Mariska Hargitay has been spending a lot of time at the Hudson Theater, where she is making her Broadway debut in the interactive play “Every Brilliant Thing.” When she’s not performing onstage, she can often be found in her “inspiration space” — a small room filled with trinkets, mementos and presents from family and friends, as well as from fans. Most prominent among them: two autographed posters of the Knicks captain, Jalen Brunson.
“His leadership, his courage,” Hargitay said, pointing to his image during a backstage visit before a recent Saturday matinee, a few hours before the start of Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals. “We don’t have words for it. Twenty-nine points down: boom, not a problem for him!”
The admiration goes both ways. On one of the posters, Brunson wrote: “To the real NY captain!” He was referring to Capt. Olivia Benson, the character Hargitay has been playing on “Law & Order: SVU.” (When the show started in 1999, Benson was a simple detective.)
But her decades-long acting experience on “SVU” meant little when it came to preparing for her current run. “I was really scared because I’ve never done this,” Hargitay, 62, said. “I didn’t see myself as a Broadway person.”
“On my show, I know everything,” she continued. “I’m the boss lady. I’ve been there the longest. I’m in charge. I know how to fix everything. I know how to make it work.”
Being on Broadway, especially carrying a solo show like “Every Brilliant Thing,” was a bit of a shock to her system. “Everything was different,” Hargitay said. “Just learning the lines was a mountain for me. I was like, ‘Why is it taking me so long?’”
“Also, I wasn’t used to getting so many notes,” she added. “I love notes, by the way, but this was a lot, and I didn’t know that it’s normal in theater.”
Hargitay credits her husband, the actor Peter Hermann, with helping her run lines and generally helping build her confidence. (One of his gifts in the inspiration space: a small pouch holding a couple of balls made of steel.) The leadership abilities she honed on “SVU” came in handy, too.
“She’s such a mensch,” Jeremy Herrin, who directed the Broadway production with the playwright Duncan Macmillan, said in a video interview. “She really wants to get better, and she recruits everybody in the room to make the show better.”
“She’s utterly responsible,” he continued, “and carries her burden in such a generous way.”
While Hargitay puts on her stage makeup and costume (jeans and a simple, unadorned top) in a separate room, she hangs out in the inspiration space, which seems to both charge and center her. She pulled out another item: a composite photo of her and her mother, Jayne Mansfield, in front of theaters — Mansfield appeared in the Broadway comedy “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” in 1955. Hargitay then proudly held a pointy blue statuette: the Broadway rising star award her mother received for her run in that show.
It was a tangible connection for Hargitay, who made her directorial feature debut last year with the documentary “My Mom Jayne.” “The movie opened up some kind of space, connected me to my mom,” she said. “I think it is no accident that this play came to me.”
“Every Brilliant Thing,” written by Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, is driven by a narrator who, as a child, starts compiling a numbered list of brilliant things in an attempt to give a depressed mother reasons to live, and keeps it up into adulthood. The script, which is equally funny and touching, does not specify the narrator’s gender, race or age, and diverse actors around the world have appeared in the show. Now Hargitay has picked up the baton from Daniel Radcliffe, who was the first actor to star in the Broadway version of the show and received a Tony nomination for his performance.
A big reason for the enduring success of “Every Brilliant Thing” is the play’s adaptability: The script can be slightly modified to fit the locale and whoever is playing the narrator. The Hargitay version, for instance, fits her age: Radcliffe’s narrator started the list at 7 years old in 1996; hers starts it at 7 in 1971. A dog who anchors the first segment was called Indiana Bones with Radcliffe, and now it’s Groucho Barks (“because Groucho Marx was so kind to my mom,” Hargitay said).
This also allows the actors to subtly personalize the story in ways that resonate with them and create further connections with the audience. But that relationship can be a little fraught in the case of someone like Hargitay, with whom many people have forged an intense parasocial bond. You can see why Brunson calling the actress a captain in his dedication can also be interpreted as a reference to her outsize presence in New York City, where her series is filmed, often on location, and where she has become a combination of mascot, advocate and super-friend.
Actually, her reach extends way beyond the five boroughs, with large numbers of dedicated fans who have embraced, and often identify with, Benson not just as a defender of the weak, the wounded and the traumatized, but as someone who has gone through the wringer herself, having survived harrowing emotional abuse and sexual assault.
A direct consequence of that passionate fandom is that Hargitay is less involved in the preshow process than Radcliffe was. “Every Brilliant Thing” relies on a large degree of participation from audience members, with numerous volunteers asked to read lines from numbered cue cards when called upon by the narrator, and five more prominent roles are read by volunteers. Before each show, Radcliffe would roam the Hudson Theater at a brisk jog, tag-teaming with associate director and stage manager types to find his co-stars. Hargitay does appear onstage before the play begins, and theatergoers immediately descend upon her to take photos, pass on a gift or exchange a few words.
“Some of them want to share emotional stories with her,” said the associate director Laura Dupper, who helps steer the casting of audience members. “Sometimes she will hand a few cards out but it depends on the vibe of the people coming in and if it feels already very intense at the top, she has to protect herself.” And so Hargitay usually returns backstage to regroup for a few minutes before the play actually starts.
Once she’s onstage in her capacity of narrator, she pilots the play with the mix of toughness, compassion and good humor she is known for. At the performance I attended, she was comfortable enough controlling the proceedings that she slightly sped up a bit of interaction, jokingly interjecting that it was “for time reasons — there’s a game on tonight.” After a scene in which she had to run around the orchestra section, she returned to the stage slightly out of breath, panting, “That was a lot harder than I anticipated. I’m 62!”
At the same time, she was always in character — the narrator now a middle-aged American woman who may well be a Knicks superfan — and appeared undistracted by audience members calling out “Olivia!” and “I love you!” She understands where they are coming from.
“We’re just people, we’re just human beings, and everyone has a story, and everyone’s holding something, and carrying something, and been through something, and afraid of something,” she said. “So the point is to be a [expletive] human first, and say, ‘I’m just like you.’ I’m a storyteller, that’s what I want, because I can hold the heart of it and keep it fun. You can be both. We can be vulnerable and strong as nails. And have balls.”
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