ANDY DRACHENBERG: What about Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill drew you to this production and this character?
LONNY PRICE: I directed Lady Day… at the Long Wharf Theatre in Connecticut and I fell in love with the play. The actress who played Billie Holiday was wonderful, but I’m always looking for projects to do with Audra McDonald. With Audra you don’t just bring her a part, you need to present her with challenging roles. I thought, what would be harder than anything? Playing Billie Holiday? Yeah, that would be hard. Singing fourteen songs and carrying a show? Yeah, that would be hard. Now let’s put her in an environment where she has to relate to an audience as though it’s 1959 in Philadelphia. And Audra McDonald is an extraordinary performer. She changes the atmosphere in the room. As a former performer I can recognize greatness, not that everybody doesn’t see that in Audra already, but she knocks me out. So being able to work with her again is a thrill for me.
AD: Since you have worked with Audra McDonald on previous projects over the years, what has that offered you in terms of experience?
LP: We’ve worked together a lot and it’s always inspiring. We challenge each other and that’s a wonderful thing. She’s uninterested in praise, it’s all about how to make the production better. Having worked with a lot of great performers (Audra certainly falls in this category), I’ve realized that it’s perspiration as much as inspiration. She’s just a killer worker and she cares about the truth. And that is what it’s about. Since we’re very close friends and know each other’s lives, we have a vocabulary in the room. Audra and I became friends not because I wanted more information to draw on in a rehearsal room, but because I love her. And the byproduct of that is that I know her very well. So we’re able to, in a very shorthand way, get to places that it might take me longer with another actor. I tend to be very loyal and like to work with the same people. Audra and I know we work well together as a director and an actor so it’s just a really good collaboration.
AD: What was your entry point into the play?
LP: We started with researching Billie Holiday. We are very lucky to be able to access so much information about her via the internet. Not only are we able to watch her perform (which is enormously informative), but we’ve found interviews so we can see her as a human being in a way that would have been technologically impossible ten years ago. So Audra watched a lot of performances and interviews and we both listened to her songs. After studying Billie Holiday we broke down the play. This play is challenging because it needs to be orchestrated. The truth about Billie Holiday, and also with Audra to a large degree, is that she couldn’t sing anything unless she felt it. Lady Day offers Billie a road map to emotional places where she’s able to sing these songs and make these songs meaningful. And what Audra and Billie share is truthfulness. You’ll never see a false moment from Audra. She’s incapable of falsity and I think Billie was like that too. Charting the play was challenging but also not so much because Lanie Robertson has written a beautiful play.
AD: In your research and as you’re watching these pieces are there any particular pieces of her history that stuck out to you?
LP: As much as I thought I was familiar with the African American experience in the first half of the last century, I didn’t know that it was as profoundly moving to me and upsetting to me until I worked on this play. Billie had the worst of everything: she was raped at 10, she worked in a whore house, she was incarcerated and she was treated abysmally. And she turned into a big star. So you think, if this is how Billie Holiday was being treated, how was the rest of the population being treated? How we treated African Americans in this country is a shame that we will carry with us forever. So, as much as I knew the history, I hadn’t experienced it quite the same as through her eyes and her story. Discovering this has been profound in my research and in working on the play. Furthermore Billie is not self-pitying. There’s something heroic about someone who had a Dickensian life who didn’t look at it as a tragedy but looked at it as a celebration of life for the short time that she was there.
AD: Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill’s venue Circle in the Square is a very unique theater space. As a director, what is that allowing you to do with the show and experiment with?
LP: The great thing about Circle in the Square is that we’re able to turn this play into an immersive evening. We’re turning the theatre into a night club so hopefully, when you walk down the stairs and into the theatre, you will feel like you are in Emerson’s Bar and Grill in 1959 Philadelphia. We’ve got this space where Billie Holiday will be interacting with her audience so that gives the play a whole other texture. We haven’t had an audience yet, so we’re all excited for that first time that Audra is there around the tables and to see how the play works. We always say that the audience is another character and in this case they’re a big character. They have a lot to do with where the evening goes and I think it will be a very alive experience because the show will be different every night. Audra will have to adapt to the audience every night. Her transformation into Billie Holiday is so fearless that I think Audra feels braver because she’s playing Billie. It’s a little eerie because during rehearsals I close my eyes and think, oh my god, it’s Billie Holiday. And I think audiences will feel that way.
AD: What do you think is the most challenging element of this production?
LP: Charting and orchestrating the night so that it has an invariance and feels like a journey is challenging to me. The road is very specific and varied. It’s about figuring out parts are most important versus less important, where the stakes are higher and where they’re lower. We have worked very hard to create a structure which is not necessarily on the page but is in the behavior of the performer and in the temple of the evening. In addition, having Lanie Robertson in the room obviously helps a lot because he wrote it and he has ideas. Overall it has been an easy and pleasant experience, and being in the room with Audra is heaven. So how bad is that? I’m a lucky guy.
AD: What is your favorite Billie Holiday song and why?
LP: My favorite Billie Holiday song is “Crazy He Calls Me.” And some of my favorite lyrics are, “I say I’ll move the mountains and I’ll move the mountains if he wants them out of the way” and “if I have to hold up the sky” and just the romance of it is just very moving to me. Theatre lyrics are not poetic like that and I spent my life in the literate theatre so for me to be around that material and to shape it emotionally with a performer is beautiful and it’s new for me. So I really like that aspect of it. Because the songs aren’t theatre songs, they’re jazz songs. So exploring them in a theatrical way has been new and interesting to me.
LONNY PRICE (Director) most recently directed Sweeney Todd starring Emma Thompson and Bryn Terfel at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic. Broadway: 110 in the Shade (also starring Audra McDonald), “Master Harold” …and the Boys, Sally Marr…and her escorts (co-written with Joan Rivers and Erin Sanders), Urban Cowboy, A Class Act (Tony nom. co-written with Linda Kline). With the New York Philharmonic (both stage and film): Company, SONDHEIM: The Birthday Concert! (Emmy Award), Camelot, Candide. Mr. Price also directed the Emmy Award-winning production of Sondheim’s Passion (“Live from Lincoln Center”), and he won an Emmy for his 2001 production of Sweeney Todd (San Francisco Symphony). Off-Broadway: Visiting Mr. Green, Grown Ups, Stopping Traffic. Opera: La Voix Humaine and Send (Houston Grand Opera). Film: the award-winning “Master Harold” …and the Boys. TV: Desperate Housewives, 2 Broke Girls. This one is for Paul.