“I feel like I successfully created a latest form of leading man for the musical theatre.” These are the words of Larry Owens, the supernova comedian, musical performer, and, as of this summer, uncanny stage star. Owens has never played coy about his many gifts—the booming voice; the immediate, startling connection to his audiences; and his deeply articulate showbiz vocabulary. And he has never shied away from what sets him apart within the industry: He’s black. He’s queer. He’s of size. 

This summer, Owens starred in Michael R. Jackson’s off-Broadway A Strange Loop. Within the deeply personal meta-musical, Owens is Usher, a fat, black, gay musical theatre author working the doors of The Lion King and writing a musical a couple of fat, black, gay musical theatre author. With an all-queer, all-POC forged, and a creator and leading man of size, the show breaks any variety of precedents. 

Owens first encountered Jackson in 2015, when he was volunteering on the nonprofit incubator The Musical Theater Factory. Each were trying to search out their place within the vastly exclusionary world of theatre; Jackson was polishing the irreverent work that will grow to be A Strange Loop. Owens soon developed a relationship with Jackson and a symbiotic bond with the character Usher. “There’s this specificity of the lived-in experiences of a fat body that I used to be reading within the pages of a play for the primary time,” Owens said. “I used to be bowled over because, beyond race and sexuality, my size has been probably the most limiting thing for me career-wise. For some reason, our society thinks that fat people have brought this on themselves, and in the event that they wanted to alter they might, and there’s no reason that anyone would wish to be fat, so why would we hearken to their stories?”

It could be years before he and the show could make their debut at Playwrights Horizons. But Owens knew that Usher was the role he had waited for his entire life. He also knew that to embrace his destiny because the play’s star, he would need to battle his way through the industry’s outdated standards of race, body and wonder—and face his own internalized demons as well.

So he returned to the climb, exploring town’s other thriving scenes for performance.  By 2017, he found himself in the course of Recent York’s alt-comedy renaissance, where acts like Bowen Yang, Peter Smith and Sydnee Washington were beginning to construct queer spaces that affirmed self-love over self-deprecation. Due to his indelible voice and exhaustive Broadway knowledge, soon he was a vital a part of most lineups; impersonating Oprah and Viola Davis or belting out arias of Sondheim at musical comedy shows like Catherine Cohen and Henry Koperski’s Cabernet Cabaret. He also began co-hosting his own monthly show, Decolonize Your Mind with Karen Chee (now a author Late Night with Seth Meyers).

Owens grew up in East Baltimore, where he attended theatre camps, and later trained at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater company. As a person of larger construct, he knew, early on, the judgments he’d need to contend with in showbusiness. He had a alternative: Sublimate himself to industry standards, or wait for the standards to catch as much as him. “The expectation to suit [in] just never made sense to me,” says Owens. “I finished weight reduction attempts in highschool, which is an extended time for an obese person to not be really pushing and pulling with that struggle. I became committed to my body.”

That certainty of self would repay within the comedy world, where performers often toil for years onstage to work out who they’re. By vowing to make no compromises, Owens arrived with full ownership of himself and what he projects, and no fear of losing his authenticity with the slightest hint of a glow-up. “This is definitely who I’m. That skinny person [I could have been] wouldn’t be me. That skinny person would need to reconceive who they’re and be continually questioning and have the specter of returning to my actual shape. Here, I don’t have any threat. (If I used to be thin) I would get to play more roles or get more dick, but not necessarily get well roles or higher dick.”

That higher role, Usher, finally got here together in 2019, as A Strange Loop went into production. To completely embody the character, Owens needed to re-engage along with his former demons again and again, made literal by a whole forged playing Usher’s thoughts—and once they get rolling, it’s open season. The thoughts merrily go in on his weight, his talent, and his status as a pariah within the savage ecosystem of gay sex. 

Was he nervous? “At first I used to be so afraid that no person would trust the language of a fat person, or hearken to someone conventionally unattractive speak about their problems. I used to be concerned that they wouldn’t see that I used to be acting due to how an obese black person acts is so different than the chic type of acting, the kind of mumblecore, Greta Gerwig mode. I used to be concerned that my technical skill can be overshadowed by the audience never having seen a fat body do that complicated work before.”

The show culminates in a harrowing Grindr encounter, made all of the more shocking for its rarity—how often can we see two men of color having sex on stage, let alone men of various body types?  “I don’t think audiences have ever considered the obese queer body sexualised. Though [the sex scene] is a moment of brutality and humiliation and a breach of mental consent, it just shows the obese queer body in mainstream media in a way that it’s never been seen before, considering that it’s really vital that individuals are reminded of fat people as human beings. A part of the human experience is sex.”

Speaking of sex, though Owens affirms that he’s “all in” for a relationship—“I’m a hopeless romantic”—he feels largely lost within the incestuous hook-up culture inside the comedy and theatre bubbles. “It’s so fucked as much as be on this loving, accepting community and to have had no romantic intention, presumably due to how I look and never how I act because I actually have many friends but no lovers. It feels weird to at all times don’t have any expectation of romanticism due to how I look. It’s this push and pull because I do know my self-worth, and anyone who sees me onstage I feel is responding to someone who’s fully living of their body. I don’t know what the missing link is, but I do know what I seem like. I can’t fault these people for not being trained to love my body after they’ve been trained to love other bodies.”

A Strange Loop closed in late July, with rave reviews from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Roxane Gay and Lee Daniels. Owens’ profile is higher than ever, and entertainment executives are sniffing blood— romantic paramours will inevitably follow. But what does Larry Owens want? “Hopefully I don’t need to do a play as taxing as this ever again. Hopefully, this tells the industry what I want them to know.” In the meanwhile he’s specializing in downtown stages like Joe’s Pub, and his podcast What Makes U Sing? He also desires to develop a half-hour musical comedy special, and perform at theatres across the country. 

And he wants a relationship that sustains him—and that doesn’t require him to be the star. “I’m attempting to get that big B—the boyfriend. I need to be in a long-term relationship with someone. I consider myself sapio, so I’m in search of that brain, and a capability to maintain up without having to be on zero—which is stage talk for centre stage. I don’t must be centre stage. I can hang back and listen.”

Having faced his demons—on and offstage – Owens has a more balanced sense of self,  “Having this space within the theatre has made me examine my self-worth, not as I perceive it, but because it actually is. I used to quantify my self-worth against what other people like me have been given, and now I put it up with what the canon has wrought. I’m now not measuring myself on the queer black stick. Now I can measure myself on the leading man stick.”