Gracie Lawrence Is Back Where It All Began

Gracie Lawrence is ready to chat — and to grab a quick bite. The actor and singer walks into Boqueria near Times Square toting a backpack and looking appropriately bundled up. It’s two days after a storm dumped nearly a foot of snow on New York City, and temperatures are hovering around 20 degrees. She settles into a booth, and before she’s done removing her layers, we’re already deep into recapping her whirlwind couple of years — a series regular on the third season of The Sex Lives of College Girls, a tour with her band, and a Broadway run last year. “Can we get snacks?” she asks as a waiter drops a pair of menus on the table. “Do you want to split something?”

Lawrence’s energy is fitting, considering she’s worked in the entertainment business since childhood and is performing eight times a week in a show that explores work and ambition. All Out: Comedy About Ambition, a follow-up to last year’s All In: Comedy About Love, is based on a collection of short stories by Simon Rich about ego, greed, envy, and, at its core, New York City. On Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre through March 8, it stars a rotating cast of actors and comics (currently, Ray Romano, Nicholas Braun, Jake Shane, and Jenny Slate). In between scenes, Gracie, her brother Clyde, and Lawrence, the soul-pop group they lead, perform songs from their 2024 album Family Business.

The play is a homecoming for the 28-year-old native New Yorker. She comes from a showbiz background — her father is director-screenwriter Marc Lawrence, who wrote Miss Congeniality — and at age 12 made her Broadway debut in the 2009 revival of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs (which ran at the same theater she’s performing in now). The show lasted only nine performances, giving the then-preteen a crash course in how capricious and fleeting Broadway success can be. In a recent Instagram post, she admitted that she avoided the theater for many years out of fear that she’d never have the opportunity to perform in the same way again.

“I felt like I got a taste of what it felt like to do my dream, and then it went away,” she says now over Caesar salad and an order of pan con tomate. “There’s these factors of commercial success that, as a 12-year-old, just weren’t across my radar. I had this bizarre experience of being truly in heaven and then getting notice that I would have to leave. It was so abrupt, and I had no basis for understanding whether it was normal or not.”

Still, the experience strengthened her resolve, ultimately laying the bedrock for how she approaches her career: Pour your energy into the things that you believe in, and don’t look back. “My goals have always been, both within the band and outside of it, to make things I like and to be part of things that I’m proud of,” she says. “I know it’s such a simple thing to say, but it’s actually really hard to have that be your north star in your career, and I think that that remains my goal.”

Our conversation, not unlike the ones I’ve had with my own girlfriends over a pizza and a glass of wine, leads to the omnipresent existential question that looms over so many of us: Where is this all going? What’s next? We conclude that the answer doesn’t need to be complicated — and that external validation certainly isn’t it. “I’ve never quite understood when people say, ‘I do it all for the fans,’” Lawrence says. “In order to create something that does resonate with anyone, I really have to do it for myself first, and my brother and I have to come up with something that we like together, that we’re proud of, before it becomes something that resonates with anyone else… I forget who said this, and maybe it’s someone in my life who said this to me, but fail doing the thing you want to do, not the thing you don’t want to do.”

She calls working with her older brother “probably the greatest gift of my life”; Clyde, who started writing songs by the time he was in kindergarten, was the first to encourage her to start singing. “Personal and professional don’t really have a separation inside in my life, because we’re siblings,” she says. And she’s more than happy with that: “There’s very little boundary between those things, but that can make it interesting,” she adds. “I don’t know any other way.”

Her many creative outlets — theater, music, screen acting — suggest Lawrence is a paragon of productivity. But we also bond over a shared love for having blocks of quiet time to think and brainstorm creatively, even if nothing ultimately winds up on the page that day. “I really believe in the importance of sitting for two hours and coming up with very little,” she says. “Sometimes it’s hard to carve out that time because it feels nonspecific, but I think if you’re a person with a creative job, it is really important to create these buckets of time that mimic how you liked to create when you were a kid.”

Her strategy is clearly working: Lawrence the band was recently nominated for a Grammy (for Best Arrangement for their song “Something in the Water”), and Lawrence herself received a Tony nod for her role as Connie Francis in the musical Just in Time, based on the life of singer Bobby Darin. “I (humbly and hopefully) now call myself a resident rather than an interloper,” Lawrence said in an Instagram post about returning to Broadway in All Out. These days, she sits squarely within the in-crowd and is an active participant in SNOB parties — that’s Saturday Night on Broadway, where cast members throw get-togethers for each other in their dressing rooms. “I always have food,” she says of her Saturday night rituals, which also include a whiskey on the rocks. “Even if we’re hanging out and partying, I am bringing a bowl of pasta.”

Doing eight shows a week, Lawrence says, is actually less frantic than being on tour on the road. She also appreciates that the play is an homage to the hometown that she loves. “That last piece, ‘The City Speaks,’ is one of my favorites, and I think it speaks to something that we all love about New York, which is that it’s hard and it’s messy and it’s intense, but there’s so much joy and camaraderie and community,” she says. “Theater is a really good example of that — everyone here is obsessed with the grind of theater. You can’t be a theater performer and kind of like it. New York is sort of the same. Here, you have to love it.”