For 13 Years, He Has Humanized the Villain of 'Oklahoma!'

NEW YORK — There was blood on the floor as usual, and on the costumes, too, when “Oklahoma!” finished its Broadway run Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater. During the long, raucous curtain call, Patrick Vaill’s white shirt was sodden with red as the director, Daniel Fish, pulled him in for a hug.

Vaill, 34, was a 21-year-old undergraduate when Fish first cast him as farmhand Jud Fry in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” at Bard College in 2007. Eight years later, when Fish morphed that show into a professional production for Bard SummerScape, Vaill got the part again, and kept it for the 2018 version at St. Ann’s Warehouse that would transfer to Broadway last spring and win the Tony Award for best musical revival. (His sassy Twitter feed captures some of the accompanying glamour, which included a trip to the Met Gala.)

In Fish’s contemporary staging, which plunged two scenes into near-total darkness, Vaill imbued Jud with extraordinary vulnerability, playing him as a sympathetic odd man out who loves the heroine, Laurey, but stands no chance against the hero, Curly.

Not long after his final bow, Vaill took a seat in the theater to talk about Jud, and defend him. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q: How are you doing?

A: I feel sort of like my heart is about to burst. This production — in a way, I’ve grown up with it.

Q: What kind of hole is it going to leave?

A: It’s almost more like a crack. This production, this role and this work has kind of cracked me open, and now new things can come out.

Q: Do you have any idea what those might be?

A: I have absolutely no idea, which is in many ways the most thrilling thing I can imagine. It’s been a long time since I didn’t know what was coming next. My immediate plan is to sleep and eat and take care of myself and be gentle.

Q: Gentle with yourself.

A: Yeah. Doing eight shows a week of this is no joke. You have to go to some very dark, very personal places that often people go their whole lives without examining. The darkness of who this person is, why he reacts the way he reacts to things, putting your body through simple tasks like crying, or getting shot, or screaming.

Q: Um, objection? Getting shot is not a simple task.

A: (Laughs) It’s not simple. Seemingly sort of external things that actually — you do them enough and they will affect the inside as well. So self-care is important.

Q: Jud rips my heart out, and that’s very confusing.

A: Yeah! Hundred percent. Because everybody tells you he’s not good, that there’s something wrong with him. At the end of the day, he’s guilty of being in love with someone that people don’t think he should be in love with.

Q: Jud does almost kill Curly, though.

A: That moment is such a strange thing that I think a lot of people forget is even in the play. It’s super disturbing.

Q: It’s partly disturbing because your Jud has a little smile on his face then.

A: Obviously that’s not a neighborly thing to do (laughs). But it is, I think, the act of someone who feels pushed into a corner. This is someone who feels he does not have control, which is scary.

Q: The other thing is that he’s the outcast. And he’s the villain.

A: He’s cast as the villain. Which is the way I have to look at it.

Q: What toll does that take?

A: It certainly, in playing this part, behooves the actor to seek out friends, to seek out ways to not feel that way. Because it’s very easy to do the show, go home to your apartment and just fester. It takes a toll. But that’s all just part of the work, ultimately. It can be painful, but it’s sort of exquisite pain.

Q: You could look at Jud and say he’s an incel.

A: The idea of “involuntary celibate”: Jud isn’t talking about all women. He’s talking about how he’s in love with one specific woman. It’s unrequited love. That is not a political act. I think people were shocked to find how little Jud does wrong in the play — shocked to find out that this was someone who is simply lonely.

Q: Lonely and helpless, actually.

A: And helpless, of course, is what makes people act out in ways that do not fit in with society. A brilliant side effect of Daniel deciding to have all the lights go out is that where that happens, in the smokehouse and with Laurey in Act 2 — these are scenes that audiences think they know. They think this is a funny scene between two guys; one is smart, and one is dumb. They think that the second one is an assault.

Then when the lights are out, all you have is the words. What happens in the smokehouse is cruel beyond imagining. People go to jail for doing what Curly does in tempting someone, who is already unstable, to kill themselves. And in the second scene, you see what that scene really is: the most horrible breakup, in a way.

Q: Will you miss Jud?

A: I will miss playing him. I will miss singing “Lonely Room.” That is just a knockout. I don’t think that you would get Billy Bigelow’s “Soliloquy” in “Carousel” without it. You wouldn’t get “Epiphany” from “Sweeney Todd” without it. What it’s doing is so mind-blowing and progressive.

Q: Originally, when you were in college, you wanted to play Curly.

A: Very much. I think a lot of actors get into this for totally wrong reasons — for applause, attention, they need to express something. You need that moment where something comes along and teaches you that it’s so much bigger than that. Daniel cast me as Jud, and in so doing, he taught me that there were so many more possibilities, that I had understanding of things that I didn’t actually know I had understanding of.

Q: Did you want to be Curly for the wrong reasons?

A: Probably. I wanted to be the kind of person who you saw on the street and you were like (snaps fingers), “That guy, he’s a hero.” Whereas what Daniel gave me was the tools to do something truer to who I am.

Q: Actual exit interview question: Would you recommend this job to others?

A: I would absolutely, wholeheartedly, without reservation recommend it to anyone who wants it enough. It’s not for the faint of heart. And that’s what’s so great about it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .