Rainn Wilson on the Silly Truth-Telling Going on in Urinetown at City Center Encores!

Rainn Wilson is an amateur sociologist of geek culture, and he has a working theory: “The theater geek is the king of the geek food chain.”

He would know, as someone who’s identified as most every link—and not just on TV as The Office’s bear, beet and Battlestar Gallactica-obsessed Dwight Schrute. If you doubt his credentials, he’s happy to list them for you: Chess team, pottery club, Model UN, computer club, marching band (he played… the xylophone).

“I drifted through all the nerdiest pursuits in high school,” Wilson told Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek during a break from rehearsal for Urinetown at New York City Center Encores! Through February 16, he plays greedy Urine Good Company President Caldwell B. Cladwell for a whirlwind 11-day run of Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis’ musical satire on capitalism and authoritarian corruption. It’s his first musical since a high-school turn as Oklahoma!’s Jud Fry—but the top of the food chain slows down for no geek.

“The way they do theater here at City Center Encores! is nuts,” said Wilson. Still, he’s utterly smitten by the scrappy theater camaraderie. “People aren't doing it for the money—they're doing it for the love of it. That energy is palpable.” Wilson first found theater as a teen after moving from suburban Seattle—where he identified as “a chess-playing doofus”—to a town outside of Chicago. His new school, New Trier High School, had a well-known theater program. “It was all of these misfits and they'd found their home,” he said. “Gay, straight, tall, short, fat, skinny, pimply, model looks—everyone was equal and accepted. I just felt in my bones, ‘I'm home. These are my people.’”

Wilson went on to get an MFA in acting from NYU and then pounded the pavement for 15 years before landing his now-notorious TV gig. “I am so grateful for those years,” said Wilson. “I got to live my dream and I got to hone my craft for years and years doing experimental plays and comedies.” He did Shakespeare at the Delacorte Theater, sank his teeth into O'Neill at D.C.’s Arena Stage, was a usual suspect at the Guthrie in Minneapolis and debuted Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus at the Public Theater (the late, legendary Richard Foreman directed). “At the same time, I had a lot of struggles,” he told Wontorek. “I had a lot of mental health struggles. I had a lot of anxiety and depression. I had addiction issues with drugs and alcohol. And so I was trying to navigate that as well. That was part of what coaxed my personal spiritual journey, which went hand-in-hand with my acting journey.”

He thinks back to his acting teacher Zelda Fichandler. “She would always talk about actors as shaman. A shaman is not just a storyteller. It's a truth teller. A spiritual guide with one foot in the mystical realms.” He knows he risks sounding “pretentious” but it’s a diligently cultivated perspective—one that keeps his eye on service rather than success. “I did spend a lot of time in my acting pursuit just being ferociously competitive. That can get kind of ugly, and it's ultimately really not very satisfying,” said Wilson. “But when I can hitch storytelling, acting, making people laugh to service, then it is incredibly satisfying. Anytime I can do something like that, that has extra reverberations, I'm game.”

It's part of what made his recent run in Waiting for Godot at Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse—“the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life”—a fulfilling project. “Every night, I would be like, ‘Universe, allow me to tell this incredible story—because it provokes questions and it helps illumine a little bit about the human condition.’” His drive-by performance at New York City Center, in its own eccentric way, does the same. “Urinetown, as silly as it is, has something to say.”

As far as longer stays on the New York stage, that remains to be seen. “I'd love to do something on Broadway," he said. Self-deprecating gibes flesh out his answer. "It's hard because I am but a humble minor television celebrity. And now to do theater, you've got to be Daniel Craig” (‘tis the season of the mega-celebrity). Still, paraphrasing the great Ingmar Bergman, Wilson left the subject on a hopeful note: “Film is my mistress, but theater is my wife.”