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[0:00] Michelle Wilson: My art has very always been very political. I think that act of putting a black woman on stage with words in her mouth and opinions is really a profound act of courage for theaters, for theater watchers. I mean, telling our stories ourselves is really quite profound.

[0:24] Gennean Scott: Welcome to the Black Business of Broadway, a podcast brought to you by the Broadway League and Black to Broadway. Here we highlight the stories, how-tos, and successes of the black professionals and legends of Broadway. I'm your host, Gennean Scott.

[0:48] Gennean Scott: Today's guest is Tony-nominated actress and veteran of stage and screen, Michelle Wilson. In addition to originating the role of Cynthia in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Sweat, some of her other theater credits include A Raisin in the Sun, Confederates, The House That Will Not Stand, and Detroit 67, to name a few. Some of Michelle's notable TV and film work includes Amazing Stories, The Good Fight, Madam Secretary, Between the World and Me, and Premature. You can currently see Michelle in The Coast Starlight at Lincoln Center Theater. Michelle, welcome.

[1:25] Michelle Wilson: Thank you. Thank you. It's nice to be here with you good people.

[1:30] Gennean Scott: I am so excited to talk to you for a myriad of reasons. One, your choice and the roles that you have chosen along your career. Wow. But we're not— we'll get there though. We'll get there. First, I want to know what inspired you to pursue a career as an actor.

[1:51] Michelle Wilson: I can't quite pinpoint it. I'm from Detroit. I think I know what happened. I'm from Detroit. I grew up on the Northwest Side, which is like the university district, and it was all these beautiful black middle-class folks who had settled in after the riots, and the white families that were still there were these large Catholic families, and then there was a Jewish activist, and so it was this amazing melting pot of folks, you know. One of my neighbors was Regina Carter, who is the violinist, and my block was full of young women, and we called them the big girls. And the big girls put on a show in Regina Carter's backyard one year. And I have a picture of myself in a tutu at that show, and I swear to God, you could see I'm turning, and all of a sudden it's just like this is it.

I have found what I am going to do. So whenever I see Regina after she comes to a show, I'm like, you know, this is all your fault. With all the vagaries of being an artist, if you hadn't put that damn tutu on me at six years old. So it's Regina's fault.

[3:10] Gennean Scott: It's cute. Well, Regina, we blame you. So was there, you know, so besides having Regina, was there anyone else in your family, you know, who was also interested in this arts career, or was this just something, was this something new?

[3:32] Michelle Wilson: My mom was a dancer with All City in Detroit. And my mother was getting ready to go away and dance in Europe, and she got pregnant with my brother. And so the mother would always say, you can do anything you want to do. You don't have to get married. You don't have to have babies. You don't, you don't have to do anything but follow your passion. So I feel like she filled me with a lot of her hopes and disappointments, and you know, she wanted me to have no regrets. So really between Regina and my mother, they instigated a whole lot, didn't they?

[4:13] Michelle Wilson: You know, it's—I have a daughter. I sometimes talk about her on the podcast, and that's the same thing that I tell her. I'm like, just go and be. I mean, you're young, you have the rest of your life to figure it all out.

[4:26] Gennean Scott: That's exactly right. And you're just trying to give them courage, you know, and the permission for self-expression. And so our—my mom's generation, they were really the women who came in kicking down doors, you know, trying to explode through glass ceilings, and really what all of that hard work gave me is permission.

[4:51] Michelle Wilson: I love it, I love it. And we stand on those shoulders.

[4:55] Gennean Scott: Yes, we do.

[4:56] Michelle Wilson: Oh my goodness, I have a long line of matriarchs, honey. Full blown.

[5:01] Gennean Scott: Really? Tell us.

[5:02] Michelle Wilson: You know, Detroit is an immigrant town, and it's the internal immigration, and my grandmother was a single mother, 18-year-old who came from nowhere, Arkansas, with my mom in tow. And she tells a story of when she told her father that she wanted to go to Detroit. They had a cousin there. He said, you can go, but you have to leave the baby here because babies belong to families, not to people. And she said, okay. And she took the baby. And my grandmother says that when she sent money back home every month, she put an extra ten dollars in the envelope just for disobeying him. So yeah, she—and she brought her siblings to Detroit. There were 10 of them, two at a time, and installed them in—they had a two-family flat. And she did that until she got all her siblings north. So it's, yeah, come from courageous, fearless women, do you know?

[6:06] Gennean Scott: Fearless, fearless.

[6:07] Michelle Wilson: Yeah.

[6:08] Gennean Scott: And it shows. I mean, in the works that you've chosen, you know, you can—you draw. I—my assumption is that you draw that from that strength and from those different, you know, experiences that you have as a black woman, you know, with the history.

[6:30] Michelle Wilson: I do want to say that the roles choose me. There's no way I—it's like this reciprocal energy, but what you're putting out is what you get, right? And so my art has very always been very political. I think that act of putting a black woman on stage with words in her mouth and opinions is really a profound act of courage for theaters, for theater watchers. I mean, telling our stories ourselves is really quite profound. And so that's what I attract and what is attracted to me, right?

[7:16] Gennean Scott: Yeah, I love it. So you attended the University of Michigan for theater.

[7:22] Michelle Wilson: I did.

[7:22] Gennean Scott: Actually, about how that training helped shape you.

[7:26] Michelle Wilson: Well, you know, I have to make a couple confessions. I actually studied political science at the University of Michigan because I could not figure out how to tell my father how that I wanted to do theater. So I studied political science and I did like 10 shows undergraduate, and I'm probably four credits away from a degree because I just—I was done. I had to get out of there. And so I call it my Thorean degree. You know, I got all the knowledge, sucked it up, and hit the road. My father did not, while he was alive, he did not think that was cute or funny at all. But yeah, it was a great time at Michigan. What resonates most with me is that we were so incredibly rebellious. We never thought anybody was giving us enough.

You have to keep in mind though that this was before—this was pre-August Wilson, you know, and okay. So we were still writing the materials from the 60s. It just—there was a—there wasn't a fit, you know, and so it was during the rise of Toni Morrison, and I remember reading The Bluest Eye in high school. I went to an all-girls high school because I was so naughty. They shipped me out, and I got the book through, you know. I lied and said my older sister had forgotten to buy the book for her class because, you know, I was a freshman and it wasn't on my book list. And so I got the book and I hid all day reading it. And I remember thinking, I can't wait till they start telling these stories in film and TV and theater. Like it—it was so clear to me. I had read The Wrights and The Baldwins, and never had I heard a voice that was so specific to women.

[9:32] Gennean Scott: Yes.

[9:32] Michelle Wilson: And black women. And so I call this generation the Dominiques, the Kotoris, they're Toni's daughters, you know. Rick daughters, she just kicked the narrative door open for so many of us.

[9:48] Gennean Scott: Oh my god.

[9:49] Michelle Wilson: So I'm gonna just trash all my other questions because your story is way more interesting than any of these questions that I have.

[10:02] Gennean Scott: No, serious, no, seriously. I mean, the daughters of—I'm talking like yes, honey, yes, yes, what an apparently.

[10:14] Michelle Wilson: So did you always—did you know Dominique? I mean, she's from Detroit also, right?

[10:19] Michelle Wilson: So I got out of—I left Michigan. It's so funny. My partner's Billy Eugene Jones, who's doing Fat Ham, and he's always like, you did not graduate, you left. I mean, it is really important. You're like, all right, killer, easy, all right. Tomato, tomato. But I left Michigan and I went to Chicago and I was playing with Lydia Diamond and Marsha Stone, Penelope Walk. It was just such a rich time in Chicago. I call Chicago my creative home. And then I went—I had my daughter in Chicago, and it was one of those moments where it was after 9/11, the world had collapsed. I came back from LA trying to figure out what I'm gonna do with my little family. I tried everything I could to keep us together, and now it was striking out on my own with my baby, and I decided that I would go to New York because if I never worked again, where would I want to live?

New York City. So I brought my little girl back here, and my friend—and he just passed this last October. But Rod Gales is the connector in so many instances of my creative life, and he had done a film. We were cohorts at Michigan. He had done a film, went back to campus, and Dominique was in that film. I'm about a decade older than Dominique. And when I came to New York, they had a Richard Pryor piece, Rod Gales and James Jackson, that was going into the fringe festival. And so I just stepped in as producer and Dominique played Richard Pryor's mother. She was an actress, and that's how we met as fellow actors, you know, in the fringe festival. And I remember her saying, I have a play. She was a poet before she was a playwright.

She has a long history of slam poetry in Detroit and at Michigan, and she also wrote a play at Michigan, but it was more poetry-based. She had a play, and me coming from Chicago, we were just do-it-yourselfers, you know, everybody. Right, so many small companies in Chicago, and there's so much art for art's sake, and here it was far more formal, and it felt very mercenary. And I remember saying to a young Dominique, the actress, you know, you don't have to have a complete play done.

[13:07] Michelle Wilson: You can have five pages, and we can come and read it in your living room, and it can be the building block, you know. This is a process, and from then on, I think I've in some way or form have touched every one of her plays since then, you know. Wow, yeah, wow, yeah. She's a kind of artist, it's really profound to watch, but every time she writes a play, her skill and technique and just beautiful, uh, I don't even know. Her grace and love of us just explodes upon itself, you know, it just goes from one level to another level. I mean, I've never been around an artist who is so profoundly visionary and at the same time so collaborative, you know. That's an art. It is, it is. That's an art. It's turning into a lost art because it's really hard to take notes. It's really hard to be in collaboration when you don't trust. And I feel like there's an awful lot of distrust afoot right now, and our artists suffer. You know?

[14:31] Gennean Scott: Yes.

[14:32] Michelle Wilson: Yes. And yes. Speaking of greats, uh, Lynn Nottage, you were nominated for a Tony for your work in Sweat as Cynthia. Can you talk about what that experience was like for you and what the process was for you to create that role?

[14:52] Michelle Wilson: Yeah. I was in Detroit doing, uh, Detroit 67. We had done it as a co-production with, uh, Baltimore Center Stage, and then we took it home to Detroit. And it was really important to us that it be done right. Dominique was sick during, um, that run. It was an emergency. I got the audition, I think, like the day before my opening in Detroit. And they were like, put, and keep in mind, this is all pre-COVID. We weren't doing Zoom auditions, we weren't doing tapes back then. I mean, it's theater, you gotta be live, right? And I remember saying I can't do this, I can't handle this right now. Um, so I'm gonna say no, but thank you. And, uh, then my agent called me back and she's like, okay, they will, they will take, uh, there was some other, what would be done?

And I remember thinking, this is ridiculous. Like, I saw those reviews coming out of Arena and OSF. Like, what is going on? And I remember my agent called with another kind of, well, can we do this? Can you shoot it after? And I was like, no, I need to be right where I am with this experience. And I think she called me back and she's like, Kate will see you the day after you get back. There are callbacks, and she's gonna meet with you for 30 minutes before your audition. And I was like, what is going on? And my agent, who was cool as a cucumber, was like, I want to see you. So, okay, relax. I did think that, uh, Kate was seeing me 30 minutes before the audition because, you know, wow, she wants to see me.

She did that for everybody in the callback. But what was beautiful about that is that, um, Kate is so specific and such a warrior, and she knew this play inside and out. And, um, it's hard for young artists to understand, but notes are armor, they're not bullets, they're armor, and she just kept filling me with notes, notes, notes, notes. Um, so when I came back to do it for the artistic team, it felt reverential, you know, it was something really powerful in that, like that was never like, oh, we're gonna do a little play. That felt so urgent and necessary, and there was so much humility in that room, and that's to me the key to Lynn Nottage. There is so much brilliant humility of the human experience, you know, yes, and she's just constantly prop, just poking at those places that we were, we're not ready to look at, you know, by the time we were doing that, this is pre-Trump, you know, we were, yes, yes, and I remember the change.

I remember that we were running at the public and then the election happened, and the day after the election, the audiences had loved before, and it was a very polite like, oh my goodness, people, and then literally the day after, people are standing up crying, clapping after we did that, yeah, and the change was, this is what happened, this is what happened. We were not taking care of each other, we were not taking care of our neighbors, and it allowed a snake to come in, you know, and start, let's devour ourselves and each other, you know, um, yeah, so I just, um, oh, I love the way Lynn's mind works and her generosity of spirit and the just the beauty of her writing, I'm just, you know, yeah, um, yeah, absolutely, and you were, and you were nominated for a Tony, that was a total surprise.

[19:17] Michelle Wilson: You know.

[19:17] Gennean Scott: Was it?

[19:19] Michelle Wilson: You know, I mean, I'm a downtown, grimy Chicago actor, you know. I had no, I never even dreamed like Tony. It wasn't the way I thought. Like I said, I always feel like what I'm doing is almost so radical. Do you know what I mean? That it won't, it won't land in the larger consciousness. Or, or that's not my drive. And so that was such a pleasant surprise. And the fact that both Johanna Day and I were nominated, it felt like, oh, they get, they get something. Something clicked. Yeah. And that was really, really beautiful. I mean, we knew right away. I, uh, my manager during that whole Tony run, I kept saying, I can't, I can't see myself. I don't know how I'm coming across because you're just doing interview after interview after interview.

And my manager, Jennifer Wiley, stopped and said, it sounds like you didn't expect to get invited to the party, but you're having a good time now that you're here. And I was like, well, there you go. That's right. There you go. I'll tell you.

[20:31] Gennean Scott: And you deserve to be at that call. You deserve to be in that.

[20:35] Michelle Wilson: It felt very good. It felt very good being at that party. I mean, Sweat is being done. And it is, it is legendary. Lynn Nottage is not legendary, but her work is legendary. She's so prescient, right? I mean, we, she, she, so much of what, so often, you know, in our narratives, it's, you know, what is the king doing, or how can I be more like the king in his court? Right, you know, and Lynn is always looking at the grimy folks who are left. Right. Do you know what I mean? When everyone is looking up at the castle, she's looking around at the people. And that's why she's always on that cutting edge of what's, what's to come. It's like, oh my gosh, she foreshadowed that. Oh my gosh. And it's, it's constant.

She was in Reading, Pennsylvania, two years talking to people to develop Sweat. So this was, she, you know, she's just not a, uh, a creative, she doesn't just, you know, parachute in and, you know, do a take on a community and then parachute out. Even after we did Sweat, when we closed it, the night we closed it at the public, we got on a van and went to Reading, Pennsylvania and did a bare bones version for them. And that was so important to her to bring their voices home, you know, it was so profound, and, uh, and then even after that, her and her husband, they did this beautiful kind of multi, um, you know, with photography and interviews up at Reading in a refound space, which was their early railroad, um, and brought more energy and actors and artists back to Reading. It's, she just is so committed to our collective humanity. She just moves me constantly, constantly.

[22:44] Michelle Wilson: Speaking of moving people, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, the documentary that she did about, you know, being Black in the United States and some of the struggles of the realities of Black people in this country. How, what did it mean to you to be a part of that project?

[23:01] Michelle Wilson: You know, Camila Forbes and I go back to Dominique's original, original script, which is poetry and monologues. And that's when Camila Forbes was the president of the Hip Hop Theater Caucus. And I remember, you know, thinking, who put this together? I mean, it was so beautifully done, the festival. And I remember they're saying, oh, Camila Forbes. And I was like, oh no, I mean, the grown-up who did this. She was so young. You know, there you go, you old ages fool. Um, that's how Camila and I first met. And once again, it's just that, uh, that connection that there's something larger than you that needs to get said and done. And, um, I remember that I was following Ta-Nehisi when he was at the Atlantic writing, and he had one of the most profound, uh, comment sections.

He had a moderator, I mean, the exchange of ideas, it was just so beautiful. And I remember thinking, who is this kid that leads with curiosity to know and vulnerability and just ruthless, ruthless insight, you know? And I used to put his quotes up all the time from his articles, and Cam would laugh, and she's like, that's my, that's one of my closest friends. And you're like, well, he's brilliant, and let him know, you know. Yes, I know. I just, you know, that's me. Yep, yep.

[24:54] Michelle Wilson: And after Between the World and Me came out, I was just, I remember reaching out to her and just saying, this is just such a text of healing, and you know, so often as, um, people of color and women, you're always being gaslit out of your feelings. Yeah, and yes, it just, I remember saying to him when we were doing it at the Apollo, this text makes you feel like you're not crazy, you know, like all of the disappointments and the fears and the struggles, but the intense joy and commitment to community, and, um, so it started as a theatrical production, right? And we did it at the Apollo, and then we did it in DC at the Kennedy Center, and it was so beautiful and profound, and then they, uh, they decided during the pandemic that they were gonna do it as a series of monologues, and, uh, I was just so happy to still be able to participate. By the time we had done it for HBO though, uh, there is Greg Alvareth Reed, myself, Pauletta Washington, Joe Morton.

[26:21] Michelle Wilson: We were the four anchors of the theatrical piece, and then, you know, you would have T.I. come in and Legacy, and but we were the four that were there holding the piece down. So technically, between the four of us, we could do every monologue in that piece. So Cam kept calling and saying, "Oh, you're gonna do this." "Oh no, no, I found someone to do this." "I need you to do this," you know. So it's like, wow, it really helps when you can do every monologue so you can keep a job, right? You know. It was beautiful.

[26:57] Gennean Scott: Well, speaking of like humanity, your current work that's at Lincoln Center, The Coast Starlight, and how it looks at how it—I kind of, when I saw it, I was like, wow, it's so a snapshot of the world we live in. We're together, but we're not. And all of the conversations that we should have are—and don't. I mean, you talk about humanity, and I mean, so for those of you who haven't seen it yet, I'm not gonna give anything away, but it's basically, you're on this train to Seattle from LA, and all these people come in and come on the train, leave the train, come on the train, and you imagine what their story is, and yeah, but they actually tell you what their story is, and it's about the juxtaposition between humanity and how we're together, right next to each other, but yet we don't interact and we don't communicate anymore.

And the backstories that you all tell about why you're on this journey and why you're on this trip, you know. I think a lot of us people watch and we make up stories about, you know, how we might interact or what we think that person is, and then this show really explores who these people are and the—I think it explores humanity and the conversations that aren't had that could be had that could enrich our lives. That's kind of how I walked away from it. How can you talk about your experience on The Coast Starlight and you know what it represents to you and why you felt that it picked you?

[28:58] Michelle Wilson: Mm-hmm. It's such a beautiful small little play, and these human connections are almost magically real, right? I mean, the idea that we could save each other's lives if we just had this conversation, but we're so separated, right? You know, and we're so used to being in our little hidey holes and, you know, struggling on our own, and redemption is in each other, you know. Camus said, "Hell is other people," and Keith Bunan is saying, "Maybe not so fast. Maybe if we figured out a way to connect in our commonality and our humanness, it could save us," you know. We're not very good at nuanced conversations, right? We're not—everything is, you know, run, blow it up, fight. If you're feeling too many feelings, you know, that's when you have the gun shootout.

And the idea of these people just having these small intimate conversations, right? It's almost magical. You know, it's almost as profound as, yeah, yeah, you know, and just sharing. And the conceit is if I had known that, they say to each other, "I wish I had told you, if I had told you the truth," you know, and just those—how we work so hard in separating ourselves from each other, you know, and defining ourselves as other and people as other than us, and really it's just those small connections that could save us, it could save us, and there's something bittersweet about that, that it could be that simple, you know, that it could be that simple to turn to someone instead of turning on them, right? To turn to someone and say, "Yes, boom, this is where I am, this is how this feels."

[31:06] Gennean Scott: This is, do you know? So it's really lovely and profound. It's funny because one of my Chicago grimy Chicago friends came and she was like, "I was waiting for the white boy to go postal or something," and I'm like, "It's not—that's not this play." This play is about just these people, and something that's also sneaky about Bunan's play is it's a play of class. You know, you have two white males who are from the warrior class. We never talk about them except to pathologize them. We never talk about that class of whiteness except to pathologize it. So here you have these two men who are from the warrior class, one is running from it, one has survived it, not wholly intact, and they are healing each other and us through their humanity and their flaws.

And I think that's really tricky and profound, but he snuck that in there, do you know? We never hear about this class of men, you know, we don't care about them. We talk often about what we're missing, you know, as Black folks and as women, but once again, just like with Sweat, there is a class dynamic that we've allowed to be exasperated, you know, and so we don't connect. Do you know what I mean? It's like this society has said, you know, "Well, we won't give you white male, we won't give you an education, health care, or a job, but you're white," and that is the wages of whiteness, and what the wages of whiteness are not as valuable anymore, and so they're dying younger, do you know what I mean? They're using drugs at higher rates, and it's like we have to realize that our salvation is in each other, you know, our salvation is in.

[33:16] Michelle Wilson: I love that, I love that. Well, speaking of salvation, I have one final question, and it is—you're good at these transitions, girl. What is the one piece of advice that you'd like to share with the Black future leaders of Broadway? Whether it be on stage, behind, in the offices.

[33:43] Michelle Wilson: Oh boy. Can we expand it out and say, like, the creative community? Broadway is brilliant. Yes. Broadway is a business model. Broadway is 900 seats that you have to sell. And that comes with its own stuff. You have to sell seats, 900 of them, to keep a play going. And these musicals are making a million dollars a week. These people are working hard. Straight plays don't do that, do you know? And so in some ways we have to change our minds. Not everything has to be for 900 seats. There has to be room for these small, intimate pieces, and we have to keep nurturing them small. And if they're supposed to go big, they naturally will. With these writers, with these actors, there's so much pain that has not been released, you know, the sacrifices it takes, humiliations this art seems to constantly heap on you.

And one thing that I've learned is that your art is very personal, you know. There is no way to do it. You get out of school—back in my day, we didn't go to grad school. I mean, I think I'm that last generation that it wasn't, you know, we got out of school and we hit the boards and we were doing it in small places. Now it's much harder because it's so hierarchical to get access to a stage without coming through a program, you know, and what is the cost of these programs, not just financially, right? So there's all these people putting their hands on your art and grooming you and molding you and helping you find your voice. I just—I hope young artists take back the power and just reground themselves in the question of why do you do this?

You know, what—why do you do this? What attracts you? And when you're young, it's like I'm insecure, and you know, I constantly think about what I would have said or should have said, and you know, it can be that thin, right? That initial impulse, right? But as you stay in the art, there has to be more, and you have to keep asking yourself, why am I doing this? What is this about? Is it enough that I just am in a state of constant "pick me, pick me"? Do you know, or is there something deeper and larger at work here? And just keep asking yourselves the questions and be graceful, be graceful, compassionate with people.

[37:15] Gennean Scott: I love that.

[37:15] Michelle Wilson: This is just too hard, do you know? It's too hard what we do, and just make room for grace and compassion with your fellow artist on this journey, you know.

[37:33] Gennean Scott: Yeah, I love it. Compassion, make room, be true to who you are, and true to the art, all things that we all should remember. Because this work is hard, it is hard, it's brutal, and it's unkind, and there's an awful lot of rejection, and you know, it's much easier for me after having—you know, I raised a kid in the art. There was a time when I thought, well, that's it, I'm done. Do you know? I had just done a show in Chicago, and it was a blowout, and I found out I was pregnant and decided to have a baby, and I was up for a soap opera, and then the show I did was going on tour, and I remember sitting in the audience, you know, probably three months pregnant, thinking, well, I'm done. That's it. I am done, and it doesn't work like that, do you know? It's a marathon, not a sprint, and there are times where you're just going to have to give and take with the craft. Do you know? Just give and take.

[38:43] Gennean Scott: Yeah.

[38:44] Michelle Wilson: Well, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I want to thank our guest and you, our listeners. You could have been doing anything else, but you chose to spend your time with me, and I am grateful. Be sure to subscribe at bpn.fm/bbb so you'll never miss an episode. While you're at it, tell a friend. I'm your host, Gennean Scott, and we at the Broadway League hope you enjoyed this episode of The Black Business of Broadway.