Joshua Bright for The New York Times  Reed Birney in William Ingeâs âPicnic,âwhich opens on Broadway next Sunday. More Photos »  WHEN Reed Birney’s big break finally came, after 30 years as a journeyman actor in New York, he nearly let it pass him by. Like many performers who had seen dream role after dream role go to bigger stars, Mr. Birney had lost faith in himself. Supporting parts and forgettable guests spots on “Law & Order” were cold comfort as he watched, at home in pajamas, as former classmates like Sigourney Weaver and Mercedes Ruehl walked Hollywood red carpets. Mr. Birney even started to believe what an anonymous poster once wrote on a blog about his performances in countless nice-guy parts. That he was a lightweight.  But then in 2008, at one of their regular coffee-cum-commiseration sessions, the actress Marin Ireland asked Mr. Birney to join her Off Broadway in “Blasted,” a British play about lost souls enduring emotional and physical atrocities. The producers initially envisioned Harvey Keitel in the role of Ian, an amoral journalist who abuses Ms. Ireland’s character sexually. But she wanted Mr. Birney, given her comfort with him and her belief that he had “a dark side that he never got to show,” Ms. Ireland recalled.  Later that day, after reading the first few pages of “Blasted,” Mr. Birney shot her a text message: “I CAN’T TAKE MY CLOTHES OFF!” But soon he said yes, reasoning that he had nothing to lose by testing himself with a character who not only got naked but also raped and maimed before dying miserably.  “At first the idea felt as silly as somebody saying, ‘Reed, we want you to play Stanley Kowalski,’ ” Mr. Birney said, comparing the introverted characters of his past to the “Streetcar Named Desire” brute immortalized by Marlon Brando. “I realized, after so many awful years in the business, how little I thought of myself as an actor sometimes.”  “Blasted” paid $300 a week, played in a 73-seat theater and changed Mr. Birney’s life. His acclaimed performance led to important roles in seven other celebrated Off Broadway productions — and now to his first play on Broadway since his debut there 35 years ago in “Gemini.” True to his reputation as a character actor Mr. Birney is returning in the small but key role of a henpecked businessman in the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of “Picnic,” William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama from 1953 about young love and middle-aged desperation in a Kansas town.  Mr. Birney’s character, Howard Bevans, has no showiness on paper, but actors have made the most of the part: Arthur O’Connell was nominated for a supporting actor Academy Award as Howard in the 1955 film (which starred William Holden and Kim Novak), and Larry Bryggman drew a Tony Award nomination for the previous Broadway revival in 1994.  Winning a Tony was a childhood dream of Mr. Birney’s ever since he began fantasizing about Broadway from his rural hometown, Seaford, Del. But at 58, after landing his second job on Broadway, he is quick to say that he’d be getting ahead of himself to imagine winning Tonys.  “Right now I just feel like I’m the poster boy for perseverance,” Mr. Birney said during a recent interview in the shabby-chic living room of his boxy Upper West Side apartment, where the bookcases hold part of his 7,000-film collection and board games like Life and Battleship that he plays with his wife, the actress Constance Shulman, and their two teenagers.  “When I was young and cute, I thought I had to really get rich and famous,” he continued. “And I was getting older and my looks were going, and I wasn’t getting famous, or even a little bit famous, I thought — oh dear, what a sad thing. I was just wildly frustrated. I felt like I had something more to give, but no one was buying for the longest time.”  Now, it seems, no one can get enough of Mr. Birney, at least among downtown theater artists, many of whom are half his age. “Blasted” hit at the same time that a new crowd of cool kids was emerging Off Broadway, which included the ubiquitous director Sam Gold and his frequent muse, the playwright Annie Baker. The two recruited Mr. Birney and other actors to develop Ms. Baker’s play “Circle Mirror Transformation,” which became a major critical and audience hit Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2009.  Mr. Birney’s character, the heartbroken carpenter Schultz, became his stock in trade: Charles Isherwood began his review in The New York Times of a later production, David West Read’s “Dream of the Burning Boy,” by writing, “Reed Birney is quickly becoming New York’s foremost actor in a particular subspecialty, communicating the grief of average men facing extraordinary loss.” (Mr. West Read developed the play with Mr. Birney in mind and said he is writing another one for him.)  Ms. Baker and Mr. Gold, meanwhile, who won Obie Awards for “Circle Mirror,” were so enamored with Mr. Birney that they decided to create an adaptation of the Chekhov classic “Uncle Vanya” for him to play the title role. If commercial Broadway productions are developed around Hollywood stars, an Off Broadway Vanya is tantamount to canonization for a lesser-known actor like Mr. Birney (even if he did earn less than 1 percent of the $120,000-a-week salary Al Pacino is drawing for “Glengarry Glen Ross” this season).
After decades of journeyman work, Reed Birney has translated his recent Off Broadway success into his return to Broadway, in âPicnic.â