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Let’s face it: Rich Cotovsky looks like a dude you’d expect to sell drugs. But you might not expect the drugs you’re buying from him to be your antidepressants, your dad’s cholesterol reducers and your girlfriend’s birth-control pills.
Don’t worry, man, it’s cool: The scraggly character actor, a cofounder and artistic director of storefront stalwart Mary-Arrchie Theatre, is a licensed pharmacist.
“My last year of pharmacy school, I needed some electives,” the Chicago native says over a beer in the Mary-Arrchie lobby. “So I take this class ‘Introduction to the Theater,’ and they have you go to three different plays and write a critique on the play, and on the list was American Buffalo.” It was the now-legendary original 1975 production of the David Mamet play, and Cotovsky was hooked.
Through the ensuing years of acting and directing with Mary-Arrchie and other companies, Cotovsky’s never given up his day job. He hooked up for a time with a pharmacists’ temp agency that afforded him flexibility for auditions and commercial work; he now works full time for a mom-and-pop drugstore that lets him set his own hours but doesn’t provide the benefits (such as, ironically, health insurance) that a corporate pharmacy could.
“There’s security involved in having a day job,” Cotovsky says. “I suppose if I really wanted to see how much power I could wield [in theater], I would have to quit my day job to find out. But one’s an escape from the other. So it’s like, if I’m having problems with theater, I have the pharmacy to go to and chill out. It helps me balance myself.” The dude, after all, abides.
Next gig He’s understudying Michael McKean in Tracy Letts’s new play, Superior Donuts, at Steppenwolf, opening June 28.
