Out actor Bill Brochtrup is Taking Steps to avoid typecasting

by Christopher Cappiello

“Well, let me just say this: We have disco dance rehearsal every day,” Bill Brochtrup says, describing his days rehearsing Alan Ayckbourn’s 1979 British farce, Taking Steps, at South Coast Rep. “We’re going to be in some snazzy bell bottoms and some platform shoes and some really nice polyester shirts,” he says with an enthusiastic laugh.

The blond, boyish Brochtrup, best known for his longtime role as the gay assistant on NYPD Blue, is having a blast rehearsing the extremely physical comedy of Taking Steps, under the direction of award-winning SoCal director Art Manke.

While Ayckbourn is one of England’s most prolific and popular playwrights, his quintessentially British aesthetic sometimes scares off American producers (except South Coast Rep, which has produced eight of his plays), resulting in his work being less well known on this side of the ocean. Taking Steps is perhaps his broadest comedy, written as an homage to the great 1930s British farceur Ben Travers.

Set in an allegedly haunted old Victorian mansion, the play finds a handful of people thrown together over a single night of hilarious frights. Ayckbourn’s stroke of theatrical genius is that all three floors of the mansion are staged on one level, with an imaginary staircase offering plenty of opportunity for physical comedy.

Brochtrup plays Mark, a regular guy trying to get a loan from his brother-in-law to fund his dream of a fishing shop. He’s also trying to get back his flaky fiancee, who ran off with a waiter on their wedding day.

“All of the Ayckbourn plays are about middle-class people trying to change their lives somehow,” Brochtrup explains. “They are really beautiful. Beyond all the slapstick and comedy, the theme of people trying to break out and, literally, ‘take steps’ to change their lives is something I think everyone can relate to,” he says. “As a gay man, I can relate to that feeling of wanting to have the courage to be yourself and follow your goals and your desires.”

The out actor has been taking his own steps to stretch and take on a range of different roles with a string of theatrical performances. Last fall he joined some of L.A.’s finest classical theater actors in the Antaeus Company’s production of Noël Coward’s sprawling Tonight at 8:30, and he just finished a run in the soldout premiere of Jonathan Tolins’ Secrets of the Trade at the Black Dahlia Theatre, starring opposite John Glover and Amy Aquino.

“After NYPD Blue, I wanted to really change things up,” he says, emphasizing that he loved that show, but didn’t want to be known as the “gay assistant” forever. “I wanted to get the opportunity to do some different things—to prove to myself that I could do it and to prove to other people that I could do it. And the theater, which is where I started, offers more of an opportunity for that, I think, than film or television.”

Brochtrup stresses that it isn’t just openly gay actors who face such challenges. “Dennis Franz played many, many policemen before he played [Det. Andy] Sipowicz [on NYPD Blue]. It was something like his 37th cop role, and he almost didn’t do it for that reason,” he says. But in theater, “I get to go from Noël Coward to this disco farce,” he says with a laugh. “I fell pretty lucky.”

Taking Steps runs May 16-June 15 at South Coast Rep, 655 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. For information and tickets, visit www.scr.org.