In the last few years, actor Nate Mann has proven to be the proverbial Company Man, having traversed stage and screen in a variety of ensemble roles.
New York theatre fans may have caught Mann as Laurie in Kate Hamill’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women or in the Tony Award-winning revival of A Soldier’s Play that ran at the Roundabout Theatre up until the 2020 COVID shutdown. You’re equally likely to have seen him on television, including in prominent streaming shows like Peacock’s Apples Never Fall, opposite Annette Bening and Sam Neill, or Apple TV’s Masters of the Air.
In the latter, a Steven Spielberg-produced series, Mann played Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, a real-life commander of the Eighth Air Force of the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. And while the cast included a host of prominent young actors, including Tony nominee Anthony Boyle and Oscar nominees Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan, it’s the gravitas and period detail that helped Mann stand out from the pack.
Mann now joins another solid cast in the premiere of the MCC Theatre production of Birthright, the new play from Jonathan Spector, whose Eureka Day also won a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play in 2024. This new play, directed by Teddy Bergman, charts the ups and downs encountered by a group of friends across two decades, beginning in their early twenties just a few weeks after a significant birthright trip to Israel in 2006 and following them through the summer of 2024. Personal developments and shifts on the world stage lead to changes within all of their lives and relationships with one another.
“Birthright was one of the first plays I read recently that caught me and I said this is really something,” Mann said. “I was floored by the script and how sharp the characters were, and intrigued as to what we could make of it. It’s provocative in ways I think are important and I think theatre should be. I couldn’t ignore it.”
While it will likely come as no surprise that events in Israel and Palestine play a critical role in shaping the events that befall these characters, what interested Mann is what these global events say about the personal lives of these characters on the home front. “It’s about the importance of trying to stay in the room while dealing with something challenging, whether it’s interpersonal or political, where the stakes involved are the things that you hold dear. It’s also about the intensity of the internet and social media; how smartphones and social media have fractured and atomized our lives and make it more difficult to have important conversations. It is possible not to blanketly reject something if we just listen.”
To speak to the Juilliard-trained actor is to get a sense of the joy he feels to be back onstage. “I grew up doing community theatre in Bucks County, Pennsylvania,” he said. “Theatre is familiar and my comfort zone.” Mann says that he loves being able to wrap his arms around such a well fleshed-out character. “Each of Jonathan’s characters is reaching for something specific, which is such a gift as an actor to think about what grounds each character. This show is really about how these relationships change and fracture over time as people grow up and discover what their values are.”
While his character, Emerson, may appear at first to be the life of the party, he’s nursing his own deep wounds. “Emerson is reaching for serenity. When we meet him, he’s just been kicked out of his band, which starts him on a path of trying to find his purpose in a real and palpable sense. When music gets taken away and he tries to find his way and build new purpose, he finds it difficult.”
Something that Mann did not find difficult was working with his castmates, which includes Hale Appleman, Molly Bernard, Eli Gelb, Liz Larsen, Molly Ranson and Zoe Winters. In fact, despite whatever vitriol might exist between the Birthright characters, there’s nothing but the opposite offstage. “I want to work with people who I can learn from, and everyone in the cast is so good, and so experienced,” Mann exclaimed. “There’s so much energy; we’re constantly throwing the ball and receiving it and giving space to one another. And the architecture of the play is there to support us all the way through to the end. We’re flying with open sails, ready to see what happens.”
So are those of us who’ve been following Mann’s career.
Information on Birthright can be found here.
