Matthew Conlon has been acting for forty-plus years. He was born and raised on Long Island(Sayville.) He and his wife Julie have had a home in Remsenburg for the last fifteen years and an apartment on 13th St. in Greenwich Village, New York City. The actual street where his grandfather lived. Mr. Conlon had a hand in the earliest stages of The Bay Street Theater and The Hampton Theatre Company. Besides appearing on stages all over the U.S.A., he has appeared on TV shows like Law and Order and full-length feature movies. He has recently been selected to play the lead in a movie titled, “Cahill’s Lanes.” The film is scheduled to begin production soon.
He said, “I’m a result of the taxpayer dollar paying for the arts. I attended SUNY Purchase in the acting conservatory program. I had gotten into Carnegie Mellon and Boston University, and I was an alternate at Julliard, but Julliard didn’t have any alternates that year. So, my dad bought me a 67 Mustang, and he talked me into going to a state school.”
After school, Conlon moved to NYC and threw himself into pursuing his passion for acting. To survive, he recalls, “I worked in bars or restaurants. I was a legal reader for some of the big corporate firms in the city because you could work the second or third shift, or you could do freelance work, and you could survive on that. I’ve worked a lot in the building trades in carpentry and painting.” Eventually, Mr. Conlon and a theater friend established a successful high-end apartment painting firm.
He remembers his first role in the “Heiress” also featuring his friend the bartender at the Stone Creek Inn and his common law wife. “She was an actor at that time, and she played the heiress, and I was in it, and that was my first show. And then I did the Crucible and then I did the play, “Proctor,” He then went back to New York City for about 15 years until he came back to the east end to the Hampton Theatre Company.
When asked about his biggest thrill, the answer was surprising but also a measure of the man Matthew Conlon is. He said, “I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan; I played Oedipus. That’s where I met Steve Hamilton. Anyway, somebody sent me a note backstage. It was an elderly couple. The note said that my performance of Oedipus had allowed them to realize things about their marriage that they hadn’t known in their 40 years of marriage. That was pretty special. That for me, that’s why I do it. I’m not really like a name-above-the-title star kind of guy. I mean, I’ve always felt like when something happens to me in the dark in the theater, it’s because whether it’s a movie or a live performance, I get nudged a little bit. It doesn’t smack me in the head. It just nudges me a little bit in my humanity.”
About longevity, Conlon said, “I guess I’m in my 40th year in the union (Actor’s Equity.) In 1992, I came out to help my friends (Emma and Stephen Hamilton) build the theater at Bay Street. I knew Emma from HP Studio, one of the original acting studios in New York. I knew Stephen from that production of Oedipus I did in Michigan. I have known them forever. I was “The understudy in Bay Street Theater’s first ever production, “Men’s Lives.” Last year, when I went on and did “The Crucible” (Bay Street), it was the first time I had been back on that stage in 30 years.”
Concerning “Cahill’s Lanes,” a crowdfunding resource, has raised the first $10,000, and the project is greenlit and now has a website. https://seedandspark.com/fund/cahills-lanes#story Filming will most likely commence in the next several weeks. Conlon said, “I’m playing the owner of the bowling lanes. I secured the lead by auditioning for Marco Joe Clate, the writer/ director of “Cahill Lanes.” Twenty years back, Conlon did two iterations of Cahill Lanes when he was “younger.” It was done on West 52nd Street, on the ninth floor or the 10th floor. He remembers, “Someone reached out to me and said, I’m going to make my little play into a film. Conlon always liked the script, which was about a lady looking for her father and then finding him. Conlon explains that years back, when Marco Jo Clate wrote this piece, there were no Ancestry.com type of websites, so finding a parent was tough. Now he said, “This scene happens every day all the time with parents and children having these kinds of first meetings. The film has an emotional impact. We did the casting over the summer. I had to earn the part. I wasn’t given the part. I had to audition, but I had a leg up… It’s very unusual that (a role) comes back, and you get to play the part. Usually, it doesn’t happen, I just got lucky I aged in the right direction. I didn’t get too old to play it.
Summing up his career of many leading roles, Matthew Conlon said, “I believe that there’s nothing like live theater. It’s so important. The main thing is I got bitten by the bug that first time, and it’s where my heart is. You know, I’ve done movies and television, but really, my lifeblood is in the theater.”
