An audition hog is how Brandon Morgan described himself back in 2019 when we included him in our Ones to Watch article. Back then, Morgan was chomping at the bit to get in front of directors and gunning for roles in as many plays as he could.
Seven years later, Morgan’s desire is the same, but the opportunities to audition aren’t as plentiful. Not because there isn’t work in Houston for this supremely talented actor – in fact, we’ve seen him in so many roles at so many theaters over the years, we’ve come to expect several knockout performances from him every season.
Morgan doesn’t audition as much these days because directors often cast him specifically for their shows. It’s both artistically flattering and a bit of a buzz-kill for Morgan.
“I guess it’s like they’re making me skip the audition process because they have me in mind for the role, which I’m not opposed to; it’s a good feeling,” says Morgan. But it does take a little bit of the competition out of it for me, though. Auditioning is a competition, and I like that. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m at some unreachable level compared to every other actor here in the city. And we’re all friends. I don’t want it to be or feel weird.”
From our side of the stage, it doesn’t matter how Morgan got the role; we’re just happy he did.
We’ve seen him tackle the dramatic and physically demanding role of a champion heavyweight boxer in The Royale; the character Moses in Pass Over, a modern, racially based retelling of Waiting for Godot; a frustrated, suspicious jazz player in Paradise Blue; and a bouncing-off-the-walls, impulsive wannabe card hustler in Topdog/Underdog. Each of these performances earned Morgan a Houston Theater Award nomination, with two wins for Best Actor.
And that doesn’t even include his effort in this season’s Mud Row at Stages theater. For our money, Morgan delivers one of the funniest moments on stage we’ve seen in ages when he attempts to draw the outline of a dead body around himself while lying on the ground.
“Hands down, that’s my favorite moment on stage in my entire career,” says Morgan. “I love that people have given me dramatic roles, but this was the first comedic role I’ve had in years and I loved every single second of it.”
Being funny on stage is truly Morgan’s sweet spot, he says while acknowledging that dramatic work is great, and of course, he goes where he’s chosen for roles. And with so many of them under his belt these past few years, there has been a slight shift in how Morgan shows up on stage.
“I think that I can get to the point of being relatable and being honest a lot faster in the process as opposed to back then,” says Morgan. “I feel so unorthodox as an actor sometimes, ’cause, you know, I’m not the most classically trained actor at all. Sometimes it’s hard to verbalize how it works. But, I’m much more confident on stage now than when I first started….. It’s like any talent, like dribbling in basketball, the repetition of the thing gives you more confidence.”
Rachel Hemphill Dickson, who directed Morgan in Mud Row, has seen this growth firsthand. “I actually taught Brandon at Prairie View before any of this journey,” says Dickson. She adds, “Most importantly, he has grown as a young man. In his artistry, he is more focused on the process than he once was, and he has also sharpened the tools he brings to the stage to help his work have more dimensions and fullness.”
Morgan’s fullness on stage is also something Aaron Brown, who directed Morgan in his award-winning performance in Topdog/Underdog, noticed. “Brandon has an exceptional ability to live fully and honestly on stage,” says Brown. “He is full of humor, charisma, and curiosity, and on stage, he can’t help but be authentic. He knows how to access the depth of a character and share that specific human with an audience.”
Even with all the accolades, Morgan isn’t immune to nerves. During his performance in Topdog/Underdog, the jitters began with the demanding script and followed him onto the stage every night.
“The words in that play, I mean, it was a mountain of words,” says Morgan. “It was my biggest undertaking, as far as line load as an actor. It was just pages upon pages of beautiful and wonderful words, and at intermission, I would turn to Tim (Timothy Eric, Morgan’s co-actor and co-Best Actor award winner), and I was like, damn, Tim, we got like 40,000 more words. Are we going to make it today?”
In the end, though, nerves aside, Morgan said he knew they managed to make magic. “I’m not even trying to pull my own chain, but doing that show night after night, we came backstage, and we were like, man, like, I think we did something good today. I can’t even put into words much about that show. I tried not to talk about it. People could talk about it to me. But did I talk about it to myself? No.”
When it comes to what Morgan wants to do next, the answer is always the same—work. “I am an equity actor, so that affords me the ability to know that I will be paid. If I’m not doing a show, in my mind, that means I’m not making money and I don’t like that.”
Morgan says he’s also thinking about directing. Currently, he’s working on mounting a reading of Robert Alexander’s A Preface to an Alien Garden, a play about the world of drugs and gangs. Explaining his interest, he says, “I’ve worked with so many directors that I kind of understand the gist of what actors want. And not just me specifically, but I watch how directors operate with other actors and, you know, I absorb a lot of that. But as far as, like, me physically doing it, I haven’t done that yet and it would be a good challenge.”
Up next, you can find Morgan back on stage in the Pulitzer Prize-winning comedic tragedyFat Ham – a play that recontextualizes Hamlet as a Black Southern Queer comedy.
Fat Ham at 4th Wall Theater runs from May 1 to 23.
