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Teaching Artist Leah Reddy spoke with April Matthis about her work on Primary Trust.

Leah Reddy: What is your theatre origin story?

April Matthis: I was a college student at the University of Texas at Austin. I had always kind of grown up with a lot of imaginative play at home. Everything from Barbie dolls to making audio tape recordings on cassettes where I would improvise sermons and talk shows and commercials accompanied by my Casio and occasionally with my little sister as a special guest. I never took any of that seriously — improvising around the kitchen island with my mom doing impressions of racist cops — until college, when I took this elective called Actual Lives. It was cross-referenced with Women's Studies and Performance Studies, and it was taught by Terry Galloway. It was just kind of like an introduction to performance. And what I learned from that class was basically anything could be performance. We're performing right now, performing versions of ourselves. So we saw some art and I was inspired to do kind of a performance piece where I straightened my hair for the class and contextualized, like the tradition of Black people doing that. And from there I recognized the performance bug in myself. So when I decided to audition for my first play, I made up two contrasting monologues and a resume.

I mean it when I said “made up”. Actor friends told me to use credits from out of town because then no one would be on to me. Austin is such a small theatre community, so tight-knit that people would know if I was lying. I made up these credits and I auditioned for this production of A Tale of Two Cities at the Vortex Theatre, and I was cast as Blood Thirsty Man. That was my theatrical debut. From there, I started working more in Austin, Texas.

I came to New York to visit a friend, Forrest McClendon, whom I had worked with on a production of Parks’s The America Play. He took me to New Dramatists to show me a picture of myself from a production of The Cry Pitch Carrolls by Ruth Margraff. I didn't realize that the kind of theatre I'd fallen into was this kind of avant-garde experimental work. I wasn't doing Shaw, I wasn't doing A Raisin in the Sun. My first theatrical experience was this real heady, edgy stuff. I did Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks as my first leading role. It was staged under a circus tent outside, and I wore a big fake butt. Of course, I would reexamine some of the things that we did now, but that was how I got started in theatre.

So my friend Forrest McClendon showed me a picture of myself in New York City at this wonderful place called New Dramatists that produced these kooky new playwrights. And one of them walked out at that moment. His name was Lonnie Carter, and he cast me in a reading. I flew back to New York, because I had a job as an actor in New York doing this reading of his called Chocolate City that was kind of like a riff on Peter Pan. And that was paid $5 because that's what New Dramatists paid for readings at the time. I made some connections from that, and that encouraged me to make the move that I had been wanting to make since childhood to New York.

LR: Beyond that start in the theatre, were there any specific experiences or teachers that helped shape you as an artist?

AM: I also did workshops with Deborah Hay, pioneering dancer and choreographer from the Judson Church back in the sixties. She did a workshop with us, and she talked about all your trillions of cells that want to express themselves right now, and how do you activate that in your body? And she had a mantra, "Where I am is what I need."

So those kinds of things started to penetrate my consciousness or subconsciousness. And I also took a performance class with the great Laurie Carlos, who was one of the original performers in For Colored Girls. She had us do an exercise where we practiced saying no, and it was just the word no. And then I just kept repeating it until people started crying. It was another kind of profound experience, that workshop with her, where I felt like she kind of intuited me and saw me, made me look at some things about myself and how I moved in the world. It was one encounter. But for the longest time, I've put her on my resume because I was like, "That workshop did something."

LR: What drew you to Primary Trust?

AM: I did a Zoom reading of it, and I really liked Paris when I saw it, which was the same team of [playwright] Eboni Booth collaborating with [director] Knud Adams. I thought it was really smart. I liked the location of interest of that play. Having specifically Black characters living in the world and dealing with questions of office culture, and middle management, and blue-collar work. Being a young person trying to eke out a living.

I recognize that time in your life and those kinds of concerns about just basic making enough to pay rent and figuring out your life and health insurance. I read an early draft of Primary Trust, and I was interested in this adult Black man who's emotionally stunted somehow. I don't feel like I get to see that a lot without it being pathologized, that you can just sit with these people and sit with their minds and their questions. There was something about it being a kind of small and quiet world that I don't get to see myself reflected in but feels so familiar to me.

LR: You play multiple characters in Primary Trust. How are you approaching that in the rehearsal process?

AM: We've had some discussions around this because, yes, I'm doing different voices, a couple different accents, but I think we've come to a decision in the room not to rely on super broad characterizations, because the idea is that [the character] Kenneth sees a lot of waiters and waitresses because he's a regular at this bar, but he doesn't really get to know them. And so, we're not as an audience expected to get to know them. It's kind of a rotating cast of characters and they all pretty much say the same thing: "Welcome to Wally's." It's been more work of who these actual people are. Like, I actually visualize them. They have faces and bodies for me. I think about their home life. Some of them have names. I think about their outlook on life. So that's character work too. It's not just physicality. Physicality is part of it, but it's also what's their taste in music? What do they like on a sandwich? And those things that make you a human being, not just your biological backstory. I'm finding that the characters that come to the forefront for me, most easily and clearly, are the ones who I feel have a distinct point of view. There's this one waiter that I described in the room. I said, "He's not necessarily friendly, but he is a good waiter. He'll get you all the things that you need and he'll remember everything, but he might never smile at you." And that resonated with people. And people were like, "Oh yeah, I love those kinds of waiters." And it's like, you give them a good tip.

That's the kind of work I've been working on. But some of [my characters] have one line, so it's like, do they need to have a full life and personality, the ones who just have half a line? Maybe not, because you're not meant to be watching how great an actor I am all the time. You're meant to be watching how Kenneth is experiencing a moment in this restaurant and time is passing with each passing waiter. Days could be passing, hours could be passing. He could be transforming in a thought. I’m thinking about what's needed to serve the play rather than, "I just gotta get my French accent out there."

LR: You've recently done Broadway, you've done film and television work. How do you choose projects?

AM: Well, I see what is possible next, what pays a living wage and has a reasonable schedule. But I look for something that is exciting, something that is singular, something that seems subversive somehow, smart, interesting. Things that make me learn more about a world, that take me to different places, both geographically and imaginatively. There are a lot of roles for people who look like me, my age range, for “the mom of...”, “the wife of...” And while I am those things in life, the way that that gets flattened out on screen is something that is not very interesting to me. If you're looking for someone who has maybe different things going on in her head than what she's putting out there, then that might be more what I'm good at.

LR: What advice do you have for young or emerging actors? Thinking specifically of our student population.

AM: I'd say find out what you like, and it doesn't have to be what everyone else likes. Find out what your taste is in movies, in music, in clothes, in architecture, in books, and trust your own taste. And that way, the kinds of things that'll come your way will be things that when you ask yourself, "Would I want to watch this? Would I want to go see this? Would I want to consume this as an audience?" You'll say, "Yes." It's not about pleasing other people more than pleasing yourself as an artist. When I say pleasing yourself, I don't mean just being satisfied with, "I'm the best, I'm doing great. I'm the best at this." It's like, "I'm most engaged, I'm most interested. This is what I want to be doing. This can take my focus all day, I could just forget what time it is working on this." That's the kind of stuff you want to figure out and then follow that.