October 2019

Gideon Glick, Will Pullen and I are backstage in Gideon’s dressing room at the Shubert Theater in between performances of To Kill A Mockingbird. It’s a Saturday evening and we’re eating our dinner that's just been delivered from Westville. For maybe the 37th time this year, I’m having chicken with a side of mushrooms and sweet potatoes–a meal that gives me enough energy to get through a two-show day and doesn’t make my stomach hurt when we run from Boo Radley’s house about twenty minutes into the first act.

Today, Gideon’s fiancé Perry is joining us and we do a thing that all actors do in a long-running show–talk about the audience. We tell Perry about the matinee and how the audience started a little chilly and cough-y but audibly wept through the second half of the second act and stood up to applaud before the play was even over. Perry and Gideon talk about their wedding plans and how they’ve settled on a venue and are picking out their suits on Monday. They’re getting married three weeks after we close. Perry is a doctor and on a schedule where he works for a bunch of days in a row and then has a few weeks off. He’s about to start one of these work shifts, which means they’ll be on opposite schedules, so they want to try and nail down the details of the wedding now. I’ve never spent a lot of time with a doctor and I’m intrigued by Perry’s unemotional but nuanced take on our conversations, especially around the theater. Despite his schedule, he’s seen more Broadway shows than anyone I know, and I like hearing his response to them since he’s not in the business but sees so much.

February 2020

I’m reading an article about medical care workers in Wuhan, China, where nurses are collapsing from exhaustion and Li Wenliang, the doctor and whistleblower who tried to warn the world about the new coronavirus, has died. I record a track of a song at Atlantic Records for an upcoming movie I’ll be shooting at the end of March. I go see my husband John in a hilarious and poignant new downtown play called Tumacho by our friend Ethan Lipton.

As the first cases of coronavirus are reported in Washington State and Wisconsin, I read an article about the startling shortage of essential medical supplies in the United States.

I think of Gideon and Perry.

I go to five Broadway shows because I’m a Tony nominator this year and I’m trying to catch up on all of the shows before April when a whole new crop of productions will open. I think of Gideon and Perry and how many of these shows Perry has already seen. I walk to a costume fitting in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for a new television show I’m supposed to start shooting in March and listen to a podcast about the ongoing crisis aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

Mike Pence is appointed to lead the coronavirus task force. It makes me think about the HIV outbreak he faced in 2015 while he was governor of Indiana, when he resisted calls from his own state legislature—including Republicans—to establish a needle exchange program. He went home to “pray on it.” I think about that same plague, and how it took the lives of so many in the New York theater community, and wonder what’s coming for all of us. I walk my four-year-old son William to school and we notice that the Valentine’s Day window at Rite Aid has already changed over to bunnies and baskets.

March 2020

I’m set to co-host a Women On Broadway event at the New Amsterdam Theater on the tenth. A week before the event, we’re sent an email that asks us to disclose any international travel to China, Italy or Iran. It’s announced that Hillary Clinton will be the keynote speaker. As I watch backstage, she speaks about the “catastrophe in November 2016.” She talked about the months that followed and the extensive media coverage of her long walks in the woods and glasses of chardonnay but tells us that it was going to the theater, being transported by stories, and feeling the energy of an audience that she really cherished during that time.

More U.S. states confirm cases of COVID-19. There is almost no testing to be found in New York City. Italian hospitals are overwhelmed. Social media feeds slowly fill with posts about the increasingly dire situation faced by the medical workers tasked with fighting this real and terrible virus that, it’s now clear, is coming for us.

I text with Gideon and he tells me that Perry is set to start a twelve-day shift at the end of the month.

At a table read for my new television show, a huge room of incredible actors struggle to know how to greet one another. There are elbow bumps, handshakes and hugs — it feels weird. John gets word that his run of Tumacho will end early. I’m mindful of new the CDC guidelines and do not attend performances of two shows that have just opened as part of my Tony nominating responsibilities. At a reading of a new play-with-music about the musician Karen Dalton, I perform for an audience that sits with two chairs between them. At the end of the reading, we get word that Broadway is shutting down.

I start to think about how to self-quarantine in our New York apartment with my extremely energetic son, William. Our babysitter flies back home to be with her family in Washington. I buy cans of beans and pasta. We only leave the house once a day — William usually wants to walk uptown so we can look at the Empire State Building. The days feel long. I haven’t spent this much time with William since he was a baby. It feels good. It feels hard. We start to hear rumblings about sheltering in place and worry that we might not be able to leave the city and that the three of us will be stuck in an apartment and not be able to go outside for months. John suggests we try to find an Airbnb upstate. My TV show delays the start date of shooting. We find a house in upstate New York and pack our car full of groceries so we won’t have to shop for 14 days.

I text with Gideon to see how everyone is doing at the hospital.

When we arrive upstate and I feel so grateful for the space and fresh air, for the resources and money to get out of the city, for the privilege to be able to social distance. We take walks as a family. I cook our meals, wipe the counters, sweep the floors and try to come up with crafts for William. I think about my mother who died almost 20 years ago and how much I miss her and how comforting it would be to have her wisdom right now.

March 2000

It’s spring break and I’m home visiting my family from the University of Michigan. My mother is lying on our couch, her face swollen and head bald and we are talking about Christopher Isherwood’s novel I Am A Camera because I’m playing Sally Bowles in the spring university production of Cabaret. There is a knock on our front door and I find Gail Babel standing there, holding a dish of lasagna in her oven-mitted hands. I know Mrs. Babel from Grosse Pointe Theater where she was a box office volunteer and her husband, Denny, helped build the sets. My brother Andrew, sister Maggie and I all performed in the musical The Secret Garden there. Gail has set up a meal train for our family with a group of people from the theater. Since my mother is exhausted and recovering from a stem cell transplant and my father is overwhelmed caring for his wife with cancer and his three kids — two of whom are only 12 and 14 — Mrs. Babel decided food might be helpful right now.

I send a text to Gideon. “I am thinking about you nonstop. Is there a way to send food to Perry’s floor? Could I start a meal train for them?”

Gideon responds that he’s doing okay but is now living in a separate apartment (in the same building) since Perry started working. Perry says it’s like the Wild West at the hospital and while he appreciates the idea of food being delivered to his floor, he feels like there are hospitals in New York that are dealing with a greater number of patients and have fewer resources. He suggests we get in touch with his friend Gabriela, a doctor in the Intensive Care Unit at Bellevue Hospital.

I remember my sister telling me that Bellevue was a hospital where no one was ever turned away. In its past, if there weren’t enough beds when a sick patient arrived, they stole a bed from another unit or made a bed with parts from the hospital closet. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Bellevue took care of hundreds of patients that other hospitals turned away. I think about how those hospital workers took care of our community in the 1980s and ask Gideon to reach out to Gabriela.

Victoria Myers and I are texting. Victoria, who I know from when she was the editor of the online theater publication The Interval, is sending me photographs taken by Joel Meyerowitz and Stephen Shore in the 1970s and a good article from New York Magazine. I float the meal train idea by her and explain how I want to set something up where the Broadway community can help feed the Bellevue Hospital staff, but between establishing a home-school routine for William, my participation in this upcoming reading of Lips Together, Teeth Apart to raise money for the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Emergency Fund, and finding out that artists have recently been deemed “non-essential,” I’m left with a sort of flat sense of self. I can’t find the time or energy to figure out the Meal Train website. She replies, “I’m on it”.

April 2, 2020

Victoria makes us a page. Gideon calls four local restaurants that are still delivering in the city, one of which is our beloved Westville (chicken, mushrooms and sweet potatoes for everyone!). He figures out a plan with the owners to put in an order in the morning so that food can be delivered at 6:45pm before the night shift begins. We’ve made contact with Gabriela at Bellevue and she tells us she can pick up the delivery outside the hospital. I make a list of people I’ve worked with and love — Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kelli O’Hara, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Gavin Creel, Cherry Jones, Laura Benanti and Andrew Rannells among them — and decide to ask them for money to start us off. If people see the names of these Broadway stars, I reason, they might be more inclined to donate.

We set our goal at $10,000, which feels possible but also scary as so many people have lost their jobs and are stressed about money. The website goes live. That night I try to fall asleep but I keep thinking about November 18, 2019, the night Perry and Gideon got married. So many of their wedding guests were members of the Broadway theater community. We stood around them in a bar on the Lower East Side while they spoke their beautiful vows to one another and when the ceremony was over we all joined in a call-and-response version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind,” led by a drag queen named Martha Graham Cracker:

Her: The morning ends
Wedding guests: I think about you
Her: I talk to friends
Wedding guests: I think about you
Her: And do they know, it’s like I’m losing my miiiiiind

My mind jumps to The Glass Menagerie when we would fundraise for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and Cherry Jones would float down the aisle in her big white dress and her red bucket to collect money after every single performance. “It is our duty,” she told me.

We have to raise this money.

April 13, 2020

Ten days later. We raised more than $100,000. I am amazed.

I remember that tiny theater in Michigan, organizing food for my family as we moved through a collective despair, struggling to maintain something that resembled normalcy. I think to myself, “theater people are the best people.” Since I was five years old performing in Annie Get Your Gun, I have known this, and I knew it last November as I took my final bow in To Kill A Mockingbird.

Being a theater actor gives me this deep sense of belonging and community. And I think that when you feel like a part of a community, it’s easy to give back and serve another community.

Performing on Broadway means you see the same people eight times a week, so you end up sharing both your artistic and personal highs and lows with those people day after day. Their pain becomes your pain. Their joy belongs to you. This processing of emotion – backstage on the floor of a dressing room or in front of fifteen hundred people – is intense, but it is also unbelievably nourishing. You examine your life. You feel supported. You build a community

Like many actors I know, I grew up feeling like a bit of an outsider. And then I started doing theater, where the expressions of love, the space for big emotions, the positive feedback – they not only made me feel good about myself but they made me feel like myself. I wonder about all of the other people who grew up feeling like outsiders who didn’t have a place to feel comfortable in their own skin or share in someone else’s life experience. And it makes me think that when you don’t feel seen, you feel scared and feeling scared keeps you from reaching out to help other people.

I am endlessly grateful to be a part of the New York theater scene. Not just because I am in awe of the talent I witness when I go to the theater or because we are funny and curious and really great to be around. Not just because we raised so much money on this meal train that now we’re not only feeding the ICU, but also internal medicine and anesthesiology and are feeding the vital cleaning staff as well. But because among them, I feel seen and valued, a feeling powerful enough to mobilize me — a “non-essential” person — during this paralyzing, overwhelming, hard-to-navigate time.

On some fundamental level, I knew that if I put out the call, it would be answered. That is community. And as I sit in front of my computer, clicking the refresh button on the #BroadwayFeedsBellevue meal train page and see donations ranging from $5 to $5,000, I think that when we emerge from all of this that is what might save us.