Friends: A Love Story (13 page)

Well, we were up at Yale rehearsing and working on the play. I was doing my thing, kind of marking and learning it, when one day Lloyd says to me in his proper, professorial kind of way, “Angela, you and Charles used to date, right?”

“Yeah….”

“Well, use it.”

“Oh, shoot! He done called me out,” I remember saying to myself. “Now, that's a low blow.” Of course, he didn't mean it that way. I hold Lloyd in the highest regard. Back then he was like Papa San—“Dean Richards, sir.” It's only recently that I started using his first name. I guess he knew Charles and I had a little history, a little drama, volatility or whatever.

“Use it!”

That's all he had to say. When I came back and did my scene after that, I started speaking in tongues.

TheLordismyshepardIshallnotwant….YeathoughIwalkthroughthevalleyoftheshadowofdeath, Iwillfearnoevil.

I was levitating off the stage.

You weren't there, you weren't there. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. Here I am nineteen and have this baby. I needed you, I needed you.

Charles came right back at me with tears coming out of his eyes.

Blood? Blood make you clean?

You really sensed that Martha and Herald loved each other. People were mesmerized. I learned to put all my experiences—be they happy or be they not—into the work.

So we did
Joe Turner
at Yale Rep, then we toured several cities. My cast member Ahren Moore had this cute, skinny, athletic little boyfriend, Courtney B. Vance, the same prospective student Charles, John Turturro and I had taken out when I was just leaving Yale. They had both gotten into Yale though
the odds were so against them. They had also set up house and were doin' it. They were so young, yet they were such a team. I admired that. I remember thinking that they were just amazing. They bad! They
bad!
Courtney followed Ahren from town to town to see her perform as we traveled the regional theater circuit. We never really said much more than hi and bye, but I could see he was a wonderful guy. Around the time we hit the road, Charles left to do a movie, which paid more, I'm sure, and was very prestigious. So he left the play and Delroy Lindo came in.

Delroy was my buddy around New York. He's a great actor, strikes an imposing figure and has a very powerful voice. But we had never worked together. Once we got started, we kind of worked differently. With Charles, I had, “Y'all used to date? Just use it.” With Delroy, we had to find something else. I was hoping to be able to work our roles out together—to affect him and be affected by him as an actor. You say it, and it makes me feel, and I react. That's what I was used to doing. But I imagine he felt like he was behind and had to learn all these lines in a vacuum. He seemed to do an awful lot of work off to himself. Some nights I felt that he was really hearing me. Those nights were really sweet. Other nights, I felt that he was trying to beat me down with his size, his physicality, the power of his voice, his anger. I felt like we weren't in sync, that we were missing so many subtleties. I wanted Herald Loomis to hear Martha Pentacost and Martha to hear Herald. Instead, it felt like, “I got my point and my point is more important!” “Well, I've got my point and
my
point is more important!” Who knows, maybe it was all in my head. But that's what I complained about. I complained to anyone who would listen. I complained, complained, complained so much that I got sick of hearing myself. At one point I dropped out of the show. Then Lloyd called up and asked me back. At that point I decided, I love this role, I love this play and it's a phenomenal opportunity. I'm gonna
freakin' stop bellyachin' and complaining and trying to be right. I worked on looking at Delroy differently. I started picking out things I liked about him personally that could make me love Herald Loomis. The fact that he was kind, that he would cook all sorts of healthy foods for me and invite me to dinner, the crook of his neck or whatever. It worked.

While
Joe Turner
was playing in San Diego, a young man named Wren T. Brown came backstage and introduced himself to me. Wren was a Los Angeles actor. He had heard about me from Ahren Staunton, my castmate from
Colored People's Time,
whom he'd met while they were each working in the Philippines. Wren and I became fast friends. While in California, I also auditioned for my first movie,
Dessa Rose.
I tried out for the role of Dessa, one of the female leads and a slave. I borrowed a long skirt and blouse from a friend, rented a car and drove to L.A. for the audition, then continued with the show.

In late March of 1988,
Joe Turner
reached Broadway, where we played at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. This time—at not quite thirty years old—I was on Broadway for real, in a role that I originated, as opposed to a show I'd joined. Opening night was incredibly exciting. My mom, D'nette and my New York aunts and uncles came to see me. As I sat in the dressing room for two hours while I waited for my entrance, I could hear the audience buzzing and feel its electricity. We had been traveling and honing the show for months. This night everyone was finding their perfect pitch!

At the play's climax, Martha tries to bring Herald back to the church.

He'll give you peace. The blood of Jesus will make you clean.

Herald says,
Blood make you clean?
Then reaches into his pocket to pull out a knife, which he then drags across his chest in a symbolic bloodletting, a letting out of the poison that's gotten into his heart. The prop knife is filled with blood, so as he touches his skin it looks like he's cutting himself.

But this night Delroy reached into his pocket to get his knife and his knife wasn't there! The play had been going along splendidly, on all six cylinders. Poppin'! It was like the roof was going to blow off. But now his knife wasn't there.

If you had seen the look in his eyes—I mean, it was like someone had grabbed his heart, like someone had died. And for a split second, he was no good, just no good—“Oh, no! What the hell do I do?” When that happened, me, L. Scott Caldwell, the little girl—everybody in the scene—we were scared, scared for him. There was nothing we could do; we couldn't help him. The moment didn't lend itself to improvisation. He was a drowning man and none of us could save him. Though we were standing there, at that point there was a part of us that was gone—out of the scene. Actor to actor, we had that look. Our bodies were still there but our faces said, “Holy moly.” Hopefully, we were professional enough that our faces didn't show it. Delroy was scared as hell. Now, what was he going to do?

Fortunately for him, for us, for everybody, we're standing in the kitchen in front of a table. He thinks quick and grabs the butter knife on the table and he scratches across his chest with it.

Blood, blood. You want blood?

Of course there's no blood. So he covers his chest then runs offstage, which is what Herald Loomis does—runs off into the world. I grabbed our little girl and we cried and we finished the scene. Then we did our curtain call. Following our final bow, Delroy sat on the steps and cried, sobbed, he was racked with grief. To be perfectly honest, I felt smug—an actor always checks his props. Even if your prop person hands it to you, you always check it. So he cried and I stepped over him and went on downstairs. Fortunately D'nette had a lot more compassion. She consoled him. “It's okay. It was still good, it was still really good tonight.” And she was right. Even with the mistake, it was a phenomenal evening. The play had been soaring up
to that point. He had done a phenomenal job—that mistake didn't ruin it. We knew we were going to get a good review.

After we changed, we attended the cast party. It was very festive, there was a lot of music and everyone was in a celebratory mood. Charles showed up, accompanied by the same woman who had been wearing the gold dress, but who was not his mama. While she was sitting on one side of the room, he worked his way over to me.

He said, “Ang, girl, you were wonderful!”

“Yeah? Well, thank you. It was a pretty good night.”

“Girl, you were
great!
”

Charles and I had a friendly conversation, but I noticed he was giving me very close body language—very face-to-face, leaning in, laughing. From the outside looking in, I'm sure we looked very buddy-buddy, conspiratorial, maybe even like something's going on between us—like something that
ain't
going on
is
going on. Now, I'd been in the position of the woman on the other side of the room before, feeling uncomfortable, looking and wondering if something was happening between Charles and another woman. And our breakup had already been ugly, it had already been embarrassing. At that point I didn't want a lot of confusion. So I leaned in and said, “Hey, Roc, let's draw the curtain on all this drama. Why don't you take me over and introduce me to your lady.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, you know,” I continued. “It's been a whole lot of drama. Let's just draw the curtain. Because I'm sure this conversation we're having—to her—is keeping something going. So why don't you take me over and introduce me.”

Needless to say, the laughter stopped. He took me over to meet her.

“Debbi, this is Angela. Angela, this is Debbi.”

“Hey,” I said. “It's nice to meet you.”

“It's nice to meet you, too.”

I sat down, Debbi and I chitchatted for a few minutes, then she took the conversation a little bit deeper. Charles's friend Reggie, from the midnight cabaret, had this girlfriend named Irene whom I knew.

Debbi said, “Irene told me I would like you if I knew you.”

“Oh, really?”

I guess that was, in a way, her admission. (The “other woman” always knows about the first woman, right?) But how in the world would we have gotten to know each other with all this stuff going on? So we talked cordially. In the meantime my sister kept flitting around the table, because she knew—and everyone else in the room knew—our history, and they were all kinda lookin'. I don't know if they thought a fight was gonna break out or what. At one point Charles came over to the table and said, “How y'all doing?”

“Oh, we're good. Real good. How are
you
doin'?”

I guess he could handle it when he had one woman over here and the other over there. But once we were talking to each other, he must have wondered, What in the hell are they telling each other?

D'nette came by the table yet again—this time with her camera—and took a picture of us together that opening night: Debbi and me. I still have it today. The whole interaction was nice. It was very empowering. Once again, I was no longer mad at a woman—this time, a sistah—over a man. I didn't feel insecure anymore. I wasn't having a conversation with him and by default making her feel insecure. I wasn't giving him more power and her less power. Instead, let's settle stuff. And that evening that's what happened. In that moment we fell in like with each other, and all of the nonsense was over. Eventually Charles married Debbi Morgan, the actress and soap opera star (they've since divorced). You know her as the first Dr. Angela “Angie” Baxter Hubbard Harrison Foster on
All My Children,
the first Dr. Ellen Burgess on
General Hospital
and
Port Charles,
Mozelle Batiste Delacroix in
Eve's Bayou
and Twana in
Woman Thou Art Loosed.
To this day, when Debbi and I are in each other's company we're genuinely happy to see each other.

 

That era—the mid to late '80s—marked the rise of August Wilson as a great American playwright. All told, ten of his plays made it to Broadway, the most of any other American playwright and certainly more than any African-American. His death from liver cancer in 2005, at age sixty, brought his life to an early end. Lloyd Richards directed five of Wilson's plays. This great director/playwrighting team garnered many of the theater's highest honors, including Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes for their work together. Although the two ultimately chose to go their separate ways, the mark they left on the stage was indelible. Lloyd passed away on his birthday in 2006 at the age of 87.

But back in 1988, August Wilson was
it!
Like
Ma Rainey
and Tony Award-winner
Fences, Joe Turner
was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. Delroy snapped back from his opening-night snafu and was nominated for Best Featured Actor. Today you know him for his fabulous acting in
Get Shorty, The Cider House Rules
or
Lackawanna Blues,
among others. L. Scott Caldwell, Ahren Moore and Kimberly Scott were all nominated for Best Actress (L. Scott won). And August Wilson, the play and cast were nominated for all sorts of Drama Desk awards. As a performer it was exciting to see black faces on Broadway and to receive such wonderful acknowledgment and recognition. It was finally “C.P. time” in the best sense of the term—a time for black actors to shine! The door to the world of theatrical acting opportunities that had been all but slammed shut to black actors of earlier generations was beginning to crack open, in large part because August Wilson's genius couldn't be denied. A whole new generation of black actors was getting ready to step through it. I didn't know it yet, but I would be one of them.