Rising Stars
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Karl Baker Olson
Last spring, when SpeakEasy Stage Company produced the New England premiere of Alan Bennett’s Tony and Olivier Award-winning play The History Boys — one of SpeakEasy’s top-grossing productions — there was a scene during which you couldn’t help but hold your breath as Karl Baker Olson sang “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” in a gentle, quivering high tenor. While he appeared in other shows before and after that at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and the New Repertory Theatre, as well as in the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s recent production of The Duchess of Malfi, it’s his role as Posner, one of ten “history boys” at a British prep school, that gets him stopped on the street and noticed by customers when he waits tables between shows.
Olson, a Minnesota native, came to Boston to attend the Boston University School of Theatre. When he graduated in 2007, he figured he’d go to New York, since it’s just “what’s expected,” he told us recently. But instead, he stayed and started to land work in a variety of plays, realizing that Boston held more opportunities than he’d anticipated. (The fact that he looks even younger than his 24 years is a big bonus where casting is
concerned.)
While the History Boys role required him to sing, and though his character in Gary, a hard-rocking play by local scribe Melinda Lopez, played the bass guitar, he calls music a “guilty pleasure” and assures us that he’s not very interested in “breaking out into song and dance.” What does interest him are plays that shatter ideas about life and societal expectations. “I want to break the world apart,” he says. A lofty goal, indeed, but having already scored work with some of the area’s most celebrated theater companies, there’s no reason he shouldn’t keep pushing the boundaries and taking on a ferociously broad range of roles.
