E2 THEATER Rashad bringing her star power to Arena Stage
on church burnings a compelling sell
by Peter Marks
Phylicia Rashad has an enviable knack for knowing when to say yes — and no. Her canniest nay- saying had to have occurred when she was the understudy for the role of Deena Jones in the original Broadway production of “Dream- girls” and one day presented her- self to its formidable director, Mi- chael Bennett, to quit. Frustrated by months of wait- ing in the wings, she’d called her own estimable resource, her mother, who advised her that it was time to fly. “I said, ‘If I resign, I don’t have another job to go to,’ ” Rashad recalls. “And she said, ‘If you stay there, you may never have another job to go to!’ ” It took guts for a semi-nobody
to dictate the timing of her depar- ture to an intimidating somebody like Bennett. “I told him, ‘I’m not an understudy. I’m a leading lady. It’s time for me to realize myself in my profession.’ ” Of such nervy leaps of faith are careers made or broken. In the case of Rashad, who appears next month in the world premiere of “every tongue confess” at Wash- ington’s Arena Stage, a payoff did come: when she was offered a tele- vision role opposite a guy named Bill Cosby. “every tongue confess” will christen Arena’s newest space, the Kogod Cradle, begin- ning Tuesday, Nov. 9; the renovat- ed Arena Stage officially opened this weekend with preview per- formances of "Oklahoma." Being the leading lady on “The Cosby Show” and later on “Cosby” made her rich and celebrated. And though TV stardom did not guar- antee her other film and television projects — “People wouldn’t see
World premiere
me for things because they thought of Clair Huxtable,” she says — it eventually gave her en- tree to a quality of stage life that she’d always envisioned, an op- portunity that has allowed her in mature middle age to amass one of the most impressive collections of Broadway parts of any actor of her generation: among them, Aunt Ester in August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean”; Big Mama in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”; and a Tony-winning turn as Lena Younger in “A Raisin in the Sun.” The fame and freedom to ven- ture wherever a good role materi- alized is how the 62-year-old Rashad ended up in the cast of “every tongue confess,” the Cra- dle’s eagerly anticipated inaugural act by highly regarded Yale Drama School graduate Marcus Gardley. Her presence significantly raises the profile of a milestone event for Arena, which also features such proven actors as Crystal Fox, Les- lie Kritzer and Jason Dirden. The director is Kenny Leon, with whom Rashad worked on “Gem” and “Raisin” and whom she instinctively trusts. Leon, the go-to director these days for epic African American plays and the big stars they can attract, guided Denzel Washington and Viola Da- vis in the revival of Wilson’s “Fenc- es” that won a bushel of Tonys in June. So when Leon called her about Gardley’s play, the outcome was pretty much ordained. “She knows I would only lead her to a good place,” Leon says, by phone from his base in Atlanta. “And I know Phylicia has eight or nine ways to play any emotion. Her tool kit is full of so many dif- ferent tools; she has scissors and scalpels and hammers. She can do it all. People don’t realize that Clair Huxtable was just an inter- ruption of her greatness.” Rashad’s experience with the
director made her decision easy about the Arena play, a blues- and gospel-inflected piece concerning
on a bus to Mexico City they went for one of the strangest and most enlightening chapters of her young life. “We didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and we didn’t know a soul,” she says, adding that rather than turning her inward, the exot- icism of one temporary living situ- ation after another opened her up. “All of a sudden, the world was a lot bigger,” she says. “People were different, and yet they were the same.” Eventually they returned to
Houston, where Rashad finished school before heading off to study theater at Howard University, her father’s alma mater and the col- lege he chose for her. “That was a time when you were told where you wanted to go,” she says wryly. Nevertheless, she loved it. A summer apprenticeship with
HELAYNE SEIDMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST BEYOND ‘COSBY’: Though Rashad is known for Clair Huxtable, she has an impressive stage résumé. presents
a series of church burnings in the South in the 1990s. “He said to me, ‘I want you to read this script and say yes,’ ” the actress is saying of Leon, over a plate of Chinese veg- gies in one of her favorite New York restaurants a block from Lin- coln Center. She’s traveled into Manhattan from her home in sub- urban Westchester to talk. In a crisp white blouse and dark slacks, the genteel Rashad seems uncannily ageless, so youthfully in sync with the character she played in the ’80s that strangers on the street still call out to her. “Spotted you a mile away!” a man in a security uniform ex- claims when, after lunch, Rashad walks past him on West 65th Street. She smiles, triggering for such encounters what appears to be a reflexive radiance. “That’s people saying thank you,” she ex- plains moments later. From Bennett to Cosby to Leon, Rashad not only has spent a ca- reer holding her own with strong
“I’m not an understudy. I’m a leading lady. It’s time for me to realize myself in my
profession.” Actress Phylicia Rashad, recounting what she once told “Dreamgirls” director Michael Bennett
male figures, but also seems to have been able, when necessary, to check her own ego. She counts Cosby, for instance, as an impor- tant acting coach, even though she was the one more devoted to the craft of inhabiting a role. “I learned a lot from Mr. Cosby,”
she says. “He gave me the greatest lesson. We were rehearsing for the filming of the pilot and he said to me, ‘You work a lot in the theater, don’t you?’ I said, ‘How did you know?’ and he said, ‘You always come in right on cue.’ ” It wasn’t a compliment, exactly.
Chucho Valdés and the Afro-Cuban Messengers Saturday, October 30 at 8pm Warner Theatre
Septime Webre’s ROMEO+JULIET
November 3–7, 2010 The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Eisenhower Theater Tickets start at only $29!
Visit
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Shankar Ravi Shankar Valdés
Anoushka Shankar Tanmoy Bose, tabla Ravichandra Kulur, flute/tanpura
Sunday, November 7 at 8pm Kennedy Center Concert Hall
Dresden
Staatskapelle Daniel Harding, conductor Rudolf Buchbinder, piano
Wednesday, November 3 at 8pm Kennedy Center Concert Hall
SCHUMANN Manfred Overture Piano Concerto
BRAHMS Symphony No. 2 Emanuel Ax, piano Harding
Wednesday, November 10 at 8pm The Music Center at Strathmore
SCHUBERT Impromptus, Op. 142 Sonata in A Major, Op. 120
CHOPIN
Polonaise-Fantasie, Op. 61 Four Mazurkas Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise, Op. 22
The Piano Masters Series is made possible through the generous support of Betsy and Robert Feinberg.
Ax
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin Lambert Orkis, piano
Saturday, November 13 at 4pm Kennedy Center Concert Hall
BRAHMS The Complete Violin Sonatas (Nos. 1, 2, 3)
Mutter
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Four Photographers on Three Wheels: William Eggleston’s Tricycle---and Before
Wednesday, October 27, 7 p.m. Free tickets available, G Street Lobby, 6:30 p.m.
Join art critic Mark Feeney, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the Boston Globe, for a wide ranging lecture on photography and William Eggleston’s Tricycle.
Cosby explained to her that on TV it might work better for her and her character to take a moment to reflect before registering a reac- tion. “Out of that,” she says, “came that famous Clair Huxtable stare.” Rashad — who kept the name of her third husband, former pro football player and sports broad- caster Ahmad Rashad, after their 2001 divorce — has benefited all her life from influential mentors, starting with a free-spirited moth- er, Vivian Ayers, who now lives in South Carolina. Rashad was raised in segregated Houston; her mother and dentist father di- vorced when she was a child, but she doesn’t recall that as trauma- tizing. “I didn’t grow up around dysfunctional stuff,” she observes. She and sister Debbie, who would become the director-choreogra- pher Debbie Allen, stayed with their mother, a poet afflicted with wanderlust. “When I was 13, my mother
walked into the house and said, ‘I’ve had it with this materialistic environment. We’re moving!’ ” Off
New York’s pioneering Negro En- semble Company cemented her determination to earn a living on the stage, and several years later she would be sharing an apart- ment in Manhattan with her sis- ter, as both began to make their way in the theater. Although she’s burnished a reputation in straight drama, her breaks came in musi- cals: Then going by the name Phylicia Ayers-Allen, she was cast as a Munchkin and a field mouse in the 1975 hit “The Wiz.” “It was a good job, a great job,” she recalls. “We were a big family. We celebrated birthdays together and we mourned each other’s loss- es.”
A stint on the soap opera “One Life to Live” would pay the bills. And then “The Cosby Show” al- tered her trajectory entirely. The theater, however, remained so steadfast for her over the years that the appeal rubbed off on her progeny: Daughter Condola Rash- ad played a starring role in the Manhattan Theatre Club pre- miere of “Ruined,” Lynn Nottage’s drama about rape in Africa, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Now, the elder Rashad is letting her appetite and passion lead her to Washington. Taking on the work of an unknown writer is yet another leap of faith for an ac- tress, though reputation is not ut- most in Rashad’s mind. “Most of the plays I’ve worked on in devel- opment were by playwrights I knew nothing about. So this is fine,” she says. For Gardley, Rashad’s participa- tion is kind of numbing. “It’s one gift after another,” he avers. For Rashad, it’s one more step on a gi- ant learning curve. “Let’s just say that the theater is not for the faint of heart,” she says, laughing. “This is the Olympics, okay?”
marksp@washpost.com
every tongue confess by Marcus Gardley. Directed by Kenny Leon; lighting designer, Allen Lee Hughes; composer, Dwight Andrews.
Featuring Phylicia Rashad. In the Kogod Cradle at Arena Stage Nov. 9-Jan. 2.
KLMNO
V1 V2 V3 V4
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2010
ELIZABETH GAITHER & JARED NELSON BY STEVE VACCARIELLO
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