Treading Courtrooms and the Boards

Even as a child, Stephen Rourke knew he wanted to be an actor. “I would watch movies, TV shows, plays—and I always thought it would be fun,” he recalls. But he had another interest, as well. “I would follow what lawyers do in the news and in fiction, and I thought it would be fun to do that, too.

“I have a creative side and I have a public service side, and the interesting thing about being an actor and a lawyer is that they both involve a degree of public performance,” he continues. “They both involve speaking. They both involve persuasion, in very different ways.”

Rourke found a way to pursue both. His general practice includes entertainment, family and immigration law—the latter being the focus of his partner in life and law, Cynthia Rosenberg. Rourke’s acting career, meanwhile, has afforded him opportunities to play meaty roles on the stage as part of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, including a key role in Paul Bogas’ drama The Throne Builders. 

“It was about a Black carpenter and a Jewish carpenter who have to work together to create a choir loft for a church in the South,” he says. “I played the role of the minister of that church. … It’s a really well-written play. I got a very positive review from The Baltimore Sun as a result, and it’s one that, if I had the opportunity to do it again, I would absolutely do it.”

Rourke has also appeared in films and television when the opportunity presented itself. Memorably, while on set for a bit part in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Rourke got to chat with Garry Shandling, who played Sen. Stern. “It’s always a pleasure when you meet someone like that who doesn’t throw their celebrity in your face,” he says. “He was as nice as you could imagine anybody being.” Rourke adds that he had similar experiences with Kevin Nealon and Bonnie Bedelia. 

While grateful for screen roles, Rourke has a soft spot for theater—including the performance spaces themselves. He recalls a family trip when he was 15 to see Butley at the Morosco Theatre. “The play was terrific, and of course, Alan Bates was terrific. But I was really impressed by the kind of intimacy and old-world charm that the Morosco and a lot of other old Broadway theaters had or have. It just felt like a really magical place to see a play. Lo and behold, not too many months later, I read an article that said that it and four other theaters that were adjacent to it were going to be torn down to build what eventually became the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square.”

The discovery pained Rourke. “The Morosco was where the original production of Death of a Salesman played,” he says. “A couple of years later, I went to the Majestic Theatre on Broadway to see the original Broadway production of A Little Night Music in its last week, which was an amazing experience all by itself, but it’s like, here you are—this is where South Pacific opened. For that matter, this is where Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim first met.”

These locations are hallowed ground to Rourke, and he’s on a mission to preserve as many as possible. 

“I was reading a story about the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway—where Hair originally opened—that it was going to be incorporated into a hotel and turned into a lobby,” Rourke remembers. “I got involved in the Save the Theatres effort, which got most, if not all, of the Broadway theaters landmarked, and I thought, ‘That’s not why I wanted them landmarked—I wanted them to be theaters.’”

With the help of friends he met online—”in the early days of the internet, by way of AOL,” he says—Rourke then organized the nonprofit Friends of the Biltmore, and launched a campaign to preserve the institution. “Eventually, that is exactly what happened,” he says. “The Manhattan Theatre Club acquired it, and they made it their Broadway home, and did an amazing job of restoring it.

“Cultural history is very important to me,” he continues. “I’m attracted to plays that deal with that in some way, shape or form. I’m attracted to it as an actor, I’m also attracted to it as a preservationist.”

More recently, Rourke is working to “produce new plays from segments of the American populace that don’t often get represented,” he says. His company, Flipping the Script Productions, is currently producing a play that he encountered through his work with the Baltimore Playwrights Festival. 

Another project Rourke is contemplating could be the apogee of his life as an attorney who acts: a local production of the David Rintels’ one-man play, Clarence Darrow. “Henry Fonda did it on Broadway quite a few moons and suns ago,” he says. “It would be a lot to memorize, but it’s a really beautifully written play.” 

Rourke hopes to produce the play as a benefit for the Maryland Volunteer Lawyer Service and/or the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts—nonprofits that Rourke says were instrumental in helping him build his practice. “I think it would be a nice way of tying a lot of different threads together.”