You might think at this stage of his career, nothing can faze two-time Academy Award winner, and America’s favorite dad, Tom Hanks. But then he decided to do theatre. Hanks is currently starring in an original play at Off-Broadway’s The Shed, This World of Tomorrow. It plays through December 21. Here’s the kicker: He co-wrote it with James Glossman, so the experience of rehearsals then previews, and all the rewrites in between has been, as the always-jovial actor puts it, “both wonderful and harrowing at the same time.”

The wonderful part: As the star, Hanks has a tiny bit of freedom on the stage. Unlike his 2013 run on Broadway in Lucky Guy, if Hanks “blow[s] an entire passage [in This World of Tomorrow], I can say to our stage manager, 'What are you going to do, fire me?'” He’s joking, because who would ever fire the quintessential nice guy Tom Hanks?

But the harrowing part is the responsibility that comes with being the steward of the play, and the pressures of making sure every change, every revision, lands. Playbill spoke to Hanks after This World of Tomorrow had its third preview (it opens November 18). Hanks was rigorous about refining and improving the play every day, noting: “We haven't thrown the baby out with the bathwater, although we have thrown out some bathwater, and the baby is still within there.”

But that’s the “best part” about working in the theatre, he says: “In movies, you are always working theoretically: Maybe this will work, maybe this will be cut. You can work on sequences that take four days, but they only take up four seconds of the movie because so much of it's been cut. This is the single best thing about the theatre: every day, every night, every performance … You start at the beginning and you work all the way through to the end. So the theoretical disappears, and it's actually the reality of what happens at that moment on the stage.”

Though Hanks is primarily known for Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Saving Private Ryan, and other generation-defining films—he began his acting career on the stage. One of his most formative experiences was spending three years, first as an unpaid intern then a company member, at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, which got him his union card with Actors' Equity. It also taught him the value of discipline and always being prepared and memorized when he shows up to work. Once his career took him to New York and then Hollywood, Hanks still kept a piece of himself on the stage. He regularly attends fundraisers for Great Lakes Shakespeare, now called the Great Lakes Theater. 

In 2013, he made his Broadway debut in Lucky Guy, written by his longtime friend Nora Ephron (with whom he made the quintessential ‘90s rom-coms Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail).

This World of Tomorrow is particularly special; it marks Hanks’ debut as a playwright. During the pandemic, Glossman approached Hanks about turning some of Hanks’ short stories into a play. He was open to the idea; Hanks had written a book of fiction in 2017 called Uncommon Type, and he had been wanting to turn one of the stories in it, “The Past Is Important to Us,” into a screenplay. That story is now the backbone for This World of Tomorrow, where Hanks plays a scientist, Bert Allenberry, living in the late 21st century, where it is possible to time travel back to the past.

There’s a few catches, though: You can only stay in the past for 12 hours, otherwise your body literally liquifies. And you can only travel to a few select dates, one of them being June 8, 1939, to the New York World’s Fair, a time that was, as Hanks wrote in his book, “filled with so many promises of the world as it could have been.” Bert travels back to the World’s Fair and is taken so much with a woman named Carmen (played by Tony winner Kelli O'Hara) that he goes back in time again and again to that same day—with the threat of his own disintegration always looming. Directed by Tony winner Kenny Leon, This World of Tomorrow is the kind of transportive romance that Hanks is known for, with a poignant message underneath it.

When asked what fascinates him about the past (in his previous film Here, he played a character living in mid-century America), Hanks admits to being a “lay historian"—he does, after all, have a collection of over 300 typewriters.

As Hanks astutely puts it: “No one realizes they are living in the past, right? The only thing they realized is that they are living in the future compared to the generation prior to them. No one is able to cognitively put together this idea that what we are doing right now is not going to mean anything in 80 years or 15 years, or seven years. Or, dare we say, in four years, unless we are impacting our lives for the better."

It's clear he is passionate about the subject, because Hanks then gives an anecdote about the discovery of the Atlantic Ocean—which he prefaces apologetically by saying, "Now bear with me here. Okay, this is the kind of stuff I talk about at dinner. So I'm going to drive you nuts." (He does not. It is, actually, delightful, which is why we have included the full anecdote below.)

Says Hanks: "The Atlantic Ocean was 'discovered' by the civilization of record at the time, the Phoenicians. The Romans and the Greeks, they got to that formidable barrier and always turned back, because the Atlantic Ocean was this big, wide thing that essentially kicked the shit out of every boat and human being that tried to go out there. That's where you went off to disappear forever, because the boats could not navigate its waters. No one knew what it was. 

"But here come the Phoenicians, and they prized, are you ready for this? They prized the color purple. The dye for the color purple was very, very, very, very hard to make. But because it was so rare, the color purple was valued by rich people and royalty. Well, lo and behold! They discovered these little mollusks that were in the waters around North Africa that secreted a purple dye, right? And it's like, 'Holy cow, We don't have to mix this stuff up anymore. There's this little shell in which we can pull purple dye out of. We're going to be rich.' Well, it turned out the search for those mollusks extended out beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and around that top northwest corner of Africa where those Phoenicians, who were searching out essentially a shellfish for their purple dye, learned that they could navigate this huge, big, massive body of water. And because of purple dye from from a mollusk, the Atlantic Ocean became possible for human beings."

Don't worry, Hanks brings all this back to This World of Tomorrow, saying: "If this guy wasn't here, this wouldn't have happened ... If they hadn't gone to the World's Fair in 1939, they would not have met the great love of their life. And I'm going to tell you right now, even you have moments like that in your life. That's the study of history. And I have always been fascinated by that odd aspect of human behavior that says: Things only happen when you're in the right place at the right time, and you have no idea if you are in the right place or if the time is right to be there—history just sort of decides that for you. And I think that's fascinating.”

So while This World of Tomorrow has a being from the future traveling to the past, the play is actually about the present. 

As Hanks explains it: “We took this one thing from the 1939 World's Fair that is actually the theme of our show … ‘The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.’ And if you take all of human consciousness and all of what is to come, the dividing line is right now. Everything that happens after this is once we cross the Rubicon into tomorrow. And everything that is familiar and obvious, as to whether it was good or bad, is behind us. So, there you have it! Nothing matters more than where we are right now and what we're doing.”

And for now, Hanks is focused on what he’s doing on the stage. When asked if there are future plans for This World of Tomorrow (Broadway perhaps?), he demurred. “An awful lot of people have decided, ‘Oh, we're going to do something on Broadway,' and [that] might not have been the smartest thing to do,” he says, adding with characteristic humility: “We have to find out if what we are serving up is worthy of the inspection, worthy of the emotional investment and the time to take it beyond this fabulous place that we call the Shed.” 

So if you want to see Tom Hanks on the stage, there’s no time like the present.

Visit TheShed.org.

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Photos: This World of Tomorrow at The Shed 3 PHOTOS

Tom Hanks in This World of Tomorrow

Marc J. Franklin

Kelli O'Hara and Tom Hanks in This World of Tomorrow

Marc J. Franklin

Tom Hanks in This World of Tomorrow

Marc J. Franklin

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