tonya pinkins October 2008 most actors spend a lifetime dreaming of career success. According to Tonya Pinkins, success was her undoing. In 1992 Pinkins’s career was taking off . She was appearing on the soap opera, As the World Turns , and she had just won rave reviews and a Tony Award for Jelly’s Last Jam . That success, says Pinkins, was too much for the ego of her then-husband. “When you’re coming from a house full of women,” she says, “you really don’t know anything about men and have no basis for picking and choosing. I just picked a string of really bad ones.” This one not only sued for divorce; he fought for and won sole custody of Pinkins’s two children. She had to leave the show to focus on the court proceedings, spent years in battle, going bank- rupt in the process, and found that for the rest of her career to date, despite artistic success, she’d be dealing with the fallout. Tonya Pinkins was born in Chicago into a home inhabited by her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and aunts, none of whom were especially interested in the arts. A junior high school teacher saw Pinkins’s talent, however, and lobbied the St. Nicholas Theater Com- pany to allow her to study in their professional program. By nineteen she was in New York, having been cast in the legendary fl op, Merrily We Roll Along . Her next Broadway musical was Jelly’s Last Jam , followed by the disappointments, Chronicles of a Death Foretold, Play On! , and The Wild Party . Then, in 2003, at The Public Theater, she took on the role of Caroline Thibodeaux in Caroline, or Change , one of the most fascinating anti-heroes in the history of musicals. She was a maid in 1962 Louisiana, supporting four children on $30 a week and sup- pressing her feelings about her world. It was an astonishing performance which Pinkins was able to repeat on Broadway, on tour, and in the West End. In 2006, Pinkins penned a self-help book, Get Over Yourself! How to Drop the Drama and Claim the Life You Deserve . She appears to have taken her own lessons to heart, because despite a litany of diffi culties that could sour the best of us, Pinkins is warm with an open, smiling face and an easy laugh. Though she describes herself as “constantly pessimistic,” her aspect totally belies that. You started studying acting in eighth grade. Did it occur to you at that point that you would want to pursue acting? Not really. It was always sort of disappointing in a way. I always wanted it to be more than it was. 1 2 nothing like a dame Duke Ellington and Shakespeare combined in Play On! (Photofest) So what made you stay? My teacher, Harris Goldenberg. He made me stay. He would take me to auditions. He was totally my stage mother. At some point you transitioned into thinking “Maybe I do want to do this . ” No, that didn’t happen. It was something that would come up, and I would do it. I remem- ber when I was selecting my colleges, I got a full scholarship to Yale, but because of his infl u- ence I ended up picking Carnegie Mellon. But you weren’t there for very long . No, because I auditioned for Merrily We Roll Along over the Christmas break. I didn’t want to do that, either. I was on my way to Puerto Rico, and Harris said, “No, there’s an open call.” He was very persuasive. So I came back for the open call and ended up getting cast and going to New York, knowing the show would not happen for almost another year. But these were the gods of the theater [Stephen Sondheim and Director Hal Prince]. Did that you lead you to fi nally embrace acting as a career? I didn’t ever feel like this was “it” or going to be “it.” I probably spent the majority of my career trying to leave it, but jobs kept coming and I knew that work is such a precious thing. I knew so many people who didn’t have it, so if it was off ered, I would take it. tonya pinkins 3 Were you able to really believe in yourself if you weren’t committed to it? I used to think, “I don’t know what they’re seeing. I don’t get it.” It didn’t feel very secure because they were responding to something that I was not doing, and I wasn’t in control of. They were responding to something about which I felt, “I don’t know why it’s here today, and I can’t tell you I’m going to be able to create this tomorrow,” so that was a very scary thing. [I just never got excited about these things] and my agent used to say, “Nothing ever aff ects you,” because I would just say, “Oh, I got this job? Okay. Thank you.” You got to New York in 1981 and got a place on 47th and Broadway. That was the heart of Times Square at its seediest . Oh, yeah, I lived in it. I remember visiting New York; it was a scary place. I didn’t really like it. I turned Juilliard down because it was in New York. I remember one of the fi rst days I was in New York I was on a bus and I saw a car almost run over a biker, who threw down his bike, got off , started bashing the car’s windshield and meanwhile somebody stole the bike. I’m thinking, “Okay, this is New York.” What do you remember about working on Merrily? It was probably one of the most devastating experiences of my life but also one of the most educational. Everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. [But later] when I’d go to other shows and things would go wrong, I would be unfazed. I was sort of just watching because it was a world I didn’t know anything about. It was completely alien and foreign to me so I was just ob- serving the politics, the rules. I’ve always been a very anti-clique person, so that always made me an outsider in a lot of ways. I would just watch a lot of things. Very bizarre, strange things happened on that show. You’d show up to rehearse your scene, and somebody else would be doing your part. Since you had no context for having done a Broadway show before, did it feel like maybe that’s how it works? No, it never felt like this is how it works. It felt chaotic and like, “What are these people doing?” Could you tell that the show was not working or could you not be objective about it at that time? I knew very early that it wasn’t working and as I watched the changes that were being made I knew they weren’t going to work. But I was nineteen years old so who cares. The day they cut all the costumes and the wigs, that was like, “Okay, maybe this is a tax write-off or something.” Do you have a specifi c recollection of working with Sondheim? No, because we didn’t really work with him. But we got invited to his home for a party and he showed us his working room. I remember he opened the door where he housed his scores and there were all the empty shelves for the ones yet to be written. I loved that. At Hal’s house, they had a rotunda foyer with one of his many Tonys spotlit. Where do you keep your Tony? I don’t have my Tony. Where’s your Tony? I don’t know. It’s a long story. I don’t know where it is. I may never see it again. 4 nothing like a dame You said before that Merrily was one of the most devastating experiences. It got you to New York and then it was over in a couple months . I don’t know if that was the devastating part of it. It was more “What have I gotten myself into?” You decided to go to Yale at that point . Yeah but I didn’t. I was up for All My Children , which was my favorite show in the whole wide world. I turned down a show at Actors Theater of Louisville because I had a screen test for All My Children . I didn’t get it but shortly after I ended up on As the World Turns . The thought of being on a soap was really exciting to me. I think I quit in my third year. Why? I wasn’t in a happy place. I’m like the most negative interview you’re getting, right? But those people were so unhappy. It was the most cutthroat place I’d ever been. After you left . I had two kids. And I started studying acting with Bill Esper. I’d do a scene and my son, Max, would be there with me on my fanny thing. So if you went back to class, had you decided to really commit to acting? Yes, I did. I wanted to be really good, and I wanted to know how to produce this thing that people were so fascinated by. I wanted to have a craft to do that with.