“I did not come here for food. My stomach is full. I did not come here for food. I came for much more than that.”
—MANDINKA RITUAL SONG
The orientation at Juilliard was a blur. Partly because I was squeezing in the start of a major part of my life and partly because of the apartment. Really, I didn’t understand the living in New York. I just thought all the apartments look like George Jefferson’s apartment.
Before I accepted my position at Juilliard, I really had to get my money lined up. I had Rhode Island Foundation money and savings from working as an actress and my day job at Providence Performing Arts Center. I was on a budget.
Subletting a cheap rent-stabilized apartment in New York from an avant-garde director who eventually headed the theater program at Columbia University seemed like the perfect solution. She came up to me after one of the plays that I did at Trinity Rep. I had told her I had been accepted to Juilliard. She was impressed and said, “I have an apartment for you.”
“Oh my God. You see how God works. Oh my God.”
“Yeah. I have an apartment for you. It’s my apartment.” Susan is a classy woman. She was becoming the artistic director at Trinity Rep taking over after Adrian Hall. She would be in Providence. I would be in New York. How perfect!
“Oh my God. Do I have to fill out an application?” “No, if you want it, it’s yours.”
“How much is it?”
“$290 a month.”
“Oh my gosh. Absolutely, I’ll take it. Absolutely. No problem.”
She may have asked me “Do you want to see it first?” but I didn’t have time for that and only asked: “What’s it like?”
“I love it. I’ve had it for years. It’s a studio apartment.” She really talked it up.
I thought, It’s her apartment, and she loves it. A top director. Her apartment. In the Village. “Yeah, I’ll take it.”
When I arrived at the apartment building, on First Avenue between Second and Third Streets, what kept playing through my mind was what she said, Oh, we love the apartment. Walking up the stairs I felt I was in one of those Booking.com commercials where after being on the road where you’ve lost your shoes, your kids are throwing up, you’re tired, you open the hotel room door to behold a massive, palatial suite overlooking the ocean. That’s what I expected from Susan’s apartment, the setting for my years at Juilliard. I was expecting to be amazed! Hell, when I opened that damn door, that shit did not happen. It was horrific.
The apartment was maybe 450 square feet. There was a small stove on the right side of the apartment and makeshift wooden shelves. Underneath the shelves was a large rusted white sink. It was one of those sinks you usually find in a basement. Next to the sink was the tub. Yup. Right in the center of the apartment was a tub that had rust stains on it. I thought, Where’s the toilet? I found it in what I thought was a tiny closet. It was one of those toilets that you had to pull a chain to flush. It was infested with mice. Infested. They were coming out of holes in the floorboards. At night you could hear them coming up eating all the food on the shelves. It was no surprise that because of my childhood that totally set me off. I was killing up to a dozen mice a day. I could hear the traps snapping. I would then toss the entire trap, mice and all, in the trash. No way would I touch it!
I called her one weekend: “Susan! You have mice in this apartment.” She said, “I never remember us having mice, Viola.”
“Susan, there are mice. I’m killing up to a dozen a day. You’ve got to help me out. Call the landlord.”
I can’t go back, is what I was thinking. Nothing.
I told Susan, “I’m only keeping it to the end of the year.” She may have given me some money off the rent. As I mentioned, it was rent stabilized.
She had had it for decades. Years later, maybe the mid-’90s, I was working with someone in San Francisco to whom I told this apartment story, and in the middle of the conversation he said to me, “I remember Susan Lawson. People said that she had the worst apartment that anyone had ever seen in their life. It was common knowledge among actors in New York.”
In defense of Susan, this was life in NYC. The concrete jungle filled with fast-moving, hardworking, dream-filled people trying to make it. All cramped into a high-rise apartment building whose landlord’s only goal is to see how many people they can cram in there. I loved the hardness of it. I love how alive NYC is. I just don’t like the living. I needed a place that kept the hardness of the city out.
At the time, the area wasn’t all that much better than the apartment. The F train almost never worked. When I got off the train, I saw the same homeless people. The same woman always had a new bruise on her. You could tell she was being beaten within an inch of her life every day. Then I would walk to my building and often find blood at the front door cordoned off with police tape. This was because of CBGB, a former biker bar, now dive club where some of the greatest rockers started—Patti Smith, The B- 52s, Blondie, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, the Talking Heads. At night, that place was rowdy and the rowdiness culminated in a lot of vomit and blood at my front door.
The apartment was never cold. It kept heat. I always had hot water. The toilet always flushed. That’s the extent of whatever good came from living there. I was in school all day and only went back to that apartment at night, but during the weekend, I was at home. All I did was eat all day. Eat, eat, eat. I wasn’t a drinker, but more than a few times I would drink a forty- ounce beer with my meal. I gained about twenty pounds on Genoa salami, cheese, tomatoes, and mustard on baguette bread; a pot of pasta every day; and a pint of rum raisin Häagen-Dazs ice cream.
I started Juilliard with eighteen other classmates in my group. By the end of the first year, we only had fourteen students. One was thrown out. One was cut. The other two dropped out; those were Black students. There are four different groups at the Jailyard, as we called it. Each group is given a number. So, our first year was group 22. The second year was group 21, third was 20, and fourth year was group 19.
The minute I walked through those doors at Sixty-Fifth and Broadway, it was apparent why so many were either thrown out or ran out screaming
on their own. It was hard. What got you admitted to the school was put on the back burner immediately. They weren’t as interested in what you did well but what you didn’t do well. If you were a willowy ingenue, they wanted to see you play a grounded matriarch. If you came off as strong and emotional, they wanted to see your lighter side, even if they had to beat it out of you.
John Styk, Robert Williams, Marian Seldes, Moni Yakim, Judy Leibowitz—these were our first-year teachers. We started early every morning around 8 a.m. and almost never finished until late at night. We were trained in speech, voice, Alexander technique, movement, and scene study.
The Alexander technique is a technique to teach the actor how to use their body without stress and tension. First-year students didn’t act with second-year, third-year, or fourth-year students, because each year had its own objectives and was its own group. First year is about discovery. We did a Shakespearean play, Pericles.
They just want to see what you got. It was directed by a great actor, who’s now gone, named Marian Seldes. You could do whatever you wanted. For the next project, you’re given a role that is completely different from you, a role nobody would cast you in. I played a character named Lily in Ah! Wilderness by Eugene O’Neill. She was completely self-effacing, walked in really small steps, had a unique voice, barely audible, always shy. I am shy but that’s not how I come off. My voice is very rooted and grounded and strong. This is a role no one would cast me in. This was the method at Juilliard. A structure based and steeped in transformation. They picked the material. They chose the plays and roles that they felt had value.
Between all day at school, a crappy apartment, undiagnosed trauma and anxiety issues, and being on my own in NYC, I was overwhelmed. I fell asleep in class all the time. My friend Michelle would wake me the hell up. Great actors would come to the school to perform and I would feign excitement, take a front row seat to these events, and within a time, my head was back, my mouth open and my eyes would be rolling back. Michelle would wave frantically, mouthing, Wake the fuck up!!! and she looked mad.
It was arduous listening and watching white guest actors perform, white playwrights coming in to speak, white projects, white characters, a European approach to the work, speech, voice, movement. Everyone was
geared toward molding and shaping you into a perfect white actor. The unspoken language was that they set the standard. That they’re better. I’m a dark-skinned Black actress with a deep voice. No matter how much I adhere to the training, when I walk out into the world I will be seen as a dark- skinned Black woman with a deep voice. Hell, when I got out there in the world, I would be called for jobs based on . . . me. I had to make peace with that. And I admit, there are some classical playwrights and contemporary ones that I never want to perform anyway!
The one other Black person in my class group was Cedric Harris. Only thirty Black students in a total of 856 students at Juilliard were enrolled in all the disciplines: drama, music, and dance. We called ourselves the Black Caucus. I was a part of that Black Caucus. Every January we had our Martin Luther King celebration, a variety show. To this day, I would say it’s some of the greatest work I’ve ever seen by artists. In dance, music, drama. Creative pieces were put together to honor Black history, Black autonomy . . . us . . . me. Everything was included from Zulu dancers to great opera and gospel. We were forbidden to perform anything other than opera, ballet, European classics. Period. We were warned NOT to perform in the MLK celebration.
If actors came into the school and were already working, they were strongly told to stop. Jazz, gospel, tap, modern, any ethnic material was on the forbidden list. We called on all of the above when we created the MLK celebration. It was our rebellion. We were told it would ruin our instrument. Well, our soul was our instrument too.
Very few members of the faculty would even come. We felt racially and individually neutered by a philosophy built on forgetting about ourselves and birthing someone artistically acceptable. Someone whites could understand. Nevertheless, our passion and will to perform matched the lack of acknowledgment of our contribution to the school. In other words, their ignorance made us fight harder for ourselves and our craft.
Juilliard forced me to understand the power of my Blackness. I spent so much of my childhood defending it, being ridiculed for it. Then in college proving I was good enough. I had compartmentalized me. At Julliard, I was mad.
I was always assigned the opening speech for the MLK celebration and Laurie Carter, who was Black and the dean, always said, “Let it rip! Speak your mind.” It was a validation of a voice weighed down by trauma, shame,
insecurity. Here was Laurie who found that small space inside of me that still had life and hope and she pulled it out.
The first ceremony at Avery Fisher Hall, I walked out onstage and told a story. It was a story of a slave in the Caribbean. He was always running away. He was a big, strong man who didn’t want to be controlled. Every time he ran away, he would be found and beaten. Once he was beaten, he would run away again. Finally, to stop him once and for all they decided to kill another slave. The body of the dead slave was put on the runaway slave’s back. They tied it tight. They made him work in the hot sun all day and night with that dead body on his back. They made him sleep and eat with it on his back. The body started decomposing. This big strong man began to lose his appetite. His body became infected by the carcass and he began to waste away and finally died.
I asked, “How many Black people in this audience feel like you have a body tied to your back? How many are trying to live and strive in a culture that has weighed us down and is more interested in our demise than our life?”
There was silence. I was speaking my truth. It was a truth fraught with the pain of everything that had ever been dumped on me consciously or unconsciously. Suddenly like an elephant who is being slayed for its tusk, I was fighting back, fighting for my space.
Every year, I would try to squeeze myself into every project and every character. I thought I had to. Corsets and huge European wigs that never fit over my braids. Listening to classmates “ooh” and “aah” over the beautiful costumes and imagining how awesome life would be back in the 1780s. I kept wanting to scream it. “Shit!!! I’m different than you!! If we went back to 1780, we couldn’t exist in the same world! I’m not white!” The absolute shameful objective of this training was clear—make every aspect of your Blackness disappear. How the hell do I do that? And more importantly, WHY??!!! None of my counterparts had to perfect Jamaican, southern, urban dialect to be considered excellent. “I am BLACK!!! I’m dark with big lips and a wide nose and thighs. I’m Viola!!”
Manifestation has always been a part of my life. Either getting on my knees physically or praying silently. And God intervened. In my second year, Juilliard was offering a $2,500 scholarship for any student who wanted to do a summer program that opened them up as artists, helped with their growth, unleashed something within. We had to write a five-page
essay explaining it. I wrote that I was lost. That there was no way to unleash passion when you were asked to perform material that not only didn’t touch your heart but wasn’t written for you. I told them of the burden and myopic scope of Eurocentric training. I got the scholarship.
My friend Kris World, who was in the dance program, went to Africa every summer with Chuck Davis, an African dance choreographer out of the North Carolina School of the Arts. Every year he took a group of people, not all artists, to a different country in Africa to study the dance, music, and folklore of different tribes. This summer, he was going to The Gambia, West Africa, to study the Wolof, Jola, Mandinka, and SouSou tribes.
The lead-up, travel, and experience in Africa caused a cataclysmic change in my life. It busted a hole in my existence.
I got every shot known to mankind before the trip. I wanted to eat everything I saw when I got there without worrying about any sickness. I counted down the days, took the bus to JFK from Providence, and flew out of JFK with the entire group—all women and most not actors. One was a nurse. One was a teacher. One would stand off to the side. She looked mad. She took her seat and curled up. Not curled up as in sleeping but curled up, in pain. She would cry and stare out of the window. A Jamaican woman was a nurse and very nice but extremely shy. Then there was me and Kris World. I was bouncing out of my seat I was so excited!
We arrived in The Gambia after a long layover in Amsterdam. It was nighttime. The airport was tiny and without a baggage claim. Bags were placed in a big pile. Strong uniformed African men with semiautomatic weapons were everywhere. We found our bags and walked out. It was love. It was as potent as a first kiss or a great prayer session. The air smelled different. Oranges and blues and purples painted the sky as the sun went down. The faint tinge of incense mixed with the ocean wind. Africa was waiting for me.
We stayed at the Bungalow Beach Hotel right on the ocean. It might as well have been the Four Seasons, but it was more like Motel 6. Kris World and I shared a suite.
Man, it was hot. To this day whenever it’s dripping hot, I refer to it as “Africa hot.” It was so humid that when I washed my underwear, it took three days to dry. We would wake up at 5 a.m. and meet on the beach. Chuck would teach us about the tribe we would meet that day and teach us
some of the dance moves. We would pray and run into the ocean fully clothed. Then we would go to the hotel and get dressed. Chuck had various people he hired as drivers, “ambassadors.” They would pick us up in front of the hotel and take us to the compounds. In the car, we would laugh and sing. The driver would teach us a song from their tribe. The first tribe was Mandinka. The Mandinkas were the people of the celebrated writer of Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley. We spent most of our time with them. We went into the compound, which was a cluster of four or five adobe houses where family members lived. We learned about djembe drums, the talking drum . . . They’re called talking drums because the sound imitates speech.
We would enter the clearing in the compound and the extended family would bring out every chair they had. They greeted us like long-lost family members. The joy, the excitement! Children would run into your arms. Then came the drummers who were all men. The intricacy of each role that the drummers played was unreal. The women would enter the circle ready to do a dance called the lingen, which is a bird in flight. Kris whispered in my ear, “They getting ready to bust loose!”
A woman would enter and begin to dance. She wore a lapa (skirt) wrapped around her body and her headwrap. As she smiled with unbridled joy, her feet would stomp with the drummers following her rhythm. She would stomp and slowly but surely her arms would fly up and her feet would go from stomping to leaping off the ground. Pretty soon, it looked like she was in flight. Other women would begin to ululate and another woman would leap into the circle and come face-to-face with the first woman. They would stare at each other intensely and begin to hold on to each other’s head and begin to fly together. The entire earth seemed to move. Loose dirt swirled around us. We were witnessing something divine.
The dancing would go on for hours. More women would jump in. Some young and some old. When they were finished, they would get down to the ground and rub each other’s feet and ululate. While all this was going on, they sang a song over and over again. It translates to, “I did not come here for food. My stomach is full. I did not come here for food. I came for much more than that.”
I sang it so much it became a prayer. I was here for . . . something. I was crying out for something.
We each had to get up in front of the tribe and sing and dance the lingen. We also had to learn a series of greetings.
“Sumole”—Hello, how are you? “Ibije”—I am fine.
“Kon te na te”—How’s your family? “Te na te”—They are fine.
“Kara be”—I am here. “Kara jon”—I see you.
By the way, we had to go through this greeting anytime we started a conversation with someone. Even if you only stopped to ask for a mango!
It made them so happy. To be seen, to feel their worth. Africa made me giddy with joy. Every smell, sound, color affected my senses in a passionate way. No shade of yellow or green or blue was the same. Fabric artists made the dye themselves. They would then make lapas, kufi (hats), grad boo boos (muumuus). Beautiful dark skin was unapologetically darkened by the sun. Every child had many women who would mother them. The ease in which people served each other. The kinky, curly hair, the complexity of the rituals, the numerous different languages.
We went to a baby-naming ceremony. After seven days the baby is given a name. The infant mortality rate was so high that parents waited seven days before they named their child. The baby was usually at a low weight but would surely live after making it past the week. We would wait in the compound for the parents with the baby to come out of the small adobe house. Women breastfed their babies while waiting to celebrate.
It was a cloudy day and the women were sitting laughing among themselves. They had calabashes, large wooden bowls, in front of them and buckets of water. When the parents emerged from the house, the women put their babies to the side on some cloth. They put their breasts in their wraps, turned the bowls over into the bucket of water, picked up two sticks, and began to drum in unison. With honor. With a sisterhood that went deep. We gasped! Kris World and I were coming from a school where we were being classically trained to become auteurs and we were witnessing it in front of our eyes. This was genius. This was art! Expression that is born out of the necessity of ritual to navigate life. When they were done, they simply put
down the sticks, turned the calabashes back in the bucket of water, and picked up their babies to begin breastfeeding again.
Juilliard’s academic approach did not connect the work to our lives. It missed the true potency of artistry, which is that it shifts humanity. Art has the power to heal the soul.
I needed healing. Before I left for Africa, I had found out finally that my relationship wasn’t what I thought it was. David had other relationships the entire time. I was devastated. Anita comforted me, utterly confused by my wailing.
“Well, what made you think you were in an exclusive relationship?” “Because, Anita, we just were! I was living there! In his apartment.” Silence.
“Living with him or just staying there when you came home on the weekends from school?”
“Anita!! I’ve been with him for years now,” I continued to cry.
“Viola? If there was no conversation about being exclusive in the relationship, then you weren’t. I’m sorry. You just thought you were because . . . what . . . you love him?”
Anita was very matter-of-fact. Loving and logical. The honesty sobered me up and hurt like a motherfucker.
“Of course I love him, Anita.”
“How do you know? Viola, how many boyfriends have you even had?
You don’t know what love is.”
It was an exchange I wished I had had before I started dating. I never knew love had to actually serve the two people involved, establish boundaries and communication. I thought all that just happened.
In Africa at age twenty-five, I felt my life both starting and ending. I was in an in-between time. Africa was an elixir. We ate benachin every day outside the hotel and in the compounds. It was rice, white fish, white sweet potato cooked in the ground and a spicy red sauce on top of the fish. It cost five dalasi, which equaled fifty cents. You brought your own bowl no matter how big and they would fill it up for fifty cents. My greediness followed me from childhood. I could never get enough food so I found the biggest bowl. Women would set up a makeshift shop outside of the hotel. Mostly, you ate with your hands. There were almost never utensils. You would squeeze the palm oil from the food with your right hand and pop it in
your mouth. The left hand was used to . . . well . . . wipe yourself after going to the bathroom. I couldn’t get with that.
We went to an African wrestling match that was more about theater than wrestling. The wrestlers would march around a field with drummers behind them and you would throw them coins. After doing this for the longest time, they would wrestle. The Wolofs had a dance called the “turtle dance” that was the equivalent of twerking. Women would bend over with their butts toward the man and twist, shake, and move at a rapid speed accompanied by not only drums but balafons, which were xylophones, and koras, which were guitars.
Drums from goat skin, and batiks were exquisite works of art. Sculptures were carved from mahogany wood and usually were in worship of tribal deities.
Africa was God’s playground.
I found out that the woman who came on the trip who looked like she was in pain was. She had lost her sister and mother within weeks of each other. She could not see her way through the grief. She was consumed by it. She came to Africa in search of comfort, answers. We all did. The shy nurse was looking to get out of her head and comfort zone. She was so shy she would just sit in the background whenever we went to a compound. I never saw her there, she was that quiet. Sometimes she would cry if she were asked to dance even during our morning prayer circle.
But there was no mistaking the supernatural enchantment that was happening in Banjul, Bakau, and Serekunda, The Gambia, West Africa. There was no mistaking the transformation that was happening. Suddenly the anxiety that always existed in the pit of my gut went away completely. I almost felt drugged. My skin came alive.
A group of girls braided my hair one day. They laughed, giggled while doing it. They couldn’t have been older than fifteen, and there were nine of them. All they wanted to hear about was my sister Danielle and our relationship. They didn’t want to hear about Juilliard, New York, being an actress. They didn’t want to hear about what I wanted to become. They wanted to hear about me. Just me. They would squeal, laugh, and clap when I told them the most inconsequential detail about me, like the day Danielle was born.
One day, we went to the Mandinka compound and a group of women came in with clownish makeup on, oversized clothes, shoes, and djembe
drums. Chuck said they were comedians. I was fascinated. They were laughing and made funny faces and then would play the drums, loud but not well. When everyone saw them, they would get loud, scream, become animated and laugh in an exaggerated way. People gathered around these women until there was a mob of women hugging, rousing, laughing loudly, singing loudly, “I did not come here for food. My stomach is full. I did not come here for food. I came for much more!” Then they began to pass a calabash around with mush inside. It tasted like peanut butter oatmeal. Everyone dug in, ate some, and passed it down. These “comedians” were actually infertile women.
In The Gambia, to have a child is the greatest blessing. When you couldn’t, the belief was that God did not hear your deepest wish and had passed you by. The intent is to make as much noise as possible so God can hear you in heaven and pour down a blessing. The noise stopped and I looked around at the faces of the women smiling, laughing, screaming in manic desperation. They were trying to wake God up.
I wept. Despite the nature of the roles I get, I’m not a crier. But I wept. I cried again when I saw a woman who looked like my mom dancing in the rain at her daughter’s wedding. She was doing the lingen dance and seemed to fly off the ground. I cried when many of the people we met in the compounds came to our hotel so that we could perform for them. We even had food. Everything we performed they squealed with joy, laughter, tears, and they didn’t even understand English. I performed Topsy from George
C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum. It’s a character that imagines herself at a party with Martin Luther King drinking champagne out of Eartha Kitt’s slipper, Malcolm X having existentialist conversation. Then this party gets so rowdy that the floor started to shake, the walls started to move, and the entire room lifted up off the ground and went spinning and spinning until it disappeared, inside of her head.
“Yes, chile! That’s right. There’s a party going on right here because I’m dancing to the music of the madness in me. That’s why every time I walk down the street, my hips sashay from side to side because I’m dancing to the music of the madness in ME! And here all this time I thought we had given up our drums. But now still got ’em. They’re here. In my walk, my dress, my style, my smile, and my eyes. They’re inside here connecting me to everything and everyone that ever was. So . . . honey don’t try to label or define me, cuz I’m not who I was ten years ago or ten minutes ago. I’m all
of that and then some. And whereas I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain, I can’t live without it.”
They roared!!!! I had lost every bit of potency and belief in my work since entering Juilliard. In The Gambia, in the midst of my people, I found it. I found the party inside me. The celebration that needs to happen to combat the pain and trauma of memory. I found that there is no creating without using you.
For two years I thought the rule was to erase and negate oneself. That’s what I was doing. Lose the voice, speech, walk, face . . . lose the Blackness. Lose and bury the very essence of what makes you you and create something void of joy but steeped in technique.
After the thunderous roar, Chuck quieted everyone down and had us form a circle to pray. We said a prayer of thanks. We thanked them for their hospitality, wisdom. We thanked them for their love and said we would never forget them. They wept and cried and began to ululate. Then they began to dance and take out their drums, in the hotel. It, ironically, was that party I spoke about in my monologue. We were all dripping with sweat. Suddenly I saw Kris World’s face change. She shouted, “Viola. Look.” The crowd parted and behind the room was the shy nurse! I didn’t even know she was there. She was coming into the circle dancing!!! She was doing the dance we learned with the Jolas and she was doing it perfectly!! She was almost in a trance and she kept dancing until she was face-to-face with the choreographer Chuck Davis. He was staring at her, and she danced and danced until sweat, tears were pouring down.
I left Africa fifteen pounds lighter, four shades darker, and so shifted that I couldn’t go back to what I was.
I was always on the outside of Juilliard because I wasn’t on the inside of me. I was fighting an ideology about what an actor was, and it was all born in the depth of white superiority. The notion of “the classics” being the basis for everything. Yet I was in the land of the classics. In Africa, there is the equivalent of every “classical” instrument known to man and it predates any European instrument. There was a “technical” proficiency attached to drumming, dance, music, storytelling. Why is it “limiting” to play Black characters but white actors are “versatile” playing white characterizers? Why do I have to be small, willowy, and lighter than a paper bag to be sexual? I’m playing a character. It’s not porn. I was sold lies for two years
and the worst part is that I believed it because I couldn’t combat it with anything else.
Africa exorcised those demons.
When I got back, no one recognized me. I performed my one-woman show in my third year with all I had learned in The Gambia. I could do anything I wanted and I wanted to use me. It was a true Coming-Out. I wasn’t weighed down with speech, voice, and all that I had been taught that was drowning me. I heeded the saying, “Stop making love to something that’s killing you.”
A year later Mark Schlegel was an agent at a top agency back in the day,
J. Michael Bloom. It was the agency everybody wanted to get into. They represented major names. They had Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, Wesley Snipes, Ethan Hawke, Sigourney Weaver, Kathleen Turner, and Macaulay Culkin. They had everyone. It was also the hot agency, probably the equivalent of William Morris, CAA, and UTA today. Mark came to see Journey of the Fifth Horse where I played a character who was an older Russian woman. It was part fantasy, part realism. I was in heavy makeup. He saw me in that role and left me a message in the Juilliard office saying that he wanted to meet with me.
I met with him. He said he loved my work, saw something in me. “Viola, it just popped out. Your talent, your power popped out. I wanted to meet you.” Our meeting was one of synergy, kismet, a perfect moment. Sometimes actors meet an agent and the vibe is What can you do for me? You’re a big agent. Just get me auditions for a job. Get me a lot of money. But this was someone who saw me, saw my talent, saw my possibilities. He introduced me to the other agents and said, “We want to sign you.”
“Okay. Let’s do it.” That’s what I was at Juilliard for. They signed me before I even graduated from Juilliard. By the time we got to the auditions at the end of fourth year, I didn’t have any stress about signing with an agent. Friends at school said, “You should have waited until after you did your scenes because you probably would have had more choices.”
All I needed was one agent. Agent and actor are like a marriage. The agent has to “get” you. I was dark-skinned, not a size two, not considered “beautiful.” After all the trials and tribulations I’d experienced at Juilliard for these reasons, I felt like it behooved me to get an agent who did “see” me. That agent would be the driving force in my career, my advocate. I got maybe twenty-two callbacks after my scenes—which was good, although
some people got sixty callbacks—but I never regretted that I signed before I did my scenes.
The reality and social media fantasy of being an actor are diametrically opposed. Most actors don’t want to be an artist—they want to be famous. Many believe if they’re pretty, young, have a great agent, then “Voila!” It’s a business that is way more fickle than that. No words can describe that one-two combo of luck meeting talent. Me? I just wanted to work. I didn’t want to go back to Rhode Island. I compared going back to death.
I was finally two weeks from graduating from Juilliard. The last two weeks were meant to be the jump-off to my new life. After four years of honing my craft, this was it. All the pain, joy, suffering, and triumphs, and suddenly . . . exactly two weeks before graduation day . . . I woke up sick!
