The launch of his many ships

When the Broadway musical “Pacific Overtures” came through San Francisco in the late ‘70s, it made an enormous impact on teenage Bradley Darryl Wong. “I was just starting to test the waters about being a performer,” the actor remembers, “and almost everything on TV, in the movies or onstage then was thankless. There were no television shows or movies that glorified being Asian. They either made fun of it or kept Asian American people in the periphery.”

But this show was different. “Pacific Overtures” was about Asians, starring Asian Americans such as Mako. “It was a celebration of the very thing that made them special,” Wong says. “Afterward, I chased Mako down the street to get his autograph.”

Nearly 30 years later, “Pacific Overtures” is back, playing at the Roundabout Theatre’s Studio 54 on Broadway, and Wong is the one likely to be signing autographs. Now widely known as much for his TV and film work as for his Tony-winning performance in “M. Butterfly” in 1988, Wong plays the role created by Mako. As the Reciter, he narrates and illuminates the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman tale of how Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in 1853 helped launch Japan’s change from the “floating kingdom” of Nippon to an industrialized nation.

Wong, 42, glides about the stage, taking on various personas, singing and generally guiding the audience through the show’s musical introduction to Japanese history. Continually changing costumes as well as characters, he’s rarely offstage. During the break between a recent matinee and evening performance, he looks around at his sparsely decorated dressing room and says, “I’m rarely here.”

That’s because he’s simultaneously also directing his first feature film, “Social Grace,” and filming NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” several mornings a week in New Jersey. But even given his tight schedule, he couldn’t say no. “I’ve never had the opportunity before to do this musical, and I’m very lucky to have this experience now. On your hands and feet you can probably count the major wonderful, no-question-about-it plays any Asian American actor would want to be in. There just aren’t that many, sadly enough.”

Weidman calls Wong “the preeminent Asian American actor in the theater,” a distinction that began with his breakthrough role as Song Liling in David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly.”

Although he was to receive the Tony Award for his performance, a Broadway debut, Wong concedes he was not initially interested in doing the play. “I thought I was content doing bit parts on television shows in Los Angeles. Besides, if I wanted to audition for it, I had to fly myself to New York, and I didn’t have the money to do that. But I had never read anything like it. I was only three-quarters of the way through it when I called my parents to borrow the money.”

After several auditions, he won the part of the male Chinese spy who convinced a French diplomat that he was a female opera singer. He also took on the name then of B.D. to help conceal the show’s conceit.

Things were a little anticlimactic after “M. Butterfly.” “It was a very specific, odd, eccentric part,” Wong says. “I floundered a bit, not sure if I was a character actor or what I was. And the work I was getting didn’t really help me to define that.”

His television and film roles didn’t help much either. He has guest starred on several TV shows and appeared in more than 20 films, including “Jurassic Park” and “Father of the Bride,” but he says it’s only in recent years that he moved beyond what he considers “caricature or character work.” His recurring role of prison chaplain Ray Mukada on HBO’s “Oz” began in 1997, and, since 2001, he’s inhabited Dr. George Huang, the forensic psychiatrist on “Law & Order: SVU.”

“Even if people in the audience don’t know his work from ‘M. Butterfly’ and other theater pieces,” Weidman observes, “they’ll see him and say, ‘That’s the guy from “Law & Order.” ’ “

They may also recognize him as college lecturer, gay parent or author, for Wong has become quite prominent off-camera. In the mid-’90s, he began traversing college campuses, talking about his life as an Asian American who chose a career path in the arts and, he says, “about how I experienced a lot of self-esteem and identity challenges because I was uncomfortable with who I was.

“Prior to ‘M. Butterfly,’ I was doing a number on myself in show biz, trying to shoehorn myself into a formulaic mold. I would have turned my back on an entire community of people because I wanted to be an actor. I say to college kids all the time: ‘If you could have given me $150,000 and the promise it could be done, I would have said, “Make my face look like Matthew Broderick’s.’ ”

Not anymore. He isn’t sure of the moment things changed -- “it wasn’t like it went on and off like a switch,” he says. “But ‘M. Butterfly’ was the first time that I thought, ‘Wow, you could really celebrate what you are in this play, be respected and do your best work ever.’ And there was no shame attached to it whatsoever.”

Partner, father, author

More recently, he’s also come out about being gay, also an identity issue for him. “When I began this career, I never talked about being gay. I left that out. Both caused me to wish I was something else until I figured it out and reached a point where I could actually understand what’s great about these things.”

Wong’s private life became even more public when he wrote a well-received book about the emotional and medical dramas surrounding the decision that he and longtime partner Richie Jackson made to become parents. “Following Foo: The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man,” published in 2003, grew out of -- and incorporates -- many of the e-mails he sent friends and colleagues about the premature births of twin sons, the ensuing death of one and the illnesses that plagued the surviving twin, Jackson Foo Wong.

Born in May 2000, the twins were conceived using Wong’s sperm and the eggs of Jackson’s sister Sue, then carried by a surrogate, Wong explained in his book. Recently, however, the men separated and, asked if they share custody of Jackson Foo, Wong replies, “There’s no real word for whatever it is that we’re doing. Richie is my son’s co-parent. He’s the other father of my son. We thought we were reinventing the family, and then we reinvented that reinvention.”

His son is clearly integrated into Wong’s life. “Jackson comes first,” says Neal Baer, executive producer of “Law & Order: SVU.” “B.D. arranges his schedule around Jackson’s birthday party and school events. He even sold me lots of rolls of gift wrap last year for his son’s school.”

Four-year-old Jackson has been to the “Law & Order” set, as well as rehearsals for “Pacific Overtures,” and Wong says he’s already looking to a few years from now when his son will be old enough to do his homework backstage. “It’s kind of a fantasy of mine,” the actor muses. “Not that he’d be enamored of the theater or anything like that but that he’d be able to be with me. I miss him terribly when I’m doing a play.”

Who needs sleep?

To accommodate his “Pacific Overtures” rehearsals, “Law & Order” edited him out of three episodes -- but that only briefly reduced his commitments. Not only is he now performing in the musical eight times a week but he’s wrapping up “Social Grace.”

A romantic comedy about an Asian American woman’s romance with New York’s most eligible, wealthy bachelor -- think JFK Jr., Wong suggests -- “Social Grace” was often being re-shot during the same period “Pacific Overtures” was in previews. Rushing back and forth between shooting on Madison Avenue and performing a few miles away at the 54th Street theater, Wong says, “I’d be in the cab, asking myself, ‘Well, what am I obsessing about at this very moment?’ Later I’d find myself lying in bed, pingponging back and forth between the two things.”

Since mid-November, Wong has been juggling all three commitments again. For “Law & Order,” a driver picks him up at 6:30 a.m. some days, he says. He tries to sleep or answer phone calls during the ride out to North Bergen, N.J. “It becomes a little crazy and you have to really eat your Wheaties,” Wong says, “but I can’t say I have any complaints. I’m not able to sleep in, but that’s the price I pay to be able to do this play.”