THE actor Morgan Spector moved to New York in 2006, one in an infinite line of newcomers to the city looking to start afresh. Of course “it’s different being a middle-class white kid coming from Northern California,” he acknowledged. “But I was still coming to reinvent myself, to realize this dream that I had. There is something about that immigrant thing that I love.”
Playwrights love immigrants too, and in the past several years Mr. Spector has played two of them onstage. He made his Broadway debut as the gentle Rodolpho, a penniless Italian émigré, in Gregory Mosher’s revival of Arthur Miller’s “View from the Bridge.” And he can now be seen, in a performance as dangerous as it is sexy, as the brutal Boris, whose arrival in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, catalyzes the action in the New Group’s production of Erika Sheffer’s “Russian Transport.”
As soon as Boris comes through the door, his sister, Diana (Janeane Garofalo), feeds him pelmeni, meat dumplings. But owing to the dietary restrictions of a cast member, the props department substitutes spinach ravioli. So it was only on a recent Thursday, in a cheerfully kitschy Sheepshead Bay restaurant a vodka bottle’s throw from the play’s setting, that Mr. Spector sat down to a first plate of pelmeni.
You might be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Spector would never corrupt his body with such a meal. In a scene from “Russian Transport” in which he wears nothing but his own tattoos and a pair of briefs, he displays a six-pack so sculptured you can practically glimpse the pull tabs. His cast mate Ms. Garofalo noted: “I would advise everyone to try and see Morgan in his underwear. Put it on your list of things to do.”
But Mr. Spector, 31 and just over six feet, said that when you work out as often as he does, you can eat what you like. He enjoyed his lamb dumplings, even dabbing them with sour cream. Though Boris, he observed, “probably would have ordered an entire lamb.”
At first glance Boris and Rodolpho have little in common. Another character in “Bridge” describes Rodolpho as “like an angel — you could kiss him he was so sweet,” whereas Diana says her brother, an ex-convict with shady business interests, is so virile, he “makes the girls pregnant only from looking.”
Yet both characters serve similar functions in their respective plays: outsiders who force the families they join to confront underlying tensions. Mr. Spector has found other points of connection too. “They both take a lot of pleasure in life,” he said. “Boris lives with a lot of gusto and joy. He’s probably a sociopath, but that doesn’t change how he feels about his own life.”
Mr. Spector projects a similar joy, though rather less menace than he displays as Boris. (Ms. Garofalo described him as “a giant goofball.”) A bright child who grew up among San Francisco refugees, he had his debut early, in community theater, in Christopher Durang’s “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,” at the age of 8.
He attempted to give up acting several times, but a high school teacher prevailed upon him to play Danny Zuko in “Grease,” and a Reed College professor drafted him as the stoker in an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika.”
“There weren’t a lot of muscular people,” he explained. “So I was pressed into service as the guy with his shirt off.”
Enrollment at the prestigious American Conservatory Theater followed graduation, as did regional work and a tour in “The Lion King.” His breakout moment arrived in proper “42nd Street” fashion. After Santino Fontana suffered a concussion during previews of “A View From the Bridge,” Mr. Spector rose instantly from a longshoreman’s two lines to the role of Rodolpho.
He stepped in, Mr. Mosher, the director, said, “without a glimmer of fear.”
Mr. Spector said: “It was the kind of thing that you dream about happening when you come to New York. Not that somebody else gets injured, but that you get an opportunity to step out from the chorus and show what you can do.”
Even a flyaway blond wig, which looked particularly ridiculous with Mr. Spector’s dark looks, couldn’t discolor his work, which David Rooney in Variety called “rich in humor and flirtatious warmth.”
Mr. Spector applies that same flirtatiousness to the part of Boris, revealing “the snarling wolf beneath the genial grin,” Charles Isherwood wrote in his review in The New York Times. You’d be hard-pressed to recognize the actor from that earlier role. Miller describes Rodolpho as looking as though a newspaper could blow him over. Boris has a physique that would intimidate a tank.
From his chair in the restaurant Mr. Spector displayed how he carried himself in each part. First he smiled and rounded his shoulders and became Rodolpho. Then he stuck out his chest and hardened his grin and in an instant Boris sat opposite — an actor’s magic trick.
Despite this impressive skill set Mr. Spector has no jobs booked beyond “Russian Transport,” which runs till March 24. Still, he doesn’t seem perturbed, speaking happily of the shots of cognac the cast downs after each successful performance.
For now he is living his own version of the New York immigrant’s dream: “I’m working on a beautifully written play,” he said. “I’m paying my rent. I’m not starving. That’s what I wanted to do when I came here. And I’m doing it.”
