this whole other layer of introducing a puppet and making this puppet so lifelike and being so nimble with it and having emotions via that puppet.

[10:15] Mitchell Winter: I think, you know, Dustin and Hansol had a lot of faith in me, and I'd worked with both of them before, so they knew what I could do to some degree. They knew who I was as an actor. In terms of the wolf character, I needed to have that sort of the wolf side of the character, but then I also needed the boy side and the puppet side. I think I'm quite a physical actor. I'm a lot in my body when I'm doing things, and I think that that naturally lended itself well to the puppeteering work. I was drowning a lot at the beginning with it, but I think a lot of it came instinctively to me as we went along and as we developed the language of how we were going to use the puppet. To get to do it a second time at MCC is such a gift because now I know how to use it all through the run at Soho Rep.

[13:47] Mitchell Winter: And it just feels like this time I'm able to have even more fun. I understand the puppet even more. It's just, uh, yeah, but there's a cool exercise people do with puppets early on, where you breathe, you match your breathing essentially with the puppet as you're moving the puppet.

[14:09] Mitchell Winter: And it's a really kind of profound way of connecting with it because to be so aware of breath and matching your own breath to how you move the puppet at the same time and synchronizing it is almost like a form of connecting and bonding with it that's really, I find really powerful and really moving.

[14:33] Jeryl Brunner: Oh, that's fascinating that you're breathing with the puppet. How does, because I think, how does a puppet breathe?

[14:40] Mitchell Winter: Yeah, you were, well, you know, just because it has to have kind of tiny movements all the time of it to kind of make it feel alive, you know, and it doesn't have to be perfect, but it's just a little movement there just makes it not frozen, you know, it makes it something existing, it makes it exist a little more, you know.

[15:01] Jeryl Brunner: Well, you're so invested in him, and can you talk about MCC and what you love about it? The set is fabulous, it's beautiful theater, and how you've transformed how the set has been transformed. But why is it such a great place for Wolf Play?

[15:20] Mitchell Winter: You know, when we were transferring to MCC, I was like, how is this gonna work? The theater at Soho Rep is so specific, it has such a specific vibe and feel. Yes, um, the MCC theater's this incredibly, uh, incredible space. It's new and amazing facility. And um, what's it gonna look like here?

[15:43] Mitchell Winter: And I remember walking into the space the first day of the set was kind of basically put up, and I was like, wow, this is incredible. And it's a testament to Dustin and the design team and the props people who were able to kind of collect all this material and all these pieces.

[16:04] Mitchell Winter: And the great thing about moving to MCC is, I mean, there's a few things in terms of one is it's a bigger space, more people can see the show. A lot of people didn't get to see the show last year because it was sold out at Soho and it was really hard to get tickets.

[16:27] Mitchell Winter: The space is bigger, essentially the configuration of the show is the same and we adjusted a few little things, but yeah, there's a giant prop wall on one side of the set where we come out of the times we pull things from.

[16:27] Mitchell Winter: And it's all the pieces are taken from essentially other shows, other theaters in New York, uh, other, um, yeah, because Dustin was really trying to figure out how to kind of move the show from like a downtown sort of space that Soho Rep sort of has to uptown, closer to, you know, closer to Broadway sort of theater feel.

[16:27] Mitchell Winter: So he grabbed a lot of, uh, he raided a lot of stock, uh, so a lot of prop warehouses and things like that for theaters in the city and grabbed pieces from shows that were on and put them all into this prop wall there to kind of basically move it to this newer space.

[16:27] Mitchell Winter: And yeah, it's been great. It's been great. There's people that saw the show last year that have come back. There's people that are seeing it for the first time, and it's been such a gift. So I mean, huge thank you to MCC.

[17:52] Mitchell Winter: I mean, just the refrigerator alone is marvelous. It's a real refrigerator that works; there's cold air that comes out of there, which is incredible.

[17:52] Mitchell Winter: Yeah, it's a refrigerator, yeah, yeah. So yeah, all those prop pieces are like new. We had a refrigerator last year, but it was old and not functioning.

[17:52] Mitchell Winter: So yeah, we just have all these new pieces to kind of play with and mess around with. And um, yeah, so I'd love to know your lightning strikes moment or lightning strikes moments, you know, when you knew this was your path. You know, what led you to Yale School of Drama? How did you get there?

[17:52] Mitchell Winter: It's an interesting thing because, you know, I played a lot of sport growing up and I was pretty into sport growing up in Australia. And then I, we're an Australian, I grew up in Sydney.

[17:52] Jeryl Brunner: Oh yeah, have you been?

[17:52] Mitchell Winter: Twice. Twice. Gorgeous. Oh, I love Australia. I love Sydney and yeah, the Hunter Valley and South Australia and Tassie and uh, yeah, it's very special.

[19:21] Mitchell Winter: Yeah, I love it. I miss it all the time. But it's, uh, you know, I've been lucky enough to be here for I guess just over 10 years now. But when I was nine, I had been playing a lot of sport, but when I was nine, the school I went to had a choir and there was a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a professional production going on in the city that was like the big show, the big musical of the time.

[19:23] Mitchell Winter: And they were looking for kids to be the children in the show, and they auditioned basically elementary school choirs to kind of be the kids in the show, and our choir got selected. So I would go to school during the day, and then every afternoon a bus would pick us up and take us into the city to go to the theater, and I would do the show every night in the city.

[19:23] Mitchell Winter: I just remember, I vividly remember being, you know, I first of all loved being amongst all the people and the energy, the electricity, all that sort of stuff. But I also really remember being side stage and in the wings and smelling the smoke and feeling the energy of the audience and things like that, and I was like, this is incredible, this is something else.

[19:23] Mitchell Winter: And really, that was the moment that kind of kicked, or that was the key that unlocked the Pandora's box, I guess, and sent me. I mean, I still kind of did sport and did other things, but I started doing some theater classes and wanting to do shows at school.

[21:07] Mitchell Winter: Eventually, I went to undergrad in Australia. I worked in music theater a lot in Australia initially, and then I really wanted to do more training and wanted to come to the States and heard about the grad programs here and auditioned and got into Yale, and that's what kind of brought me over to the States.

[21:40] Mitchell Winter: So I moved here for Yale, and I've been here since then. So it's, yeah, it's kind of been an amazing journey.

[21:49] Jeryl Brunner: Had you gone to see theater? Was it part of your life? At least you said you loved sports, and was it like part of your repertoire before then?

[22:03] Mitchell Winter: I was, uh, I grew up playing piano. I was playing piano at the time. My mum, it's interesting, my dad's side is really, my dad's an incredible drawer and amazing artist.

[22:20] Mitchell Winter: But he, you know, he was a restaurateur and kind of studied as an accountant, but he never followed his art essentially. But he was an incredible drawer and artist. So he had this kind of side to him, and then my mum's side had this incredible kind of musical sort of, my grandfather taught himself how to play the accordion, and my uncle and my grandfather were amazing kind of dancer movers.

[22:32] Mitchell Winter: My family had really good ears, you know, could with music and things like that, and they would go to the theater, see things like that. But my aunt also used to work at the Opera House in Sydney, and as a teenager, I would, um, she would kind of go, "Oh, Mitch, what are you doing tonight? Do you want to come in to see this?"

[23:14] Mitchell Winter: And you know, she would basically kind of sneak me into shows back then, and so I got to see pretty much everything that was on at the Opera House for a while while she was working there, which was amazing.

[23:28] Mitchell Winter: And you know, doing that, you see a lot of Australian things, but you see a lot of international artists coming in as well, and you see opera, ballet, uh, you see plays. It's such a mix of things there that I got to see.

[23:42] Mitchell Winter: And yeah, I think, you know, I loved, um, I loved so much early on, very early on. I loved the community, I loved the feeling of being a part of something. I loved being able to express and be able to be who I was, and yeah, there was a real kind of freedom and fun and play that I really loved about it all.

[24:15] Jeryl Brunner: Do you remember your audition for Yale? Was it in the States?

[24:19] Mitchell Winter: Yeah, it was. It actually came about pretty randomly. I was, I'd come to the US to, I came to New York to do a little trip, and I wanted to kind of meet some people to figure out if I could move over here.

[24:33] Mitchell Winter: And I had coffee with three people in this week that were, that I'd kind of been connected to or I knew somehow that were in the industry or related to the industry, and all of them mentioned grad school programs to me.

[24:46] Mitchell Winter: I looked it up and I saw NYU and Yale were like really amazing programs. It was like, uh, applications have to be in like now. So I just threw together an application, and then I saw that the auditions were happening.

[25:01] Mitchell Winter: I had to, I was going back to LA, like back on the way back to Australia essentially, but to go back to away. So I went back there and I drove up to San Francisco for the audition.

[25:13] Mitchell Winter: And um, yeah, I remember kind of running monologues in the car on the drive on the way up and then getting to the audition and, um, yeah, doing that and then the callback weekends and then getting accepted. It all just kind of happened in these like three weeks or so, you know, really kind of three or four weeks. It was all kind of, and it just felt very like in the moment, like just happened at the right time and, you know, in the moment sort of thrown together.

[25:49] Mitchell Winter: But I think I was very I didn't have anything to lose. I was in and I was very just here present, I guess, with myself and where I was and yep, I'm just gonna do this and I remember going to the callback weekend at Yale and going, Wow, this place is special and amazing and I wanna be here and it happened and I had a great time there.

[26:18] Jeryl Brunner: Did you get to do just hundreds or yeah, if Lan had dozens of plays like classics and contemporary and then what Carly used to have, you know, to meet is Yeah.

[26:33] Mitchell Winter: I mean, the head of the program at the time, this incredible teacher, Ron Van Leo, who when I remember meeting him and going, who are you? I wanna know everything, you know. But he said that what makes a great program is who you invite to teach and who you invite to be a part of the program, not the facilities, you know. It was like that's and really I loved my faculty, the teachers that I had at Yale, but you learn so much and you get so much from your peers and who you're with. You've got it's one of 16 and everyone is incredibly passionate, incredibly driven, incredibly just chomping at the bit to kind of get in to do things and play and make and get better, and so it's just an incredible environment.

But we yeah, I did so many shows and all variety. I mean, you're doing Shakespeare, you're doing Ibsen, all those classics you're doing, but then Yale also has the Yale cabaret, which runs through the year, which is student-run, and every year it's a different sort of theme or a different sort of artistic directors, it's a different artistic director student team, and in that people students pitch projects that they want to do, and they can be anything. And so you end up doing a lot of different kinds of shows. Some things are a little more like experimental, if you will, some are a little more musical, some are dancey, some are you know text but you know it's some there was a I remember there being like a puppeteeri sort of show there too so you there's a lot of variety and yeah you get exposed to a lot which is awesome.

[28:28] Jeryl Brunner: What was the monologue that you auditioned with or monologues?

[28:28] Mitchell Winter: I did a few but the one that was my real piece was this monologue from a play called Road by Jim Cartwright. It's a British play about a whole different bunch of different scenes, essentially slices of life in this working-class town in northern England. But I did a monologue that was from this character who essentially was a neo-Nazi skinhead who would go out every weekend and like just get into fights because he wanted the thrill of a fight and then one weekend he goes out and he's kind of getting into this kind of brawl but he has this kind of epiphany moment and almost like out of body experience moment and it changes him and he essentially from that moment on becomes like a monk essentially.

So it's like he gets the same enlightenment or he gets this enlightenment and thrill and presence or something by being by meditation and things like that. So it's kind of an amazing, amazing monologue with a crazy kind of journey within it. But yeah, that was my piece that was I realized afterwards it was too long, it was over the time limit, but for some reason that didn't stop me and it worked out okay.

[30:09] Jeryl Brunner: And where did you go to school in Australia?

[30:13] Mitchell Winter: Australia I went to WAPA, which is the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. It's an amazing school there for I did music theatre in undergrad. Yeah, it's kind of like the premier music theatre program in Australia. So I got a lot of which was a great school. It's in Perth in Western Australia.

[30:30] Jeryl Brunner: Oh in the West, yeah.

[30:32] Mitchell Winter: In the West, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so yeah, from that I got a lot of opportunity in music theater initially and which I loved. I loved. It's it was like I still I still do love musicals here and there, but I kind of it I guess my I guess I I'm interested in lots of things. I felt like I was getting a little stuck in one thing there, and I wanted to kind of broaden again and expand and I mean ideally I'd like I kind of would like to do lots of different things, you know.

[31:15] Jeryl Brunner: So is there a role you're aching to play in musical theater in the play? Is it yet to be written? Or is there a role that you're like, oh yeah, wish I could be Hillary Hill or you know, or Sweeney Todd one day down the road.

[31:32] Mitchell Winter: You really hill, you know, that's wild down the road. But um, you know, I that you played that you're like, I love that.

[31:46] Mitchell Winter: I've got two parts to this answer. One is um, I guess while I was at Yale, I got to do George in Sunday in the Park with George. Um and gosh, that was an incredible experience and role, and I loved it so much. I want to do it again. It's a show that I and a role that I would love to do again. But then the other part of the story I think is I think I'm half Chinese, half Australian, and I'm always looking, I'm always watching and looking for things that represent or speak to me and or where I can see myself and I'm thinking a lot about this at the moment as well, and with everything everywhere all at once and the response and the deserving accolades that they're receiving and I just think it's so amazing and I just want yes, yes, more more more.

You know, I want that to just be there and so yeah, I think there's a role that I really want to play sometime that's gonna be written sometime that might involve someone who's mixed race too and can yeah, so I'm excited to play it.

[33:24] Jeryl Brunner: Oh that's so beautiful.

[33:26] Mitchell Winter: Yeah, I think about you saying Philip Le Hat too. My gosh with so many move on and you know which brings back yeah when you talk about mixed I mean there's so much in Wolf Play about race, about culture. Is it hard to put into words how the experience of doing Wolf Play has changed you?

[33:50] Mitchell Winter: You know that it is hard to put into words I think in one way it's it's put in it's changed me a lot because I think that personally it's changed me because Dustin and Hansol are amazing collaborators and they they're people who allow you to bring everything that you are to what you're doing and they whoever you are as an artist they want to c they want to bring that out and bring that to the fore and I think the play really allows a lot of like everyone in the play is amazing and is able to bring them so much of themselves to and to their roles and their characters and I think that's amazing and and it'll and so it's it's given me so much permission and backing and in myself as an artist and what I have to offer.

But then the other side of it is I see people after the show all the time or I run into people in the street at different things and I see a lot of Asian Americans who are at the show and they have such a connection or such a powerful response to it. And it's I mean, even the other day I'm someone who approached me afterwards is a playwrighting and actor MFA, doing the playwrighting actor MFA at Brown at the moment, and you know, he seemed so moved and so inspired by the show and by what I was doing in it too, and if it can make people feel a little just even a tiny bit of like a little bit of like wonder or a little bit of like oh my gosh, it the possibility, a little bit of possibility, if it can instill even a little bit of that, or then that's incredible.

And I just notice it so much because it's I think a lot of Asian Americans are coming to the show, and that's an amazing thing. And I think that's what happens when you when you have shows like this and even shows like K-pop on Broadway that brings us brings another audience, a wider audience in. It's like such a so important, it's so important.

[36:15] Jeryl Brunner: It's such a beautiful love story, too. I mean, at many levels, it's and every character is so well drawn and three-dimensional and multifaceted, and there's an uplifting element and also a heartbreaking element all at once and a whimsical element, and it's really a beautiful play.

[36:43] Mitchell Winter: Yeah, I feel like all the characters are very human and fully fleshed out, three-dimensional. They're very um, it's hard to it's it's I think as an audience member you can kind of understand or or empathize with each character in the play in a strong way. It's a testament to the other actors and you know to the actors in the show to bring that humanity to it all. Um yeah, I think that that makes it for makes it a really complex and kind of um oh yeah, it's hard to know who to root for in the show, you know, because everyone has their moments and everyone has um yeah, but yeah, I it is a it is um I do often think of the show as a love as a love story for for Ginu and and the wolf falling in love with um you know Ash and Rob and some of the other characters in the show.

[37:46] Mitchell Winter: And in the end, what's so profound is that G Lu has my heart, a puppet has my heart, and that says so much about you and your performance and the play and the ensemble.

[38:00] Jeryl Brunner: Thank you so so much for coming on, which uh thank you so much for having me. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure. The great still happens every day. When lightning strikes the moment you know the theme song was written by Tom McGovern. This episode was edited by Kyle Moore. This episode was produced by Alice Stran. When lightning strikes.