Perfect Fit: Young Actor and His Role

Franco Wicks is the sort of ferociously funny, privately pained character that any rising Hollywood star would love to play — and on Broadway no less, in this fall’s production of "Superior Donuts."Instead Franco is being played, to acclaim, by an actor who is virtually unknown in New York or Los Angeles, Jon Michael Hill. His is one of the few current Broadway play ensembles that lack a big-name star.et among this 24-year-old actor’s colleagues at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, where “Donuts” originated in the summer of 2008, Mr. Hill was an incentive for joining the play, Tracy Letts’s follow-up to his Tony Award-winning “August: Osage County.” “Jon was one reason I said, ‘Count me in,’ ” said Tina Landau, a Steppenwolf ensemble member who directed the play in Chicago and New York. “He’s completely mercurial. He can do everything and its opposite. That’s so exciting to see in a young actor.”

For Mr. Hill, who is making his Broadway debut, the role is an opportunity to play a struggling, young African-American who wants to make his mark in a world where many of his peers are poor, discarded, or maimed by violence. These are young men Mr. Hill sees on the nightly news and knew while growing up in Waukegan, Ill., and whose stories deserve to be heard by an audience, he said. CONTINUE READING..