on Broadway when I got the audition for the role of Susan in therevival. I wasn’t really thinking anything of it. I’m the least knowledgeable musical theater actress you probably will ever meet in your life. I should be ashamed of myself, but I didn’t know it was a bunch of different vignettes taken from George Furth’s work. So I’m reading through it, trying to figure out the storyline and a background and I’m not findingshows one Saturday looking at The Kennedy Center production I found online.
It was the parents in the show like Nikki Rene, who’s my dressing-room mate, and Chris Fitz and some people on the crew who started talking about being afraid to send their kids to school. Nikki spent her entire dinner break three or four days in a row going to every drugstore trying to find disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer. The first inkling I got was actually from my wife, Jessica Stone, who’s a director.
I enter the stage from the audience, and the experience of walking through the audience became more and more surreal. Standing there amongst thousands of people, laughing and enjoying themselves, and I’m feeling like I knew something that they didn’t know, and just feeling dread, and horror, and fear. I don’t remember that last performance at all because it was just another preview.