John Cariani

John Cariani is an American actor and playwright born in 1969 in Brockton, Massachusetts. When he was eight years old, his family relocated to Presque Isle, Maine, where he attended Presque Isle High School and participated in its music and theater programs. He graduated in 1987 and went on to Amherst College, where he sang with the Zumbyes, Amherst's oldest a cappella group, and was a member of the Glee Club. He earned a B.A. in history from Amherst in 1991, after which he trained in acting and directing at StageWest in Springfield, Massachusetts, an institution that has since closed. He moved to New York City at age 27 to pursue a professional acting career.

Cariani's early years in New York included work with the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival alongside Off-Broadway productions, television commercials, and film work. A significant early opportunity came in 1999 when he was cast in the Off-Broadway production It's My Party (and I'll Die If I Want To), which starred F. Murray Abraham and Joyce Van Patten. In 2000, he appeared in the independent film Scotland, PA opposite Christopher Walken and guest-starred on the television series Ed. The following year he took on a role opposite Robert De Niro in the Warner Brothers film Showtime. From 2002 to 2007, he played forensic expert Julian Beck on the police procedural drama Law & Order, the role for which he became widely recognized on television.

His Broadway career spans 2004 to 2021 and includes appearances in Fiddler on the Roof, Something Rotten!, The Band's Visit, and Caroline, or Change. His Broadway debut came with the 2004 revival of Fiddler on the Roof, in which he played Motel the Tailor, earning him a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical that same year.

As a playwright, Cariani first developed Almost, Maine at the Cape Cod Theatre Project in 2002. The play had its premiere at Portland Stage Company in Portland, Maine, in 2004, and opened Off-Broadway in 2006, where it was included in Smith and Kraus' New Playwrights: Best Plays of 2006. Dramatists Play Service published the play in 2007, and it has since accumulated nearly 100 professional productions and more than 5,000 community, university, and high school productions. It has ranked among the most frequently produced plays in North American high schools, and in 2020 Cariani adapted it into a novel, Almost, Maine: A Novel, published by Macmillan. Dramatists Play Service also selected Almost, Maine to represent its eighth decade in the publisher's 80th Anniversary Edition boxed set. In 2014, Transport Group revived the play Off-Broadway with Cariani performing in the production; The Advocate included it on its list of the best theater of that year, and Lincoln Center recorded it for its Theatre on Film and Tape Archive.

Cariani's second play, cul-de-sac, premiered Off-Broadway in April 2006 in a Transport Group production. The New York Times described it as charming, witty, and macabre. The play received further development at the Cape Cod Theatre Project and was reworked for presentations at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and at High Point University in High Point, North Carolina, in 2016, as well as a professional production at Half Theatre in Poughkeepsie that same year. His third play, Last Gas, premiered at Portland Stage Company in 2010. Cariani has described Almost, Maine as nearly a love letter to northern Maine and Last Gas as a more realistic portrayal of that region. The play ran at Opera House Arts at the Stonington Opera House in Maine in 2013 and at Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, New York, in 2014, and was published by Dramatists Play Service in 2014.

His play LOVE/SICK premiered at High Point University in the fall of 2010, was presented at Portland Stage Company in the spring of 2013, and was produced by Hartford TheaterWorks in 2014. It ran Off-Broadway in February 2015 at the Royal Family Performing Arts Space and has been performed in Riga, Latvia, and Mexico City. The play was adapted into a Spanish-language feature film, Enfermo Amor, released on Vix+. Two new vignettes from LOVE/SICK premiered at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, in a filmed version directed by Cariani himself.

Cariani and his husband John Lloyd, a retired NYPD detective, have been together since 1999 and live in the Bronx.