Michael Urie has vowed to try to combine his love of travel with his acting career as often as possible: “Any opportunity to go to a cool place to work, I would take.” So, for five weeks, Urie is on Martha’s Vineyard, a TV and stage actor taking what he considers a vacation even though he’s working.

And while Urie has been busy with rehearsals and, now, performances as Vince — a troubled man with a hot temper for the twisty, dark “Tape” at Vineyard Playhouse — he does consider that something of a vacation based on how he spent the earlier part of the year.

Vineyard Playhouse, a professional theater at 24 Church St., Vineyard Haven,

has announced the following summer schedule. There are usually readings of new works on Monday nights but that schedule has not yet been finalized.

Tickets and

• Through June 18: “Tape,” by Stephen Belber, a riveting dark comedy about high school friends who meet up 10 years later and wrestle with questions of memory, motive and truth.
• June 23-July 9: “Coming2Terms,” a new play by Bill C. Davis (“Mass Appeal”) about best friends who meet monthly to bring a new life into the world.
• July 14-Aug. 6: “Tennessee Williams: Original Acts,” short plays to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the playwright’s birth.
• Aug. 10-Sept. 3: African American Festival of Theater and Music. The full schedule – including staged readings, solo shows and musical guests – has not yet been announced, but these shows will be part of it: Aug. 17-20, “5 Mojo Secrets,” a new play by Kathleen McGhee-Anderson about trying to make a marriage work after kids, careers and long years together; Aug. 31-Sept. 3, “Two Old Black Guys Just Sitting Around Talking,” a new play by Gus Edwards about two cantankerous rivals who tell stories and argue on the same park bench every day.

At the playhouse’s Outdoor Stage at Tisbury Amphitheater,

Tashmoo Overlook, State Road, Vineyard Haven:

• July 20-Aug. 14: Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors”
• Saturday mornings in July and August: The Fabulists

“The thing about ‘Tape’ is that it is intense, but it’s only 70 minutes long, not seven hours. So that was appealing,” he says. He also knew that, with “Tape,” he could “start eating again.”

Until April, Urie, 30, had been performing at Signature Theatre Company in New York as Prior Walter, an ’80s-era AIDS patient and potential prophet, in the revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angels in America.” That show’s two parts (“Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika”) alternated in repertory, but, together, involved a seven-hour script.

Prior was a tough, demanding role that left Urie exhausted and required him to look like an emaciated, dying man — a role Urie says called for him “to be very hungry for five months.”

So you can understand why Urie might jokingly put on Twitter and Facebook last week that he was dedicating his performance in “Tape” to “a delicious friend” — a lobster to whom he wrote, “You haven’t died in vain.” Food comes up at various times during a phone conversation as he eats a quick Vineyard breakfast: “The food here is incredible!”

He’s just as enthusiastic about the play, which, while intense, is also fun for audience members, he says, with their loyalties changing constantly among the three former high-school classmates.

“‘Tape’ is more like an entertainment. At the end of it, I’ll feel energized … it’s such a ride,” Urie says. “If we do our job right, the audience will just be floored. And it’s great that it’s short because I want audiences to go to dinner afterward and talk about who they liked and what they thought.”

The idea of doing “Tape” at Vineyard Playhouse came from co-star Ryan Spahn, who had connections to the theater, as a chance for the two to work together. Spahn plays Jon, a filmmaker who’s been a close friend of Vince’s in the decade since high school but who hooked up with Vince’s former girlfriend at a drunken senior party. That girlfriend, played by Victoria Campbell at the playhouse, also shows up at the hotel room as accusations fly.

Urie plays “the swarthy Italian … who orchestrates the whole thing with the tape recorder” as Vince tries to get Jon to tell him the real story.

Urie likes Vince: “Unfortunately, Vince has been holding a grudge for a long time and it gets the better of him, but I’m certain he means well. He has a lot of denial … and he’s trying to do the right thing by recording the conversation.”

And Vince is a role that Urie says he wouldn’t likely get in New York. While Prior was a lot like Urie himself in personality, Vince is very different and a person Urie will be happy to say goodbye to when the run is over.

“I often play comedy parts and not so ‘hetero’ parts, so it’s an exciting opportunity to get away from New York and L.A. and do things I wouldn’t necessarily get cast in there,” he says. “It’s a great opportunity for me to stretch my acting chops.”

Urie is most widely known as Marc St. James, snarky assistant to diva magazine editor Wilhelmina Slater and rival to Betty (America Ferrara) on TV’s “Ugly Betty.” The role was supposed to be a one-time gig, but the chemistry with Vanessa Williams as Wilhelmina was so strong that Urie became a regular. That character grew and deepened during the show’s four-year run, and Urie says the writers were “incredibly collaborative and wonderful to deal with on a daily basis” and so open to him helping to develop Marc.

He relishes one story about being “maybe inappropriately obsessed” with actress-singer Bernadette Peters as a teenager and then having her cast on “Ugly Betty” as his teacher. He suggested that her character and Marc fall in love and laughs now at the memory. “I thought it would be awesome to fulfill all of my 15-year-old dreams … I don’t know if it was to love her or to be her … and they wrote something like that (falling in love) into the script.”

He’s also proud to have been a big part of a storyline when Betty’s nephew realizes that he’s gay and — years before a similar “Glee” storyline won Chris Colfer an Emmy — comes out to his family with Marc’s help and advice. Marc was also gay and came out to his mother, played by Patti LuPone, in an episode, too.

With “Betty” episodes readily available, Urie says he still gets letters and emails from people who tell him how much that storyline meant to them and that they “wish they had had someone like Marc” to help. One message was from a girl who said her father had kicked her brother out of the house because he was gay, and she made her father sit down and watch the episode with Urie and LuPone. Afterward, the brother was allowed home — a situation that Urie finds overwhelmingly rewarding.

“Ugly Betty” was a huge boost to Urie’s career and he says he’s keeping an eye out for another TV project. A pilot he shot for TBS, in which nerds solved crimes, wasn’t picked up this year, but he wants to try again. “I loved working on TV and, obviously,” he adds with a laugh, “that’s the fast track to notoriety and money. Plus, if you get on the right job, it can be extremely creative.”

But he’s kept busy with theater. Urie had been involved since the beginning with Jon Marans’ play called “The Temperamentals,” about the birth of the gay movement in the 1950s, and, in a rare situation for theater, stuck with that project all the way through two New York productions. Urie won the Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding lead actor for playing the real-life character of Viennese refugee and designer Rudi Gernreich.

He was working on that play during the last season of “Ugly Betty,” which could often mean a full day of filming, then running to the theater at night. An exhausting schedule, but when the TV show “got canned,” Urie found it a relief to have “The Temperamentals” to go to at night.

“It made the transition out of ‘Ugly Betty’ very easy,” he says. “In most professions, it’s a bad thing to be working two jobs, but when you’re an actor, working two jobs is a good thing. I was lucky.”

That trend continues even with his Vineyard working vacation. After performing in “Tape” tonight, Urie is heading to Washington, D.C., to be part of the Ford’s Theatre Society’s annual gala Sunday night. He reconnected with friend Mark Ramont, director of theater programming there, when Ramont came to see “Angels in America” and agreed to be part of the evening — even before he found out Julie Andrews was one of the honorees. He says he’s looking forward to meeting her, to a White House reception due to be part of the festivities and, especially, to the piece he’s going to perform — a scene from “The Laramie Project” in which a character in the town where a college student was murdered for being gay argues with his parents to be part of a production of “Angels in America.”

“Angels” had been important to Urie since he was a teenager, so performing that scene now after being in the New York show seems “sort of like bookends” for him.

His high school experience also comes into play for his next project. Even while on the Vineyard, he’s working with collaborators on his documentary film about high school speech-and-debate teams. Competition with that kind of group was a key part of his teen years, with drama training coming through the 10-minute versions of plays for the “speech” part.

“It’s the only thing I ever did in an educational setting that prepared me for how much rejection you can get as an actor,” Urie says. “I loved (the team) so much, I wanted to make a movie about it.” He hopes film festivals are in his near future.

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