Friends: A Love Story (7 page)

As for my dad, I didn't ask for another kiss until he was on his deathbed.

 

For my performance thesis during my senior year I directed and acted in Ntozake Shange's
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf.
I was The Lady in Red. I applied to perform the show at the University Theater on what would have been parents' weekend. They didn't pick us for the main show that ran on weekends—probably because we weren't doing
South Pacific.
But they did give us the Monday through Thursday before the big parents' day show. We figured that they felt we weren't good enough to be the stand-alone show for parents' weekend. But now I understand that it was incredible validation of our talent that Yale University—where the white sons and daughters of privilege prepared for the world—permitted us to perform on their main stage. Still, we put on the play and featured all these wonderful women who were strong, passionate, talented and had an artistic flair. The
show was so moving and engaging that the university asked us to extend it for another four days. On top of that a black church and a community organization wanted us to do it for them. After a while it seemed like the play kept going on and on, but it was very well received. Auntie Golden came up to see it. “Wow, you're really good!” she told me. That was very affirming, since she once thought pursuing theater would be a waste.

So during my senior year I was acting and directing on campus, in and out of New York researching my thesis, and talking to theater greats like Lloyd Richards and Douglas Turner Ward. I also made friends with some of the graduate drama students, like David Allan Grier, Reg E. Cathey and Izzy Monk, who were actors (David's also a comedian); Jim Simpson, a director, who went on to marry Sigourney Weaver; and OyamO, who wrote
The Resurrection of Lady Lester.
I performed in
The Resurrection
with some of the grad students at the Yale Cabaret that students put on. That year I decided to apply to both Yale and NYU drama schools, but when I went to NYU to visit, I realized I wouldn't apply in time to get financial aid. So I had to put all my eggs in one basket. Jim Simpson agreed to critique my monologues. I did two—Lady Anne from
Richard III,
and Frankie from
Ladies in Waiting.
Then I auditioned for and applied to the prestigious Yale Drama School—and got in!

Unfortunately, my mother was never able to afford to come to Yale to see me act. But she did make it up for graduation. She was so proud of me and I was grateful she had encouraged me to attend. My dad also came. I was a little reserved. “Oh, hello…” Still, it was cool to have them both there together, along with Auntie Golden, who definitely wouldn't miss it. It was cool, it was definitely cool.

 

I started drama school at Yale that fall of 1980. There were about seventeen students in my class—about ten men and seven women. Of those, there were two black guys and two black
girls: Charles Dutton, Roger Guenveur Smith, Sabrina Le Beauf and me. Two brown skins, two light skins. Our class was like the little orphan class. We didn't have any big stars or any pretty, pretty, pretty girls or any handsome, handsome, handsome guys. By industry standards we were just a hodgepodge of regular-looking interesting/character people—you know: tall, skinny, bald, comely, black; no one voluptuous or blond. At twenty-one or twenty-two I was about the youngest in our class; the median age was around twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Most of the students had been out in the world. When someone would tell them, “You go from this class to that class, then take a test, then break down the set, then go to rehearsal and you will go from morning 'til night,” they thought, “Oh, please! I'm fully grown. I don't feel like doing that. I'm sleeping in.” Or they had opinions and would challenge the teachers. “I don't particularly like voice class and don't see why it's all that important. I'm tired, I'm going to miss class today. I'll go next week.” They upset the traditional dominant-subordinate roles of professor and teacher. I think that after our class the program was composed of mostly younger students.

By and large, acting school is a really exciting time. You're breaking a script down, you're chatting about the characters and good and bad performances, you're doing a play, you're sitting around at the “gypsy” bar where all the grad students hung out. You're into something you love and want to dedicate your life to. You aren't out trying to find yourself; you didn't say, “Let me try to do something practical instead of what I love to do.” You've found it—and it didn't take thirty years! Everyone is training so they can hopefully survive in this impractical profession where people are always telling you that only five percent or ten percent of Screen Actors Guild (SAG) actors actually make a living, and the other ninety percent are doing other jobs.

Even though it's very exciting, drama school is very hard
work. Everyone loses weight the first year because you don't have time to sit down and eat. I existed on coffee, Snickers and bagels. Academically, we had classes, scene study, the history of theater, voice class, singing class, movement, fencing. When I was not in class I was at my work-study job. After first semester, on top of academics, you have to do things like put on a Shakespeare production in ten days—build the set, sew the costumes, learn your lines, rehearse with your classmates, everything. When I think back on it, what we accomplished was amazing. It was so awesome—I was in love with it. And there were so many talented students, like Sabrina, Roger, Charles, John Turturro, Jane Kaczmarek and Kate Burton, daughter of the famous actor, Richard Burton.

Unlike out in the real world, race in drama school was, for the most part, a non-issue. You were supposed to grow up and be a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, those kinds of jobs. We were already different—young, artsy, ain't none of us gonna make no money right off the bat. Race didn't make that much difference. We might deal with it in the context of a scene, like if we were performing something of Athol Fugard's, the great South African playwright. But for the most part we would deal with race later, in the real world, the marketplace. While we were in school any conflict we experienced was mostly interpersonal. We rarely allowed race to restrain our feelings, our intuition, our delving into the psyche and human emotions. I'm the mama, the white girl's the daughter and you're the audience. We believe it and we say it is, so you believe it, too. And no one was talking about, “Okay, when you graduate, some of you are not going to work. It's not because you're not talented, it's because you're black or Latino.” Or whatever the 109 other reasons are why people don't work, like you're too tall or too short. For the time we convinced ourselves, “It's going to come down to talent, right?”

 

In October of my first year, my father's girlfriend called me with the news he was in the hospital. He hadn't been taking his blood pressure meds and came home from work with a really bad headache, which wasn't like him. She took him to the hospital, where they learned he had a brain aneurysm. I didn't know what a brain aneurysm was—I now understand that he was having a stroke—but it was brain stuff and sounded serious enough that I tried to get there. Kate Burton was one of the few students with a car. When she heard my dad was in the hospital, she offered me a ride to his hospital in the Bronx. She dropped me off and I found my way to his room. I remember he was very lethargic—I don't know if it was from the meds or the aneurysm. One eye was half-shut. We talked a little bit, and I spent the night somewhere down the hall in the hospital. Then I had to return to campus the next day. Before I left I said, “Dad, I'm getting ready to go. Give me a kiss.”

“No, not today,” he answered. “Some other time.”

“You're really not going to give me a kiss?”

“Nah,” he said—not mean, but real cool-like.

“You seriously aren't going to give me a kiss?”

“Maybe tomorrow….”

I was a little hurt. It wasn't like we were super-duper close, and especially given our history, I didn't
have
to ask him. He died two days later.

 

Daddy's funeral was held in a funeral home in New York. I remember going into a very small chapel, walking forward through the pews and seeing my father laying there looking all stiff and puffed up with formaldehyde or whatever they use, his hands propped up on each other on his chest—not in a position I'd ever seen him in before. I guess there's no way to make the dead look natural. As I looked at his body, a part of me was detached—“Wow! Look at you.” That part of me wasn't
sad and found it all very interesting. I remember wandering into the rooms with other dead people in them and getting spooked. I was thinking, “
Whoo!
Let me get out of here and back to the room where my dad is.”

Another part of me sensed mortality. Finality. That part of me felt sad. I remember thinking, I didn't have years with you or the relationship I wanted or dreamed of with you, I had the relationship that I had. I knew you, spent some time around you, had some interaction with you, and my mother never spoke ill of you, but I longed for more. Yet all my disappointments aside, I was grateful for him. Despite all I did not get from him, I got life from him. All that's particular and singular and unique about me—half of it came from him, from his genes. And the family I did get from him—D'nette, Grandmom Brownie, Aunt Golden, my uncle Jerry, my sister Jean and her sister Lynn—all of that was because of him. Now he was gone.

While I was sitting there, my aunt Helen, Uncle Jerry's wife, tapped me on the shoulder from her seat in the pew behind me.

“Angela, this is your sister Lisa.”

I turned around and looked into the eyes of this sweet-faced sixteen-year-old girl. I remember reaching my hand out, shaking her hand. “Hello, Lisa. You're so pretty!”

When I turned back around, I looked at my father in the casket, eyes closed. “Well, aren't you something else? This is some extra drama.
Whoa!
I have another sister I didn't know about, and she's sixteen and I'm twenty-one!”

My sister Jean was sitting next to me. She was just learning about Lisa at age thirty-three. She was visibly upset and shaken. “Oh, my God, this is so terrible! How does this happen that people die and you're meeting siblings at funerals. This is just over the top! This is not supposed to happen! This is so inappropriate!”

Lisa may have been a secret to us, but somebody knew about her; she didn't get from North Carolina to New York on her own.

During the funeral they played my father's favorite song,
“Danny Boy,” an Irish song I imagine he loved because his name was Daniel Benjamin Bassett. That has to be one of the saddest dirges that has ever been written. It is so sad. So beautiful. I cried. It really took me there. Life and death were hitting me in the face at once. My father and I had both been trying to create a father-daughter relationship. But if you don't have the tools and you don't have the time, you just don't make it. We didn't make it. Now there was no chance of reclaiming our relationship. I was stuck with: my dad put his tongue in my mouth, my dad didn't kiss me to say goodbye and then he died. And now I'm meeting my younger sister at the funeral. You can't do that to someone! Thank God I was an actor and could use all these emotions and experiences in my characters. I had grown to expect a lot of drama and foolishness. It didn't bother me.

 

While I was a student, as far as I'm aware, not many of the male students were romantically interested in me. Some guy from the other side of town kind of liked me. He was much older—he had to be in his forties—and I was trying to be cool and deal with him. But he wanted to get me involved in stuff I didn't want to be involved in. You had to run for your life! One particular situation whose details I will keep to myself involved a massage, a piece of material (he was making swimsuits), some scissors—then out came the Polaroid camera. I shouted, “Put that down! I'm going to be somebody one day, I cannot be in these kinds of situations.”

During my last year of school, Charles Dutton and I started dating. I needed one roommate to fill out my three-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment on Dwight Street in New Haven. The apartment was really nice—big, long, spread out, quiet and you didn't feel up on top of each other. It was also near campus. I wanted to keep it. I think Charles was a little reluctant at first; he already liked me. But he acquiesced, moved in and everything was copasetic.

I thought Charles was a fascinating person. He was about twenty-nine or thirty and street-smart. Before coming to Yale he served an eight-year stint in prison for fatally stabbing someone during a fight. While he was locked up, he read
A Day of Absence
by Douglas Turner Ward, one of Negro Ensemble's founders, whom I had met. It changed his life; he started doing theater while in prison. When he got out, he applied and was accepted to Yale. I admired Charles as an actor. He was—is—phenomenal, very powerful, compelling. He is a mesmerizing performer; you can't take your eyes off him when he is onstage. His performance begs you to watch. You want to see his character develop and unwrap itself, layer upon layer upon layer. I admired his instinctual ability—his approach seemed to be more intuitive than technical. He was certainly learning the technique from his studies but didn't always know how to break a script down into iambic pentameter—unstressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed. That didn't matter. He could get up onstage and speak as if he knew exactly how to break it down. He knew how to perform Shakespeare in iambic pentameter from somewhere deep in his core. That married with his passion, and usually his audience would eat it up. Some of our other classmates were brilliant students, but when they got up to perform they didn't have that richness. Their performances were dry compared to what he was able to do. He was definitely the best actor in our class.