Hometown actor Esper grabs spotlight in...

Hometown actor Esper grabs spotlight in...

Carol Rosegg

Michael Esper, left, with Dick Latessa and Linda Lavin in Nicky Silver’s ‘The Lyons’

Michael Esper is on a roll.

In the span of two weeks in March the homegrown actor wrapped the Off-Broadway play Assistance, shot an NBC pilot for a medical drama called Do No Harm and got back to work on The Lyons, which opens at the Cort Theatre on Broadway on April 23. Shape-shift much?

Its been busy, s ays Esper. Busy is a good thing.

Over the past decade, Esper, whos in his 30s, has worked steadily and emerged as one of the very good things on New York stages.

He acts with an emotional openness and authenticity thats as striking as it is uncommon.

Espers talent is evident whether hes punking out on Broadway in the Green Day musical American Idiot or assuming the cadence and carriage of 16th-century England in A Man for All Seasons.

Off-Broadway, his roles have been as varied from a rent boy in The Intelligent Homosexuals Guide ... to a besotted shepherd in As You Like It to an unfulfilled college student in Crazy Mary.

Esper, born in Manhattan and raised in Montclair, N.J., relates to that last role. It played out in real life at Oberlin College, where he studied writing and philosophy for a year.

Then they asked me to take a year off, he says. It was excellent advice. It was an amazing school, but I wasnt a very good writer and was so unhappy. The process of writing is a lonely one.

And its the opposite of the group method of making music (Esper plays saxophone and guitar) and acting, which hed grown up surrounded and intrigued by.

His parents , William and Suzanne, teach the craft at their William Esper Studio in Manhattan.

After Oberlin, I started to do the work that my parents teach, he says. I got focused.

At the moment hes concentrating on The Lyons, a prickly family comedy by Nicky Silver seen downtown last year at the Vineyard Theatre.

Esper plays a troubled gay short story writer whose acerbic mom is played by Linda Lavin and dying dad by Dick Latessa.

Its really good to be back doing the play, he says. Theres a feeling of intense familiarity, and at the same time its completely new.

Chalk some of that up to Lavin. Shes controlled and virtuosic and hilariously funny, says Esper. But I never feel, on stage with her, shes executing something practiced. Shes unbelievably present. So alive.

Director Trip Cullman, who guided Esper through Assistance and the 2005 comedy Manic Flight Reaction, has similar praise for the rising star. Michael doesnt hold back, he says. The danger with Assistance is playing it only for laughs. Michael mined all the underlying pain and thats what made it work. His emotional accessibility and impeccable work ethic are a dream combination.

Asked the roles hed like to do, he says, I think about all the same roles every actor would love to do. Such as? Tom in Glass Menagerie, and Hamlet, he continues. I dont have a long-term fancy dream. But I think about them now and then.