Henry Stram

Stram grew up in Kansas City, while his father was the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. He performed with The Barn Players until he moved to New York City in 1973 and studied acting at the Juilliard School. While at Juilliard, he frequented Cafe La Fortuna, a cafe that opened in 1976 and was known for its garden, opera music and Italian desserts.Among Stram's stage credits are Titanic, The Crucible, The Elephant Man, and Fly by Night. Stram came under fire in 2009 while performing in the Rebecca Gilman stage adaption of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Stram was playing a deaf character, and since he is not in real life, it was said of him, "A hearing actor playing a deaf character is tantamount to putting a white actor in blackface" by a member of the board of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts. The National Association of the Deaf, Deaf West Theater, and others demanded that the director, Doug Hughes, and the New York Theatre Workshop replace Stram with an actual deaf actor. Stram had played the role in 2005 in the premiere of the show in Atlanta. In 2012, he participated in Shinsai, which was a benefit concert to support the victims of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster along with Patti LuPone, Richard Thomas, Mary Beth Hurt, Jay O. Sanders, Jennifer Lim and Angela Lin. The same year, he was in the cast of Rebecca, but the show was closed after it was discovered one of the investors never existed with a following criminal investigation. Ben Sprecher, a producer, hoped it would have a run in 2013.