When Matt Salinger walks down a street, he gets a lot of attention. At 6-feet-4, you could safely call him tall, and with his kind of looks, you could safely expect at least a double-take or two from would-be admirers.
Matt's an actor, and he's in town working in "The Sum of Us," a play at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, in the role of a 24-year-old, football-playing plumber, a hardworking, blue-collar type who lives with his widowed father (now being played by Richard Thomsen, formerly by Robert Lansing) in a small town in Australia.His character also happens to be gay. And he's looking for love, but apparently in all the wrong places. It's not easy finding it. His father is most understanding, encouraging son to bring home his friends, giving them meals and beers, encouraging them to spend the night, sacrificing his own chance at happiness along the way.
The show is in its final weeks at the moment, and that's too bad, because it does have something to say about family relationships, which was what drew Salinger to it.
"I'm very moved by it," the 31-year-old says, finding time on his day off to talk. "Only partly because I'm a new father myself (he and wife, Betsy Becker, have an 11-month-old son, Gannon), and that brought a flood of new emotions to me.
"The father-son side of the story really touched me," he continues. "On almost every level, it could just as easily be about a heterosexual. The boy is such an innocent in so many ways. A lovely innocent. It takes place in a small suburban town in Australia, and I think it was right to keep it there, because I think it would be hard to find someone quite as trusting here, with our media culture.
"And the idea of parents growing older, his being forced to deal with that, well - that's touching, too."
Matt's own father, with whom he has a close relationship, is the noted author, J.D. Salinger. His parents are divorced but lived near each other in New Hampshire, and his time was divided between them as he grew up. His parents are still in the East, but since Matt spends a good bit of time on the West Coast these days ("and traveling with a baby is not easy"), he sees less of them now than before.
Even so, it does seem odd that someone who has spent his life avoiding the public as much as Matt's father has a son whose life seems to be spent in the public eye. Matt doesn't think so at all. After all, he has his own life to live.
But back to the play at hand. "I'd never before come into a play that had been running," he said. "It's not easy, especially when you're the only actor coming in. Actors are insecure anyway, and being the only one starting out where everyone else is in place, you feel as if you're running just to catch up."
Well, maybe. But he doesn't have to worry too much. He has a solid background - in the few years since he left Columbia (with a degree in art history, after having studied earlier at Princeton), he worked in college productions, Off-Off Broadway; in Los Angeles, in a movie ("The Revenge of the Nerds"); and finally, on Broadway, in "Dancing in the End Zone."
That show lasted only two months, but it put Salinger's career on a roll that hasn't stopped. It got him into Sidney Lumet's "Power," which got him cast in the highly rated TV miniseries, "Blood Orchids," the true story of a murder on a naval base in Hawaii, with Jane Alexander and Kris Kristofferson. And he's just finished the movie "Captain America," to be released later this year.
What's next for him?
"I don't know. I think I'll wait and see what this leads to," he says, waving goodbye.