Taylor Trensch had already begun making a splash at Tampa’s Blake High School of the Arts when CL did its first survey of 25-and-under artists in 2005, but we didn’t have him on our radar. Then, a few years later, he went from promising kid to full-time professional, booking a lead as the suicidal teen Moritz in the national tour of the Broadway hit Spring Awakening — and he hasn’t stopped working since.
Trensch created the roles of Michael Wormwood, the TV-addicted older brother in the original Broadway cast of Matilda the Musical (a performance praised by Entertainment Weekly as “hilariously deadpan”) and Dwayne Hoover, the morose teenager in Little Miss Sunshine at La Jolla Playhouse. He joined the cast of the Broadway mega-hit Wicked as Boq, the munchkin who becomes the Tin Man. He understudied Tony winner Alex Sharp as Christopher, the autistic teen at the center of the Broadway production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime, a role so demanding that he took over for Sharp at least twice a week. And next year he’ll be back on Broadway playing a key role in a major musical revival he can’t talk about yet.
So, yeah. He’s way beyond promising. Now 27 (but looking years younger), he’s clearly made it.
I met up with Trensch this summer on the bucolic grounds of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the prestigious regional theater in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. He was there to star in WTF’s world premiere of Poster Boy, a musical based on the story of Tyler Clementi, the gay NJ college student who committed suicide after being subjected to cyber-bullying.
Moritz, Tyler, Christopher, Michael Wormwood. I asked Taylor if he’s cornered the market on…
“Problematic teenagers?” he filled in. Many of his characters, he acknowledges, are “either very silent or v ery troubling.”
I asked why he thinks directors cast him so often as the introvert, the outsider.
“I think physically, because I’m not a Hemsworth brother, I fit more into that world on a superficial level. I’m not sure, because I think I live most of my life in a very opposite place.”
Which he does. He’s an outgoing, soft-spoken guy in conversation, quick to smile, with a positive attitude that he says is one reason he keeps getting hired. That, and a fierce work ethic. “There’s so many talented people, so why not be the person who’s not going to be a butthead?”
As Tyler Clementi in Poster Boy, he exudes a quiet, cerebral intensity — a reserve that finally explodes in a wrenching solo toward the end of the show. If there’s anything that does link Trensch with Tyler and his other roles, it’s this intensity, and a laser-like focus on a goal — in Trensch’s case, the goal of being a professional actor, which he says he’s known he wanted to be since he was 5.
His debut: playing a munchkin in a Temple Terrace community theater production of The Wizard of Oz. “I peed my pants on opening night and didn’t get to take my bows. It was very devastating. I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for the business.” (Thankfully, his pants remained dry when he played a munchkin on Broadway.)
The way he’s pursued roles says a lot about his determination. A theater teacher suggested he audition for Spring Awakening while he was still in high school — “they were looking for real teenagers, not trained actors” — so Trensch sent the producers an audition tape. “For years I was flying back and forth to New York to audition, first for the Broadway company, then the tour… but I was always a smidge too young.” Finally, when he was a sophomore at Elon University, he got the nod — and left school to join the national tour.
He went after Curious Incident with similar single-mindedness. He’d read the Mark Haddon novel on which the play was based when he was 15, the same age as the protagonist, and when he found out it was being adapted for the stage in London, he started following it “like a hawk.” Then, when the Broadway transfer was announced, “I just emailed my agent and manager every single day begging to get an appointment.”
Does he ever wish he’d stayed in college? “No. I’d be lying if I said that. I had some professors who were a little worried and wanted me to finish my degree, but I was just so in love with the show and that part and it was such a massive opportunity… I just said goodbye and signed up.”
His parents have long been supportive of his career, traveling from Tampa to see him in all of his shows. His father was in Williamstown to see him perform the day I was there. “He’s a wonderful kid,” he told me. “I know he’s mine, but he is.”
Though Tyler Clementi and Christopher travel markedly different paths, Trensch sees similarities. Among the documents shared with the cast of Poster Boy were transcripts of email messages Tyler was sending to his friends. “I remember there was a sentence that was something like, ‘I know the rules of how to have a conversation. I just can’t do it.’ That’s so heartbreaking to me, and that feels similar to Christopher, in that he kind of understands the rules of how to operate in the world, but he finds humans so surprising and just impossible to deal with.”
Even if Clementi was uncomfortable with social interaction, it doesn’t follow that he was uncomfortable with being gay. On the contrary, says Trensch; he’s happy that Poster Boy shows Tyler as someone who enjoyed being gay — “a complex human being who likes to have sex.”
Trensch himself came out when he was in high school. I asked him if he’d ever been bullied.
“At this stage in my life I love being a queer person. But I’m sure there [were] times when I felt uncomfortable and I definitely got picked on, like, people spitting in my face in middle school and high school.”
Even at Blake?
“It was a magnet school, so there was a division of it that is really friendly to outsiders,” he acknowledged. “But then it’s also a public school where kids are mean to other kids to, like, save themselves — to deflect.”
But it was his teachers at Blake — Eric Davis (now artistic director of freeFall) and Jim Rayfield — who gave him the foundation to be a theater professional.
“Eric treated myself and all of my peers like adults, and expected a lot from us, and that helped prepare me for college and the professional world.”
The future life of Poster Boy remains to be seen. No reviewers were invited to the run in Williamstown (I was allowed to see it because I was doing this profile), but if the buzz is good it’s got the pedigree to back it up, including a Tony-nominated composer in Craig Carnelia and the backing of the Public Theatre — birthplace of (you may have heard of it) Hamilton.
Meanwhile, Trensch is engrossed in a month-long dance workshop in preparation for that aforementioned Big Musical, which will bring him back to his favorite place on earth. He enjoyed breathing the fresh air of the Berkshires, but it’s New York (Brooklyn’s Greenpoint section, to be exact) that he calls home. And even though walking through Times Square is “like my personal hell,” there’s a payoff at the end.
“You get to your stage door, and it’s like the greatest experience. Every day walking through a Broadway stage door is the coolest — it’s never not absolutely magical.”
Expect to see Taylor Trensch walking through Broadway stage doors for many years to come.
