For Andrew Durand, Playing Dead Has Never Felt So Alive

On stage, Andrew Durand is a real stiff.

In Dead Outlaw, which is up for the Tony Award for Best Musical, Durand plays Elmer McCurdy, a real-life bandit who was killed in a shootout in Oklahoma in 1911. Through bizarre twists of fate chronicled in the show, McCurdy’s mummified body became a sideshow attraction, eventually ending up at an amusement park in Long Beach, California, until it was discovered in the 1970s and given a proper burial.

For the first part of the musical, Durand, who has been nominated for a Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, is alive. For the second, he’s a corpse.

“I sing six songs in a row,” he says. “I rip the stage apart. I’m running all over that thing. And then suddenly I just have to stand dead still in a coffin with sweat dripping down my back. It’s a challenge.”

So how does he play a corpse in a coffin in full view of the audience?

“Well, I try my best to keep my eyes open. It’s like a staring contest every night with 1,100 people out there. I set little goals. I’m like, all right, you can just keep them open for 30 more seconds, and then Eddie Cooper, my fellow actor, will walk in front of me and then I can blink and swallow,” he says. “When another actor makes an entrance, I can blink and swallow again, because I assume the audience is watching them. And then when they start wheeling my coffin across the stage, that’s when I can take a deep breath and wiggle my toes and fingers.”

On the first show he ever saw:

I saw my first show, Pippin, at my local community theater in Roswell, Georgia, when I was 10 years old. Something about it was so intriguing — I saw all these adults and kids up onstage playing and having fun. I thought, well, that looks really cool. And I was just hooked. The first show I did was Heidi. I played Peter, the farmer boy that she liked. When I wasn’t in a show, I’d hang around the theater, painting the sets, working in the costume department, selling popcorn. Anything I could do to be around the theater.

On his pre-show ritual:

I always take 10 minutes before places to just sit quietly and close my eyes and breathe deep and think about the story that we’re about to tell. I think about Elmer and I try to ground myself in the moment. [Tony Award-winning director] David Cromer always told us that he viewed the show as one long sentence, and we’re just all sort of passing the baton to each other. I want to feel open and electric and ready to receive and give energy from the audience and from my fellow actors.

On working with David Cromer:

He’s an amazing actor himself, and I think he understands the plight of the actor. We always feel like we have to add things to make it into something. He would say to us all the time, “You are not your flourishes or your decorations. You are interesting enough to stand there and deliver the material. You don’t have to add anything.” It’s liberating but it’s difficult. As an actor, you always want to be interesting. But David’s thing is, “You are interesting. That’s why I cast you.”

On playing a bandit:

He is an anti-hero. He’s not a great guy, but we all have a grain of humanity in us, and it’s my job to find that in him. I feel for him, because he was neglected as a child. He started drinking at a young age. He had addiction issues. There’s a section in the show where he settles down with a girl for a while. And he’s happy. He joins the volunteer fire department. I love that part, because that’s when the audience falls in love with him. But the addiction, the darkness, gets him in the end. Whether he was born that way — nature vs. nurture — I don’t know. But he just couldn’t keep that good life going.

On memorable fan interactions:

I just got a letter from a fan who’s getting her master’s degree in the history of the West in the 1800s. She said, “We come across all these bandits and train robbers and bad guys all the time, and we just write them off as nasty people. But seeing your show, I now think of these people differently. Everybody has humanity. They’re trying to make the best of their lives, such as they are, in the only way they know how. It doesn’t excuse what they did, but they’re trying to survive.”

On jazzing up his dressing room:

Well, I always have plants in there, which is a struggle since most of these dressing rooms don’t have windows. I have a little plant light that I plug in diligently every night before I leave because I like to have a little life in there. And I have fan art. People do caricatures of my character, so I put those up on the walls. And I have opening night cards I pasted onto my mirror to remind me of the love that is going around the building. And I have a couple of little trinkets. My stepsister gave me this blood stone. I’m not into crystals and stuff like that, but sometimes it helps me center myself. I hold the stone while I’m doing my Elmer meditations. It’s a placebo, I know, but it helps ground me.

On his day-off activities:

Oh, gosh. It’s Tony season, so right now I go to a gala and then do three interviews. There are a lot of extracurriculars right now, which I’m not used to. It’s at the point where, when I get to the dressing room before the show, I must put my phone down, stop checking my email, stop going through my schedule. I’m here to do the show. But otherwise, when I have a day off, when I have some time to myself, I sleep in, have a nice breakfast, tidy the apartment, do some laundry, go for a walk, and meet some friends for dinner. And that’s about it.

On his after-theater hangout:

There’s so much I have to do right now that I’m living like a nun. No offense to nuns! When I have friends at the show, I see them for five minutes after but then I go right home. But when I do go out, I go to Bar Centrale. The staff is really nice, the food is good, the drinks are good, and it’s not loud. I like gin drinks — I’ll have a gin gimlet or a gin martini with a twist.