own in Kraków. A tall, mysterious--possibly even magical--gentleman she comes to call the Swallow Man takes her under his wing and together, for years, they traipse across war-ravaged Poland. From a Brooklyn rooftop at sunset, Savit talks to Shelf Awareness about his love of theater, Stephen Sondheim, the unreliable nature of memory and the existence of Peter Pan.

You're an actor in New York, and a busy one--even debuting on Broadway this year in Amazing Grace. What first attracted you to the theater?

The first time I remember being aware of the theater was when I went with my father up to Stratford, Ontario--there's a wonderful theater festival there. I grew up in Michigan, so Stratford was only a few hours' drive. My mother was out of town that weekend,just recite all the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, the living treasure! That's the wonder of theater. Every conceivable kind of twisted, messed-up, interesting, enlightened, beautiful human being is represented in the canon. It's fun to be able to skip around.

So how did Anna and the Swallow Man come into the picture?

The first idea I had was this image of an old European forest... and a small village in the middle of it. I was thinking about a tall man in a three-piece suit walking into this village in the middle of a rainstorm, and he was completely dry and he had no umbrella. And I was thinking of what a weirdly, perhaps titillatingly, perhaps disturbingly magical kind of presence he would be and how it would be more