(Jacopo Raule/Getty Images)
Sawyer Avery may have dropped his famous surname for his off-Broadway debut, but that won’t keep his dad, Steven Spielberg (right, with Avery), from attending. (avid Rosenzweig; Jacopo Raule/Getty Images (right))
To prepare for his NY stage debut, Steven Spielberg’s son had a close encounter with . . . clowns.
For three weeks in June, Sawyer Avery spent five hours a day, five days a week jesting around at New York’s Funny School of Good Acting.
“The first thing we did was that we had to sit in a row of three people and we had to laugh nonstop for 20 minutes,” says Avery.
“You go up and completely open up and make a fool of yourself onstage so that everything else becomes easier.” By doing that and more, he says, his clowning instructor, Christopher Bayes, “really taught me to embrace who I am.”
And just who is Sawyer Avery, exactly? The lanky 20-year-old, who stars in “Belgrade Trilogy,” starting today at the East Village’s 4th Street Theatre, is the youngest son in Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw’s seven-child-deep clan.
“It was a very conscious decision,” Sawyer Avery Spielberg says of lopping off his surname for the stage. “I wanted to tell my own story and have my own little journey and my own little adventure. Sometimes the last name can be a little bit distracting . . .
“No matter if I’m Sawyer Avery or Joe Schmidt or whatever my name is,” he adds, “my dad will always be a big part of my life . . . It is a big name and there will be a lot of noise around it. But as long as I stay focused, I can handle it.”
For Avery, who declines to name his favorite Spielberg flick, focus has always been important.
“I grew up with dyslexia,” says the actor, who attended a private high school for students with language-based difficulties. “So when it comes to reading plays and analyzing plays, it’s always a little harder for me sometimes, so I feel accomplished when I analyze a play in a good way.”
In “Belgrade Trilogy,” Biljana Srbljanovic’s politically charged dark comedy, Avery stars as Mica Jovic, a love-struck boy living in Prague and dealing with the effects of a postwar Serbia.
The setting is light-years from Los Angeles, where the actor grew up in what he calls a “very happy, beautiful, strong, artistic Jewish family.”
While the Spielberg brood has scattered over time, they still gather for major holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving and Christmas, even though Capshaw converted to Judaism. They also converge for big life events like Avery’s “Bongos and Congos”-themed bar mitzvah seven years ago, when the family filled a restaurant with drums and a “huge chocolate fountain.”
Avery, who has broad shoulders, brown hair with a tint of red and Capshaw’s delicate features, never lost his passion for percussion, but he did gain a fondness for acting. At age of 16, he performed in a Los Angeles production of “Hello Herman,” by John Buffalo Mailer (son of Norman). Two years later, he moved to New York to study theater at the Atlantic Conservatory.
“They’ve always been very open to all my decisions, all my choices and I’m very thankful,” he says of his parents, whom he expects will see “Belgrade Trilogy” before it ends its run on Sept. 22.
“It’s been a gift,” he says, adding that his father taught him the importance of humility, patience and listening.
Avery’s craft has bestowed other lessons along the way.
“Acting teaches you how to be human because you learn how to talk, you learn how to walk, you learn how to communicate and so it’s just been a great thing for me to do to, you know, ground myself,” says Avery, who, during our interview (his first), occasionally vibrated like a nervous rabbit while he spoke.
Once the play wraps, the West Coast native will take a 10-week screenwriting course in Manhattan. Avery says that while he may write, direct or produce down the line, he plans to stay in theater for now.
“There’s so much magic that happens onstage that you don’t get in movies,” says the young Spielberg.
“My goal isn’t to be a movie star. That just seems like a lot of anxiety. That just seems like a lot of pressure.”