Theater: Lee Osorio

Actor, director and playwright Lee Osorio is having the best of times and the busiest of times this spring. He’s currently appearing as Sydney Carton and a variety of other characters in “A Tale of Two Cities” at the Alliance Theatre while also preparing for two world premiere productions of his own plays.

While his main character in the Dickens adaptation is driven by unrequited love, Osorio finds the larger questions posed by the script to be most intriguing.

“What excites me about this piece are the big questions that it boldly asks, and it does not provide answers,” he said. “This is not a play that has a political agenda beyond asking these big, seemingly eternal questions. This isn’t preaching to anybody. It’s really asking us to take a look at the current political system we live in and ask if this is what justice looks like — if this is the version of reality that we want, how we arrived here and where we should go from here.”

Osorio also wrote and stars in “Prisontown,” a one-man show premiering at Savannah Repertory Theatre in May. He conducted interviews with people in his Georgia hometown of Lumpkin who are affected by its prison complex. In addition, he will direct a show at Stage Door Theatre, “Native Gardens.”

His play, “A Third Way,” which won the Del Shores Foundation Writers Search in 2023, premieres in October at Actor’s Express, where he has performed multiple times. Osorio described having one of his own scripts there as heartening. “The biggest thing to come from the production so far is more confidence in my writing,” he said. — Benjamin Carr

COURTESY Lee Osorio is appearing in “A Tale of Two Cities” while also preparing for two world premiere productions of his own plays at Savannah Repertory Theatre and Actor’s Express.