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THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Tuesday, June 7, 2016

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Emily Motill

PAGES: 19, including this page

June 7, 2016

Broadway’s ‘The King and I’ to Close

By Michael Paulson

Lincoln Center Theater unexpectedly announced Sunday that it would close its production of “The King and I” this month.

The sumptuous production, which opened in April of 2015, won the Tony Award for best musical revival last year, and had performed strongly at the box office for months. But its weekly grosses dropped after the departure of its Tony-winning star, Kelli O’Hara, in April.

Lincoln Center, a nonprofit, said it would end the production on June 26, at which point it will have played 538 performances. A national tour is scheduled to begin in November.

The show features music by Richard Rodgers and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. The revival is directed by Bartlett Sher.

June 7, 2016

No More ‘Groundhog Day’ for One Powerful Producer

By Michael Paulson

Scott Rudin, a prolific and powerful producer on Broadway and in Hollywood, has withdrawn from a much- anticipated project to adapt the popular movie “Groundhog Day” into a stage musical.

The development is abrupt and unexpected, occurring just weeks before the show is scheduled to begin performances at the Old Vic Theater in London. “Groundhog Day” is collaboration between the songwriter Tim Minchin and the director Matthew Warchus, following their success with “Matilda the Musical.” The new musical is scheduled to run there from July 15 to Sept. 17, and had been scheduled to begin performances on Broadway next January; it is not clear how Mr. Rudin’s withdrawal might affect the transfer.

In an emailed statement, Mr. Rudin suggested that he was not satisfied with his ability to influence the evolving show, and had opted to move on. He has plenty on his plate: He has already announced that he will be producing revivals of “The Front Page” and “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway this season, and is expected to announce a revival of “The Glass Menagerie” as well.

“The production in New York is going to be a transfer of the London production, which is not how we had originally conceived the project when I joined it,” Mr. Rudin said of “Groundhog Day.” “The more it evolved, the more it felt that there was no way for me to do what I like to do, so I asked to withdraw. Not every ideal show happens in the ideal circumstances for everyone involved. I wish them well with it. It’s a great show, and I’m sure it will be a big hit.”

The withdrawal was confirmed by two other producers, Lia Vollack, of Sony Pictures, and André Ptaszynski, of Whistle Pig Productions.

“Scott came to us last week and said he didn’t feel this was something he wanted to continue with in its current configuration,” they said in a joint statement. “We met about it, we did our best to convince him otherwise as we are all close friends, but in the end we respect his decision. We are grateful for his work over the last two years, and we certainly wish we could have completed this journey together.”

Mr. Rudin announced the “Groundhog Day” project in April 2015. He has an ongoing relationship with the Old Vic, in the form of a right of first refusal to commercial transfers of the theater’s work. Mr. Warchus is the Old Vic’s artistic director.

A spokeswoman for the Old Vic did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

June 7, 2016

Review: ‘An Act of God’ Is Back, With Sean Hayes

By Charles Isherwood

I know it’s traditionally said that the Jews are God’s chosen people. But evidence to the contrary is currently on view on Broadway, where “An Act of God” opened (or rather reopened) on Monday at the Booth Theater.

God’s chosen people actually appear to be — gay sitcom stars! Call it the big reveal left out of the Book of Revelation.

How else to explain the presence of Sean Hayes, the perky gay star of “Will & Grace,” taking over the role of the Almighty, which was initially played by Jim Parsons, the goofy gay star of “The Big Bang Theory,” when David Javerbaum’s pricelessly funny fusillade of irreverence first opened last season.

Technically speaking, Mr. Hayes is not portraying God. In his boundless mystery, God has chosen to come before us in the guise of Mr. Hayes. “For lo, I have endowed him with a winning, likable personality and know of a certainty that your apprehension of my depthless profundities will by aided by his offbeat charm,” as God- in-the-person-of-Mr.-Hayes says. God later adds, “He has no idea he’s here.”

The Almighty is not wrong about Mr. Hayes’s appeal. (How could an all-knowing being be wrong?) Just as Mr. Parsons made for an endearingly cuddly deity, so does Mr. Hayes. He almost looks like a grown-up cherub — albeit one who’s been on the Atkins Diet — and he channels the same fresh-faced boyishness and impish zest that made the character Jack a constant scene-stealer on “Will and Grace.”

For those who missed it the first time around, in “An Act of God,” first a series of tweets and later a book before coming to the stage, God has taken corporeal form — a holy being doing so for only the second time in Christian history (it appears to be working out better this time) — in order to correct mankind’s dire misconceptions about His thinking and His works.

A certain set of Mosaic laws, specifically, have begun to grate on His nerves, despite their undeniable popularity. “Yea, I have grown weary of the Ten Commandments, in exactly the same way that Don MacLean has grown weary of ‘American Pie,’” he says. And so he has come before us to expand the list. Or rather rewrite it, since some of the originals were too good to let go.

God is accompanied by two archangels: Gabriel, played with a funny air of poker-faced self-importance by James Gleason, who mans a Gutenberg Bible, reciting quotations at God’s command; and Michael, played by a feisty David Josefsberg, who takes questions from the audience and eventually, to God’s annoyance, begins challenging his ideas. Michael loses a wing for his impertinence.

But mostly it’s just God up there, chatting away like an amiable neighbor who has just settled down on your sofa for a good gossip. (The handsome set, by Scott Pask, suggests a celestial talk show, its centerpiece being a sweep of pristine white couch on which God mostly perches.) Aside from the inevitable jokes about “Hamilton”

— one is tiring of those, but I’ll give God a pass — and that real estate mogul who has improbably become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, “An Act of God,” once again smoothly directed by Joe Mantello, remains essentially the same show, a gut-busting-funny riff on the never-ending folly of mankind’s attempts to fathom God’s wishes through the words of the Bible and use them to their own ends.

Mr. Javerbaum’s wit, one is tempted to say, is almost as infinite as God’s wisdom. There’s a good gag a minute, maybe more, in this 90-minute show. And in Mr. Hayes, God has a delightful infinite-wisdom delivery system. His God is by turns comically admonishing, affectionate and just occasionally petulant, as who would not be when his carefully laid plans have resulted in, well, the world in its endless imperfection.

“An Act of God,” by contrast, could be fancifully viewed as one of God’s better-realized creations. It’s an hour and a half of comedy heaven, and I’d gladly watch it annually. What’s Neil Patrick Harris doing next summer? C1

June 7, 2016

Review: ‘War,’ a Deathbed Drama About Identity by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

By Ben Brantley

Identity. Look hard — and then harder — at that word until it wavers, fragments and dissolves before your eyes, and you begin to wonder if it amounts to anything other than an assemblage of diversely shaped letters that might as well be runes. It’s enough to give you a headache, isn’t it?

Well, that’s sort of the experience of watching Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “War,” a portrait of family as a state of civil conflict that opened on Monday night at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center. This is a heavily confused play about cultural confusion, a consideration of identity — racial, social, political, anthropological, even biological — that never settles into a coherent identity of its own.

You could call it a casualty of the very existential maladies it investigates. And it seems fitting that it should befall a work by Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins, who is both one of the most exciting young dramatists working today and one of the hardest to categorize. His specialty is the ambiguity of self, particularly as defined by skin color, and the futility as well as the necessity of looking for solid answers.

To explore this knotty subject, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins has taken such radically different approaches that it would be hard to immediately determine the authorship of his individual plays if his name weren’t on them. His works have included a satisfyingly cynical thriller, about murder in the workplace(“Gloria,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year), and a genre-bending detonation of a 19th-century melodrama about interracial love (the brilliant “An Octoroon”).

Then there’s “Neighbors,” a self-described “epic with cartoons” about a blackface-wearing black family, and “Appropriate,” about a white family with an oppressive past, which seemed to borrow from just about every classic American drama of domestic dysfunction. The one thing these works have in common is a cool and canny authorial distance, a sense of an observer with a merciless eye for human inconsistencies.

In “War,” directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz (who also staged an earlier version at the Yale Repertory Theater in 2014), it feels as if this writer has for once entered the fray directly, and lost his footing. The story of a divided clan uneasily united around the hospital deathbed of its matriarch, it may well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s most far- reaching statement about how the hunt for identity strands and estranges people, even from those they should be closest to.

But it is so replete with ideas and arguments — and tries to cover so much territory within a confined space — that it chokes on its ambitions. Not that many of the ideas, and the various ways in which they’re presented, aren’t provocative in themselves.

There is, for example, the matter of the apes, or alphas, as they prefer to call themselves. They inhabit the limbo-land wherein Roberta (the luminous Charlayne Woodard in gracious hostess mode) finds herself after having a stroke. Her body may be in a Washington hospital, but her spirit inhabits this planet of the apes. And it is here that she must rediscover who and what she was, from the very beginning.

At the same time, in the real world by that hospital bed, Roberta’s contentious children — Tate (Chris Myers), a prickly gay political consultant, and Joanne (Rachel Nicks), a stay-at-home mom married to the white Malcolm (Reggie Gowland) — are squabbling over what to do about Mom. Their fight is further stoked by the presence of an addled, non-English-speaking stranger, Elfriede (a touching Michele Shay).

Elfriede is accompanied by her grown son, Tobias (a bellicose Austin Durant), who acts as his mother’s interpreter. Thus we learn that Elfriede is a member of the family, the product of a wartime affair between Roberta’s father and a German woman.

Now consider the conflicted levels of time and place that Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins has thrown into play here. We have the ancestral oblivion of ape limbo, in which Roberta is lost; the despoiled Germany of the 1940s, in which her father was an exotic alien (the Germans made monkey noises when they saw him); and the fractious present, in which even brother and sister cannot connect.

“Why is everything some war in this family!?” asks a tearful Joanne, after an especially nasty blowout with the arrogant Tate. “Everything is a part of some struggle that seems like it’s never going to end — that no one even understands!”

That is perhaps the bluntest declaration of the central theme here. But “War” doesn’t lack for other blunt declarations and for long and winding passages of exposition that cover the same patches of family history again and again. (The spectral Roberta has to recreate her entire life story with her ape friends, embodied by the rest of the cast and led by Lance Coadie Williams, who doubles as a sassy hospital nurse.)

Now you could argue that modern playwrights have always had a penchant for turning family grievances into repeated litanies. Look at Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” or Stephen Karam’s “The Humans” (both currently on Broadway) or any of Edward Albee’s domestic dramas.

The difference is that here Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins uses such repetition not to convey psychological character but to make sociological points. He is unusual among first-rate playwrights in that his empathy seems largely abstract. He understands his characters, but you don’t feel he connects with them. And it makes connection similarly hard for us and for the talented performers playing them.

Designed by a solid team that includes Mimi Lien (sets), Matt Frey (lighting) and Bray Poor (sound), “War” works hard to conjure a physical sense of worlds overlapping into eternity, with sliding floors and projected words to translate for the nonverbal apes. But this production, which has become more congested since I saw it at the Yale Rep, still seems to exist in limbo in ways that its seriously gifted writer never intended.

June 7, 2016

Peter Shaffer Dies at 90; Playwright Won Tonys for ‘Equus’ and ‘Amadeus’

By Bruce Weber and Robert Berkvist

Peter Shaffer, a leading British playwright whose Tony-winning dramas “Equus” and “Amadeus” explored the male psyche through the entwined anguish of dual protagonists, died on Monday in County Cork, Ireland. He was 90.

His agent, Rupert Lord, confirmed the death. “Sir Peter had traveled to Ireland to celebrate his 90th birthday with close friends and relations,” Mr. Lord said in an email. Mr. Shaffer turned 90 on May 15. Mr. Shaffer, who lived in Manhattan for more than 40 years, died in a hospice in Curraheen, a district outside Cork City.

Valued by critics and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Shaffer (pronounced SHAFF-er) saw his reputation amplified by well-received movie renderings of his plays. He won an Academy Award for his film adaptation of “Amadeus,” about the rivalry between Antonio Salieri, the court composer for the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the precocious composer whose magnificent gifts thrill the older man and fill him with malicious jealousy as he realizes his own consignment to mediocrity.

As a playwright Mr. Shaffer was ambitious, probing in a variety of genres. His first Broadway play, “Five Finger Exercise,” was a 1950s domestic drama about a British family with culturally mismatched parents and the emotional fissures that are unwittingly exposed by a young German tutor brought into their household. (The Hollywood version, starring Rosalind Russell and Maximilian Schell, was Americanized and set in California.)

It was followed by “The Private Ear” and “The Public Eye,” a pair of one-act comedies involving lopsided romances and a third wheel, and “The Royal Hunt of the Sun,” about the 16th-century vanquishing of the Incas by the Spanish. It starred Christopher Plummer as the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and David Carradine as the Incan ruler Atahualpa. (For the 1969 film version, Mr. Plummer played Atahualpa; Robert Shaw was Pizarro.)

All were received with at least respectful (and often quite admiring) critical notices, and ran on Broadway for several months. So did another pair of one-act comedies, “Black Comedy” and “White Lies,” which featured Michael Crawford and Lynn Redgrave in their Broadway debuts. But Mr. Shaffer’s best known and most substantial work lay ahead.

He drew his inspiration for “Equus” from a story a friend told him about a British stable boy — the teenage son of forbidding, religion-oriented parents — who had compulsively blinded a number of horses in his care after being seduced by a young woman on the floor of the stable. The horses were around them ostensibly, at least in the mind of the boy, watching them.

From that episode, the play evolved into an intimate, tense wrangle between the boy, Alan Strang, and his psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Dysart. The psychiatrist’s own chill marriage, doubts about the efficacy of his profession and interest in ancient Greek history add depth to the relationship and the resonance of myth to the story of the boy’s gruesome and mysterious act.

The production, a vivid one directed by John Dexter, included men in silver masks representing the blind horses and a long nude scene recapitulating the barn seduction. It opened in 1973 in London and in October 1974 on Broadway, with Anthony Hopkins as Dysart and Peter Firth as Strang. It ran there nearly three years, winning Tonys for best play and best director.

The production also attracted a remarkable parade of replacements for Mr. Hopkins, including Anthony Perkins, Alec McCowen, Leonard Nimoy and Richard Burton. Burton subsequently starred in the 1977 film version, directed by Sidney Lumet. (A 2008 Broadway revival starred Richard Griffiths as Dysart and Daniel Radcliffe as Strang.)

Though the play drew much praise — “stunning,” Walter Kerr called it in The New York Times — it also courted controversy. A few amateur shrinks (that is, critics) offered a variety of interpretations, including that the play was about closeted homosexuality — a suggestion that especially flummoxed Mr. Shaffer — and professional ones complained about the portrayal of their profession.

“By weaving together many clinical syndromes, therapeutic methods and psychoanalytic clichés, Shaffer presents us with a fictitious piece of psychopathology,” one doctor, Sanford Gifford, wrote in an article in The Times, adding that the playwright’s “skillful mixture of truth, banality and pretension” establishes “a spurious air of importance.”

In “Amadeus,” set in Vienna in the late 18th and early 19th century, Mr. Shaffer took on the mystery of genius — in this case in the guise of a musical visionary who imagined whole, elaborately gorgeous compositions in his head, but who presented himself to the world as a boor and a self-destructive libertine. That Mozart’s music, of which Salieri speaks reverently as “the voice of God,” could be created by such an unholy man, is a torment that Salieri cannot abide, and he works to undermine Mozart’s success — and his health — only to be riddled by guilt for decades after Mozart dies at the age of 35.

The play opened at the National Theater in London in 1979, directed by Peter Hall, with Paul Scofield as Salieri and Simon Callow as Mozart. The next year, with Ian McKellen and Tim Curry in the leading roles, Mr. Hall staged it on Broadway, where the production won five Tonys and ran for three years. (There was a Broadway revival, also directed by Mr. Hall, with David Suchet as Salieri and Michael Sheen as Mozart, in 1999.)

“Amadeus” was widely scrutinized for historical accuracy, and scholars later debunked the portrayal of Mozart as a puerile genius poisoned by Salieri. (One Mozart biographer, Robert M. Gutman, who died in May, maintained that Mozart died from illness, possibly rheumatic fever.)

Mr. Shaffer admitted that though there may have been some rivalry between the two men, he took considerable artistic license in creating their characters and ratcheting up Salieri’s antipathy to such a malevolent degree.

“The problem with the Mozart-Salieri story is that there is no end,” he said in an interview with the William Inge Center for the Arts, in Inge’s hometown, Independence, Kan. “One survived the other by 32 years. It’s not much of a climax. There had to be a scene between them, a confrontation scene. In a play, that’s what drama demands.”

It was a scene he rewrote over and over again, he said, finally settling on what he called an offering — Mozart’s offering up a score of the unfinished Requiem Mass in D minor to a masked patron, who is, of course, Salieri.

For the 1984 film, directed by Milos Forman and starring Tom Hulce as Mozart and F. Murray Abraham as Salieri, Mr. Shaffer wrote an entirely new ending, imagining a scene in which Mozart, on his deathbed, dictates part of the Requiem as Salieri scribbles out the score. The music is played on the film’s soundtrack during the scene, and as Salieri recognizes the glory of the composition, it is almost as though he is receiving, as if by communion wafer, a morsel of godliness.

That, Mr. Shaffer said, was for him the most exciting scene in the film, because it “breaks all the rules that I’d ever been taught about cinema, that it has to be visual and the sound doesn’t matter very much.”

“It’s a scene about sound,” he said. “The characters don’t move.” He added: “If you read the script, its nothing but eight pages of musical direction: ‘Bar this,’ ‘Oboe in E-flat’ and so forth. Very boring. It would give the average Hollywood producer a heart attack to read those eight pages. But they do work and they work wonderfully. And even more mysteriously, they are cinema; they’re not theater. If you had that scene on the stage, with a stage manager winding back a tape in the wings, it wouldn’t work at all.”

Peter Levin Shaffer was born on May 15, 1926, in Liverpool, along with his fraternal twin, Anthony, and grew up in London, where his father worked in real estate. The twins attended St. Paul’s School in London until 1944, when they went to work in the coal mines of Yorkshire and Kent for three years as an alternative to military service. In 1947 Peter Shaffer won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history.

After his graduation in 1950, the brothers published “How Doth the Little Crocodile?,” the first of several mystery novels they wrote under the joint pseudonym Peter Anthony. Anthony Shaffer, who studied law, eventually became a noted playwright himself, winning a best-play Tony before his brother did, for the 1971 murder mystery “Sleuth,” which ran for 1,222 performances, eclipsing the runs (barely) of “Equus” and “Amadeus.”

The brothers were reportedly close and on largely good terms, but it is notable that Mr. Shaffer’s plays so often focused on pairs of male rivals — Pizarro and Atahualpa, Dysart and Strang, Salieri and Mozart — whose competition delivers both nourishment and suffering.

“We are both poisoned, Amadeus,” Salieri says at the end of the play. “I with you; you with me.”

After leaving Cambridge, Peter Shaffer soon moved to New York, where he worked in a bookstore and at the New York Public Library before returning to England.

His first play, “The Salt Land,” about the fledgling state of Israel, was produced on television by the BBC in 1954. Four years later he scored his first major theatrical success with “Five Finger Exercise.” Directed by John Gielgud, it opened on Broadway in 1959 with a cast that included Jessica Tandy, Roland Culver and Brian Bedford.

Mr. Shaffer’s other plays included “Yonadab” (1985), a biblical saga about evil doings in King David’s court; and, most notably, the comedy “Lettice and Lovage” (1987), which starred Maggie Smith in London and, in 1990, on Broadway.

As Lettice Douffet — “the most eccentric tour guide ever to lead bored American and Japanese visitors through one of England’s dullest stately homes,” as The Times’s Frank Rich described the character — Ms. Smith won raves and a Tony, as did her co-star, Margaret Tyzack, as her stuffy employer.

Mr. Shaffer was knighted in 2001. His brother Anthony died in 2001. He is survived by another brother, Brian.

At midpoint in his career, in a 1975 interview in The Times, Mr. Shaffer admitted to a “sense of fulfillment” stemming from the work he had already done. He also looked ahead.

“When I’m 100,” he said, “if I manage to write lots of plays, I can read them all in a row and it may give me some vague sense — only vague — of what I am, and was.”

June 3, 2016 Daphne's Dive Stars Vanessa Aspillaga & Daphne Rubin-Vega on Sisterhood, Diversity and Turning into Benny from Rent

June 3, 2016 By Kathy Henderson

Daphne Rubin-Vega & Vanessa Aspillaga photographed at Rudy's Bar & Grill (Photo: Caitlin McNaney)

Sisterhood is powerful in Daphne’s Dive , the new play by Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes. In the title role, Vanessa Aspillaga runs a neighborhood bar in North Philadelphia where an array of colorful characters makes themselves at home. Her older sister, Inez, played by two-time Tony nominee Daphne Rubin- Vega, has escaped to the upscale Main Line thanks to her marriage to a rising power broker with roots in the Puerto Rican community. Thomas Kail’s production for Signature Theatre gives full voice to Hudes’ strivers, with Aspillaga and Rubin-Vega sharing a lively onstage chemistry first seen in the 2003 Broadway production of Anna in the Tropics. During an afternoon chat at the Theater District dive bar Rudy’s, the ladies sipped soft drinks and shared their thoughts about diversity in casting, the 20th anniversary of Rent and what they’d tell their younger selves.

Q: We’re sitting in a booth at Rudy’s, and Vanessa plays a bartender in Daphne’s Dive. What’s your drink of choice?

VANESSA: I don’t drink alcohol now, although I used to come to Rudy’s with Sam Rockwell and actors from Labyrinth [Theater Company]. You got free hot dogs with your drinks! When I imbibed, I liked a very dirty martini with olives stuffed with blue cheese. It was like a meal.

DAPHNE: I don’t drink either. I used to love wine, and tequila was always fantastic, but those days are over. Just going to the bathroom here took me back—it’s almost like CBGB.

Q: The last time you two shared a stage, you were in a Pulitzer Prize-winning play on Broadway. It must feel like a gift to be reunited as sisters.

DAPHNE: That’s exactly what Tommy Kail said.

VANESSA: I’ve actually known Daphne since I was 19, in the early days of Labyrinth.

DAPHNE: The early ‘90s. She was the little one—Yul [Vasquez’s] niece.

Q: What do you love most about this play? DAPHNE: Quiara has such a strong voice, and the play deals with so many relationships: sisters who have taken different paths, a mother and daughter [Samira Wiley of Orange Is the New Black], a daughter trying to

make her way in the world. It’s poetry.

VANESSA: The play spans 18 years, and you get to see the changing dynamics between these people who have laughed and cried and mourned together. Time shifts, and you pick up how things have changed since the previous scene.

DAPHNE: It’s like jazz. What is left out is as powerful as what is said.

Q: As Inez, Daphne wears a spectacular lineup of wigs and costumes. Are you jealous, Vanessa?

VANESSA: I love her clothes in the show! She’s fabulous.

DAPHNE: I’m very bourgeois. I love playing the wife of a guy who rents things out. At one point, my husband says, “Have Inez show you some apartments,” and it tickles me to death. It’s my little “in” joke with Quiara: I’ve turned into Benny from Rent.

Q: Speaking of Rent, does it feel like 20 years have gone by since the show’s debut?

DAPHNE: Yes and no. Rent has been a big part of the fabric of my life. Not a day passes without it being brought up. Adam [Pascal] and I are doing a show [on June 3 at Ocean County College in Toms River, NJ], and when we rehearse the songs, the way they just come back—it’s like, holy moly!

Q: Rent was praised for diversity in casting, and now people are saying the same thing about Hamilton. Has that issue gotten better in the past two decades?

VANESSA: There are changes, but they’ve been a little slow, in my estimation. One of the problems since the early ‘90s has been [scripts] written by Latino writers where everyone except the bastard and the whore is played by Anglo actors—plays like Death and the Maiden and films like The House of the Spirits. The reverse doesn’t happen, although funnily enough, my first job as an actress was in an Anthony Minghella film, Mr. Wonderful, and I was supposed to be Italian.

Q: Daphne has broken barriers by playing Fantine in Les Miz and Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway.

DAPHNE: I make it my life’s work to do that. People ask me, “Why do you choose these political roles?” They become political by dint of the fact that the person playing them looks like me. It’s been a slow advancement, but we are creating our own stories now. We have no choice.

VANESSA Daphne and Quiara are working on a musical together!

DAPHNE: It’s called Miss You Like Hell and it’s being developed at La Jolla. [Performances begin October 25.] It’s about an undocumented mother and her estranged daughter reuniting for a week to ride across the country before the mom’s deportation trial. Quiara is such a powerful writer, I would follow her anywhere.

Q: Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to your younger selves?

VANESSA: A couple of things: I would say love yourself. You are thin enough. You are beautiful.

DAPHNE: Believe in yourself. Confidence, infused with the truth, is a very powerful asset.

VANESSA: I channeled all my energies into my acting [in the past]. I took a lot of chances on stage, but in life, I tended to be more closed off and hermitic. I would say to my young self, go out with people! Call that cute guy who gave you his number. It’s OK!

DAPHNE: The biggest mistakes I made were when I tried to be like someone else. My strength was in being myself. I got traumatized after a record deal fell by the wayside, but I just kept going. The world was my teacher, and it helped me become an actor that I’m proud of being. I’m still alive and kicking!

June 2016