Audra McDonald

Say it’s the opening of Twelfth Night, a gorgeous night in Central Park, you start a monologue as Olivia—and you hear a cell phone ring. Will you attack an audience member?
I have done that in my concerts. Not necessarily attack them, but gone, “Tell ’em I said hi!” or, “We can wait!” I’ve been known to do that. My issue with doing that here is that I can’t improvise in Shakespeare, man. I can’t speak that speak. To kind of riff on that, the iambic pentameter? Maybe I need to get some lines ready, ’cause right now I got nothin’. If that were to happen, I’d be like, “Stop it, forsooth! By my troth, turn off thy phone!”

What percentage of Shakespeare is actually gibberish to you?
[Laughs] Uh, today? I guess I’d say around 10 precent. When you’re working on a character, you always have that moment where you get into rehearsal and go oh, right, I have to figure out what the other person in this scene is saying to me. There’s always that moment of, oh, oops. Hopefully by opening night it’ll be zero percent.

You’ve done Henry IV. Is it fun to be dong something a little lighter?
Oh, yes. I’m having so much more fun. And you know, I’m gettin to make a fool of myself by throwing myself at Anne Hathaway five different ways.

In the first scene, Duke Orsino says of Olivia that she “purges the air of pestilence.” That something you do regularly?
With my sheer aura? Oh yeaaaaah. Absolutely not. I probably bring more pestilance to the world.

Is there any less pressure becuase the audience didn’t pay to be there for Shakespeare in the Park?
No, if anything, there’s more, because people have to work so hard to come see it. They stood in line all damn day, you better give them something worth seeing.

Do you and Taye Diggs ever do a little song and dance on the set of Private Practice?
Oh my god, we’re always doing that, and it’s not just me and Taye, it’s the entire cast. You can always get Kate [Walsh] to sing. Amy Brenneman is always singing. She has this song we like to sing called “I’m So Fuckin’ Pretty.”

And that’s not Taye Diggs’ song?
No! Amy goes “I’m so fucking pretty,” and I sing “You’re so fucking pretty.” Yeah, we do that. And I sing “Kung Fu Fighting” with Kate Walsh. And with Taye, it’s always most fun to sing off-key with him. It’s one of his favorite things to do.

So the Broadway pros are grating on everyone’s ears.
Well, yeah. It’s shy, quiet time with the Private Practice crew. [Laughs]

Were you a shy child?
I was a dramatic child. Incredibly dramatic. If it was happening, it happened to me like an opera. I used to freak out about thunderstorms in Fresno, California. “We’re all gonna die!” I was really, really dramantic. I’d stub my toe and you’d think someone had stabbed me through the heart.

Broadway seems like a good fit.
My parents were like, “Phew. Channel that mess.”

The cross-dressing, girl-attracted-to-girl parts in Twelfth Night—does it have any resonance with gay pride issues to you?
I don’t know that it has that much resonance. But I’m all for gay rights and marriage equality and all that. In Shakespeare time it had differnet meaning, because the person playing Olivia would be a man, too. So Viola’s like Victor/Victoria, a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man! Madness ensues! And it’s not like Annie [Hathaway]’s cross-dressing in rehearsal. It’s still Annie. I think for me, I’m going to be a bit weirded out when she gets the costume and makes more of an attempt to look like a boy.—Interviewed by Allison Williams

McDonald appears in the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night through July 12.

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