The Long Beach Playhouse sure did for their annual New Works Festival where they receive hundreds of submissions for plays to be workshopped and staged by contemporary writers. In the end they chose two plays, one of which I became a part of.
I had the great pleasure to be cast as Billie Holiday in the one act play by Chuck Cummings titled Billie Sits for Carl. The play is a fictional account of a night spent with Carl Van Vechten, patron of the Harlem Renaissance who photographed artists like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston and more.
I prepared for the role with NY based acting coach, Alyson Schacherer, who teaches at the Barrow Group and together we dove in to avenues in which I could really make Billie my own, rather than playing a speculation of such an iconic person.
How did we do that? We watched videos of her performances, lots of them and I fell in love, although my building might have been over hearing God Bless the Child on repeat. We listened to radio interviews, picking up on how her speaking voice lived in its own melody like her tunes. My favorite was digging up photographs of her, gathering a sense of her style and personal rhythm.
Up until this, I had never played a historical figure and my curiosity had always been the balance between finding your freedom in them and living some reflection of them, but in being Billie Holiday, my greatest pleasure in the role was welcoming the chance she already existed in me.
So what did I learn from this? Besides a boat load of Billie Holiday songs? And yes indeed she was a woman, thank you very much Cher Horowitz, is that like me, like all of us artists, this icon had her journey, and it's okay for it to be topsy turvy, up and down, round and about, as far as our art continues to be about feeling.
Photo by Bryan Janney
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