“Wing’-ing it on State: Malina Chooses ‘Chains’

When the world premiere of Parents in Chains, which features three largely different casts over the course of its March 12-30 run at Ensemble Theatre Company’s New Vic Theatre, launches its second week on March 18, veteran actor Joshua Malina will be making his Santa Barbara theatrical debut. Malina’s list of credits runs for pages and includes such favorites as Jeremy on Sports Night, Will Bailey in The West Wing and David Rosen in Scandal. He’ll be playing one of the sets of six parents worrying about their teenage daughters’ weekend away, fretting about their safety as well as contemplating the girls’ impending departures from the homestead – the angst conveyed over a series of messages exchanged in a text chain. 

The actor portrays Mark, whose wife passed away five years prior to the opening of the play, and who has been raising three daughters on his own, the oldest driving back from San Francisco as a possible hurricane makes its way up the coast. 

As the father of a 27-year-old daughter and a 22-year-old boy, Malina related to the soon-to-be empty nest theme of the play. 

“It touched me because you get a sense of how people with their different parenting styles react to that eventuality that your kids to whom you’ve devoted your lives are going to leave and be on their own,” he said. “I love the combination of humor, sweetness and sadness when you follow the text threads of this group of friends who have known each other for decades, and how they’re dealing with family and friendship, parenting and divorce and just getting older. The whole piece just resonated with me.”

If it weren’t for being an empty nester himself, Malina wouldn’t have returned to theater at all, once again stepping on stage in the last few years after nearly three decades in the TV trenches. Despite appearing in (Sports Night/West Wing creator) Aaron Sorkin’s play A Few Good Men on Broadway in 1989, when Malina moved to Los Angeles in 1992, the roles he landed were in very small theaters for little money. 

“Then I got married and had kids and needed to make a living, and TV is where the money is for somebody like me,” he said. “But now it’s 30 years later, and the kids are adults, so I’ve been bitten by the theater bug again, which is really a labor of love. There’s just something sort of irreplaceable and very special about the magic of being on stage.”

Not that Malina doesn’t realize his fortune in appearing in two Sorkin TV shows as well as Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal. But since returning to the stage, he’s also played lead roles in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt on Broadway and Nathan Englander’s adaptation of his own short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank in London. 

“They’re just excellent writers,” he said. “And I’ve definitely learned over the course of my career that to whatever extent you have any hand in your own career, going towards a good material is the smart way to go.”

Jay Martel’s script caught his eye in the same way, as did the idea of telling a story through text threads. 

“I have had different text threads for just about every job I’ve done since the mobile phone, at least when the cast gets along well,” Malina recalled. “I have ones from the two plays that I’ve done in the last couple of years and even the one with the group of parents, much like in the play. And I still have a West Wing text thread.” 

Indeed, that beloved TV series also became the weekly subject of a podcast he co-hosted in which each episode corresponded with an episode of the TV show, which Malina – already a self-described fan of the series – joined after emailing Sorkin for a job when he heard Rob Lowe might be leaving. 

“I said, ‘If he leaves, how about a less handsome, less famous actor who would work for less money?’ It worked.” 

Still, Malina said, he never imagined at the time that The West Wing would still be talked about today. 

“It felt like a special thing at the time, but I definitely didn’t predict that 20 years later there would still be this kind of interest with people watching it for the seventh time, or new ones who weren’t alive when we made it. But when I revisited it in that deep dive kind of way for the podcast, I got a whole new wave of respect for the writing.”

The hope is that Chains will also find a favorable audience, Malina said, people who see themselves in the characters. 

“There are some very universal themes of family and friendship and relationships and fear and parenthood. People will not only identify but hopefully be touched by it.”

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