They Gotta Crow!

In the Manhattan Theatre Club production of Drowning Crow at the Biltmore, the well-known film, television, and stage actress Alfre Woodard stars with up-and-comer Anthony Mackie, who will
be seen in five films released during 2004. Drowning Crow is Regina Taylor’s adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull. In it, Woodard portrays actress Josephine Nicholas Ark Trip, the matriarch of a family living on the Gullah Islands off the coast of South Carolina; Mackie plays her son, C-Trip, a performance artist.

Woodard’s breakthrough role was in her third film, Cross Creek, for which she received a 1983 Oscar nomination. Arriving at the ceremony, the actress told reporters that she didn’t expect to win but remarked that “getting to go to the Academy Awards is like being invited to the palace.” Now, this Cinderella is attending a ball on Broadway, where she previously appeared in 1975 as an understudy in Me and Bessie (“I went on two or three times,” Woodard tells me). Is her preparation for a stage role different than for her work in film or TV? “Oh, yes!” she exclaims. “For film, I prepare in a much more quiet and intimate way. For TV, I prepare in a very focused way while, at the same time, I’m being my own navigator because they jump cut in TV. For the stage, I prepare as if I’m in an athletic competition. It’s getting your muscles up — your physical and vocal muscles, your endurance, your psyche — because it’s like an ongoing event.”

Mackie’s made a big splash in 2002’s 8 Mile, his first film. Following the actor’s audition for a part, writer-director Curtis Hanson created the character of Papa Doc, a hip-hop performer, for him. Mackie describes his role in Drowning Crow as “sort of a cross between Basquiat and the rapper Tupac. In The Seagull, Constantin [his character’s counterpart] is kind of content with the reality that fate brings to him. But, being a young black man and dealing with the world around him every day, C-Trip has to ask himself, ‘Why am I not afforded the same things as the men around me?’ He’s a very ambitious, very outspoken, very passionate person.”

Once quoted as to “what I would like to be as an actor,” Woodard claimed that she’d like to “take the essence of Vanessa Redgrave, Mary Alice, and Gerry Page — and roll them together.” Now she fondly recalls the analogy and adds, “It’s even more true than it was when I said it.” Mackie, for his part, says that “If you could incorporate Jeffrey Wright, Don Cheadle, and Eddie Murphy, you would have every aspect of a human being to create a phenomenal character.” Although he understudied Cheadle in Topdog/Underdog at the Public Theatre, Mackie didn’t have the opportunity to work with Wright (“I thought about breaking Don’s leg”) but considers him “the greatest actor of his generation — hands down. Jeffrey’s a beautiful cat.”

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The youngest of three siblings, the Tulsa-born Alfre Woodard was very close to her parents. I tell her that I’ve read about their staunch support of her in the early days of her career when, as I put it, she was struggling. “I never struggled,” she responds with a laugh. “People are struggling in Baghdad.” Both of her parents “have gone on, but they got to see me succeed. I’ll tell you something about them that has allowed me to be the actor that I am, to still be in this business and not be nuts, bitter, desperate, or competitive: You could say to my parents, ‘We just won our basketball game.’ They’d say, ‘Good for you. That’s great!’ Or you could say, ‘Daddy, I just got an Oscar nomination’ and he’d say, ‘Good for you. Whatever you’re doing, just stick with it.'”

Woodard made her professional debut at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in Horatio and Saved. She spent six years in Los Angeles, averaging only a few weeks of acting annually. As part of an improvisation group, she juggled, mimed, tap-danced, and impersonated animals. Eventually cast in productions of Me and Bessie and for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, she toured Australia in the latter and then appeared in a PBS-TV adaptation of the show. Other stage work includes Love Letters, Two by South, A Winter’s Tale, and A Map of the World. Since Woodard’s movie debut in Remember My Name (1979), she has excelled in such films as Miss Firecracker (1989), Grand Canyon (1991), and Passion Fish (1992).

Television has given Woodard her greatest success. Between 1984 and 2003, she garnered a dozen Emmy nominations and won four times: for episodes of Hill Street Blues and The Practice, the pilot of L.A. Law, and the TV movie Miss Evers’ Boys. She’s also appeared in three television series: Tucker’s Witch (1982-83), Sara (1985), and St. Elsewhere (1985-87).

Since 1983, Woodard has been married to writer Roderick Spencer; the couple has two adopted children, Mavis and Duncan. Happy to be on Broadway, Woodard declares that “From the time I get up in the morning, the play affects everything I do and see and eat, and who I talk to. I can’t let anything in the way that would keep me from being where I need to be psychologically, emotionally, and physically by eight o’clock.”

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In his Playbill bio, the New Orleans-born Anthony Mackie thanks his father, Willie Mackie, “for giving me everything I needed to survive.” Adds the actor, “He didn’t have the opportunities that I was afforded. My dad had to drop out of school in the eighth grade to pick cotton. Still, he moved on, worked to raise his family, and became a successful businessman. For 40 years, he’s been a roofer. He’ll get to see me act for the first time on opening night, which is his birthday.”

When Mackie was in fourth grade, a teacher suggested that he join the school’s theater program. “I was a bad kid,” Mackie confesses. “I’d finish my work and needed something to keep my focus. I met Sandra Anderson Richards [who headed the talent group] and I’ve been acting ever since. Later, another teacher, Ray Vrazel, taught me about Shakespeare and helped me to be more versed in the literate side of acting.” The young actor credits his success to his Juilliard training. “There are no limits,” he says of the school. “Every day, you work around the best talents and walk in the same steps as André Braugher, Baryshnikov….”

During his fourth year at Juilliard, Mackie was cast as Tupac Shakur in the school’s production of Up Against the Wind (written and directed by Juilliard graduates) and then was allowed to continue in the play in its Off-Broadway engagement at the New York Theater Workshop. “They never let you do a play outside school while you’re still a student,” Mackie tells me, “but Michael Kahn gave me his blessing.” His performance got him an agent “who’s now my manager and one of my best friends.”

Next came Topdog at the Public. But rather than stay with that show when it transferred to Broadway, Mackie opted to do Talk, for which he received an Obie. It was his first time working with Drowning Crow director Marion McClinton, who also directed Mackie in his Broadway debut role: he played Sylvester, the nephew of Ma Rainey (Whoopi Goldberg), in the revival of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. According to Mackie, “My dream was for my first play on Broadway to be an August Wilson. If he isn’t the greatest living playwright, he’s one of the top three. I was smiling every day!”

Among his films awaiting release are Haven, Brother to Brother, and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber, and Meryl Streep portray the characters originated by Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury. There are also two Spike Lee projects: Sucker-Free City and She Hate Me. Should he achieve screen stardom, Mackie insists that he’ll continue to act on stage. “I didn’t go to Juilliard to be a movie star,” he insists. “I went because all the actors I admire started on the wood.”

Mackie says that one of his major goals “is to do a play in the park. I’d love to do Romeo and Juliet as Mercutio or Romeo. I’d love to do Edmund or Edgar in King Lear. I’d love to do the Scottish play.” Meanwhile, he’s pleased to be playing C-Trip in Drowning Crow — and, like his co-star, his focus is entirely on the play. “There is nothing else during my day,” he says. “I get up, go to the gym, come back, go over my lines, get dinner, and go to the theater. It doesn’t afford me the opportunity to be carefree and easy, especially when I’m acting on stage with people I’ve admired for the six years I’ve been in New York. It’s a huge challenge and, at times, it’s frightening.”