Get Out! GAY Magazine – Issue 437 September 25, 2019

Aside from being a lesbian, how close is
Angela to being your own true self?
Angela is a good 50/50 split. Her nononsense
and her sass and her honesty
I draw a little bit from myself, but her
whimsicalness and her hippie tendencies,
that’s not me. And the way she raises
her kids... Angela is very lackadaisical.
For example, “I just give my kids hugs,”
which was a line last season. I remember
reading that
and thinking,
“What? Who
does that?”
You also
have another
situation:
You live in
this totally
extravagant
and entitled
white
community,
and you’re
not only
a lesbian,
but you’re
a black
lesbian.
They covered
all the bases.
They
certainly did.
We really
haven’t had
a situation
on the show
that is a total
learning
moment or a
major moral
issue. You kind of get to see indirectly
how Angela navigates all the different
aspects of who she is, like when she is
at the PTA meetings and things of that
nature. She is the only divorced, lesbian
black parent and since she tends to be
the only one in all of those categories, I
like to think that she just kind of handles it
with grace.
Aside from “American Housewife,” you
have also been on Broadway. And you
can sing.
Oh honey, can I ever!
How did you get from Broadway, which
is a whole different genre in life, onto a
sitcom?
It’s two different worlds. People ask me
all the time, “How did you get this?” My
initial reaction is, “I auditioned.” The
worlds are so different. If you were doing
this for a career and not as a craft, it’s a no
brainer, because I’m constantly trying to
go to the next level and do the next thing.
So I had been
training forever
with an oncamera
coach
in New York,
kind of like an
Olympian trains
for their craft.
You just keep it
up so that you
are always ready.
I was always
taking courses
and always
auditioning and
trying to do
whatever I could
whenever the
audition arose.
But for a while
it was very hard,
because people
saw Broadway
and TV so
separately. The
golden age of
Gene Kelly and
Fred Astaire, all
of those who
did everything
and it was
acceptable—
and not only
acceptable, but you kind of had to—
those days are gone. So now it was
like, you either do this, or you do that.
Then Lin-Manuel happened to make
Broadway cool again, and ironically it
made it easier to go into those rooms,
because the connotation no longer was,
“Oh, you do Broadway, that’s fun.” So
it kind of brought Broadway to the level
that it should be seen at. I was still doing
Broadway when I auditioned for this show
on opening night of one of my last shows
in New York. We rehearsed all day till 6
o’clock, and my audition was at 6:30. My
opening night call was 7:30.