Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  Then one day we were in the apartment having another blow-up argument, when Charles claimed an agent only agreed to meet me because I was in a relationship with him.

  “Awww, shit!”

  Shoomp! In that split second the window came down, the drapes were pulled, the hatches battened, the shutters closed, the door was slammed and locked. I only got something because of him. Hmmph! That was complete and utter bullshit. After receiving standing ovations at age sixteen, four years of college, three years of grad school and a year of performing in New York, I was certain of my acting abilities. People have different gifts and I was fortunate enough to discover mine early on. It is a gift from God. It has nothing to do with anyone else. In other areas I might have to compromise and negotiate about many things in my life, but I never had to compromise about acting. So trying to mess with me about acting was intentionally messing with my self-esteem. It was like you don’t want to whup my ass, but you do want to sabotage me emotionally to try to make me your slave.

  “Oh, I see what you doin’,” I said to him. “You got an ego and you tryin’ to con somebody. Well, you know what? I may not know everything, I may not know a lot. But I can act my ass off! You can mess with me about some other stuff, but ’bout some actin’ you’d better step back—you can’t do it. ’Cause this is what I do and it’s not something I chose to do, it’s from God. He gave it to me, not you.”

  That was absolutely the end of our relationship—it was sho’ ’nuff over. I may have been weakened in some ways because I didn’t have a father, but on the other side of that, I had my mother’s take-no-prisoners, no-bullshit “get out!” as an example. That strengthened me, so I used it. I gathered up all his things, addressed them to him in care of the woman in the gold dress and sent the package off. Honestly, a part of me was kind of glad he had somebody because I knew he would be all right. After that I said R.I.P! “Thank you, Lord!” I lit some candles and gave myself seven days—oh, yeah, I gave myself some time. It had been three years; I had never dated anybody that long; you gotta mourn the death of something. If I wanted to cry, blubber, fall out, feel sorry for myself, what the heck. But at the end of seven days, that was it; it was over. I’d wash my face and blow out the candles.

  After that, folks tried their best to drag me back through my shit. “Oh, you must have been so embarrassed!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was embarrassing,” and this, that and the other. But, I said, “Moving on!” I’m sorry, that was yesterday. Ain’t nothin’ hap’nin today. “What? Who? Huh? What’s wrong with you? Please! I’m over it. What you talkin’ ’bout? Girl, please, put some music on! Come on, what club we goin’ to? Oooh, ain’t he cute!”

  By now I was in the second half of my twenties. I wasn’t sure about marriage—when or how it would happen—but I did entertain the notion of having a baby. I had gotten the idea in my head that I should do that when I was twenty-nine. But when I mentioned it to Mama, she put an end to that notion by reminding me about the opportunities I had, what her life had been like and that the Bible said things should occur in “decency and in order”. Marriage came before babies. “Oh, Angela,” she told me. “I hope you’ll get married first.”

  That same spring of ’85 Lloyd Richards, the former Yale drama school dean, called me. Aleta Mitchell, an alum from the year behind me, would be leaving Ma Rainey to get married. He offered me the opportunity to play the role of Dussie Mae. I was excited! I had actually played Dussie Mae one summer during grad school when I had worked at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in New York. But by the time the play came to the Yale Repertory Theater, I had already graduated. Now something good, exciting, that I’d always dreamed of, was finally about to happen. Of course, you-know-who was also in the play. Yet I knew this would be my pièce de résistance. The fact that I would be performing with Charles didn’t even matter.

  My character, Dussie Mae, was the friend of Ma Rainey played by the late great actress Theresa Merritt. Charles’s character, Levee, likes her, but one of the other characters tells him to watch out.

  You better get your eyes off Ma’s girl.

  Ma ain’t got that girl. That girl got a mind of her own, Levee answers. He flirts with Dussie Mae, and she tries to get what she can get. There are scenes in the play where Dussie puts on her stocking in front of him, leans over him, sits on his lap. I worked those scenes.

  Do you want some of this lemonade?

  Charles and I were on the outs, but all our scenes were hot! We treated each other nicely behind the scenes, but when we were onstage we were battling out our personal life on a Broadway stage. Our performance was infused with all the drama that was going on in life. This lasted for about two weeks, until the play’s eight-month run ended.

  About a year and a half later, Lloyd asked me to come to Yale Rep to play the character Martha Pentacost in August Wilson’s third play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. In the play, set in Pittsburgh in 1910, Martha had lost her husband, Herald Loomis, after Joe Turner, a notorious Tennessee plantation owner who existed in real life, had enslaved him illegally on a chain gang for preaching and trying to save some black men’s souls. Martha and Herald had a child together. When their love was ripped apart by these circumstances, Martha dealt with it by leaving her daughter with a relative, migrating north to Pittsburgh and pouring herself into the church—in essence, by marrying the Lord. In the meantime, locked up, Herald turned away from God. Once he was released, he set off to find his family. But they weren’t where he had left them. He searched for them, eventually finding his daughter and, finally, Martha. The play is over two hours long and you hear about Martha the whole time, but she doesn’t come onstage until the last twenty minutes, during which she goes into something like an apostolic trance. Her only scene is with Herald, who was played by—who else?—Charles.

  Well, we were up at Yale rehearsing and working on the play. I was doing my thing, kind of marking and learning it, when one day Lloyd says to me in his proper, professorial kind of way, “Angela, you and Charles used to date, right?”

  “Yeah….”

  “Well, use it.”

  “Oh, shoot! He done called me out,” I remember saying to myself. “Now, that’s a low blow.” Of course, he didn’t mean it that way. I hold Lloyd in the highest regard. Back then he was like Papa San—“Dean Richards, sir.” It’s only recently that I started using his first name. I guess he knew Charles and I had a little history, a little drama, volatility or whatever.

  “Use it!”

  That’s all he had to say. When I came back and did my scene after that, I started speaking in tongues.

  TheLordismyshepardIshallnotwant….YeathoughIwalkthroughthevalleyoftheshadowofdeath, Iwillfearnoevil.

  I was levitating off the stage.

  You weren’t there, you weren’t there. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Here I am nineteen and have this baby. I needed you, I needed you.

  Charles came right back at me with tears coming out of his eyes.

  Blood? Blood make you clean?

  You really sensed that Martha and Herald loved each other. People were mesmerized. I learned to put all my experiences—be they happy or be they not—into the work.

  So we did Joe Turner at Yale Rep, then we toured several cities. My cast member Ahren Moore had this cute, skinny, athletic little boyfriend, Courtney B. Vance, the same prospective student Charles, John Turturro and I had taken out when I was just leaving Yale. They had both gotten into Yale though the odds were so against them. They had also set up house and were doin’ it. They were so young, yet they were such a team. I admired that. I remember thinking that they were just amazing. They bad! They bad! Courtney followed Ahren from town to town to see her perform as we traveled the regional theater circuit. We never really said much more than hi and bye, but I could see he was a wonderful guy. Around the time we hit the road, Charles left to do a movie, which paid more, I’m sure, and was very prestigious. So he left the play and Delroy Lindo came in.
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br />   Delroy was my buddy around New York. He’s a great actor, strikes an imposing figure and has a very powerful voice. But we had never worked together. Once we got started, we kind of worked differently. With Charles, I had, “Y’all used to date? Just use it.” With Delroy, we had to find something else. I was hoping to be able to work our roles out together—to affect him and be affected by him as an actor. You say it, and it makes me feel, and I react. That’s what I was used to doing. But I imagine he felt like he was behind and had to learn all these lines in a vacuum. He seemed to do an awful lot of work off to himself. Some nights I felt that he was really hearing me. Those nights were really sweet. Other nights, I felt that he was trying to beat me down with his size, his physicality, the power of his voice, his anger. I felt like we weren’t in sync, that we were missing so many subtleties. I wanted Herald Loomis to hear Martha Pentacost and Martha to hear Herald. Instead, it felt like, “I got my point and my point is more important!” “Well, I’ve got my point and my point is more important!” Who knows, maybe it was all in my head. But that’s what I complained about. I complained to anyone who would listen. I complained, complained, complained so much that I got sick of hearing myself. At one point I dropped out of the show. Then Lloyd called up and asked me back. At that point I decided, I love this role, I love this play and it’s a phenomenal opportunity. I’m gonna freakin’ stop bellyachin’ and complaining and trying to be right. I worked on looking at Delroy differently. I started picking out things I liked about him personally that could make me love Herald Loomis. The fact that he was kind, that he would cook all sorts of healthy foods for me and invite me to dinner, the crook of his neck or whatever. It worked.

  While Joe Turner was playing in San Diego, a young man named Wren T. Brown came backstage and introduced himself to me. Wren was a Los Angeles actor. He had heard about me from Ahren Staunton, my castmate from Colored People’s Time, whom he’d met while they were each working in the Philippines. Wren and I became fast friends. While in California, I also auditioned for my first movie, Dessa Rose. I tried out for the role of Dessa, one of the female leads and a slave. I borrowed a long skirt and blouse from a friend, rented a car and drove to L.A. for the audition, then continued with the show.

  In late March of 1988, Joe Turner reached Broadway, where we played at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. This time—at not quite thirty years old—I was on Broadway for real, in a role that I originated, as opposed to a show I’d joined. Opening night was incredibly exciting. My mom, D’nette and my New York aunts and uncles came to see me. As I sat in the dressing room for two hours while I waited for my entrance, I could hear the audience buzzing and feel its electricity. We had been traveling and honing the show for months. This night everyone was finding their perfect pitch!

  At the play’s climax, Martha tries to bring Herald back to the church.

  He’ll give you peace. The blood of Jesus will make you clean.

  Herald says, Blood make you clean? Then reaches into his pocket to pull out a knife, which he then drags across his chest in a symbolic bloodletting, a letting out of the poison that’s gotten into his heart. The prop knife is filled with blood, so as he touches his skin it looks like he’s cutting himself.

  But this night Delroy reached into his pocket to get his knife and his knife wasn’t there! The play had been going along splendidly, on all six cylinders. Poppin’! It was like the roof was going to blow off. But now his knife wasn’t there.

  If you had seen the look in his eyes—I mean, it was like someone had grabbed his heart, like someone had died. And for a split second, he was no good, just no good—“Oh, no! What the hell do I do?” When that happened, me, L. Scott Caldwell, the little girl—everybody in the scene—we were scared, scared for him. There was nothing we could do; we couldn’t help him. The moment didn’t lend itself to improvisation. He was a drowning man and none of us could save him. Though we were standing there, at that point there was a part of us that was gone—out of the scene. Actor to actor, we had that look. Our bodies were still there but our faces said, “Holy moly.” Hopefully, we were professional enough that our faces didn’t show it. Delroy was scared as hell. Now, what was he going to do?

  Fortunately for him, for us, for everybody, we’re standing in the kitchen in front of a table. He thinks quick and grabs the butter knife on the table and he scratches across his chest with it.

  Blood, blood. You want blood?

  Of course there’s no blood. So he covers his chest then runs offstage, which is what Herald Loomis does—runs off into the world. I grabbed our little girl and we cried and we finished the scene. Then we did our curtain call. Following our final bow, Delroy sat on the steps and cried, sobbed, he was racked with grief. To be perfectly honest, I felt smug—an actor always checks his props. Even if your prop person hands it to you, you always check it. So he cried and I stepped over him and went on downstairs. Fortunately D’nette had a lot more compassion. She consoled him. “It’s okay. It was still good, it was still really good tonight.” And she was right. Even with the mistake, it was a phenomenal evening. The play had been soaring up to that point. He had done a phenomenal job—that mistake didn’t ruin it. We knew we were going to get a good review.

  After we changed, we attended the cast party. It was very festive, there was a lot of music and everyone was in a celebratory mood. Charles showed up, accompanied by the same woman who had been wearing the gold dress, but who was not his mama. While she was sitting on one side of the room, he worked his way over to me.

  He said, “Ang, girl, you were wonderful!”

  “Yeah? Well, thank you. It was a pretty good night.”

  “Girl, you were great!”

  Charles and I had a friendly conversation, but I noticed he was giving me very close body language—very face-to-face, leaning in, laughing. From the outside looking in, I’m sure we looked very buddy-buddy, conspiratorial, maybe even like something’s going on between us—like something that ain’t going on is going on. Now, I’d been in the position of the woman on the other side of the room before, feeling uncomfortable, looking and wondering if something was happening between Charles and another woman. And our breakup had already been ugly, it had already been embarrassing. At that point I didn’t want a lot of confusion. So I leaned in and said, “Hey, Roc, let’s draw the curtain on all this drama. Why don’t you take me over and introduce me to your lady.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, you know,” I continued. “It’s been a whole lot of drama. Let’s just draw the curtain. Because I’m sure this conversation we’re having—to her—is keeping something going. So why don’t you take me over and introduce me.”

  Needless to say, the laughter stopped. He took me over to meet her.

  “Debbi, this is Angela. Angela, this is Debbi.”

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, too.”

  I sat down, Debbi and I chitchatted for a few minutes, then she took the conversation a little bit deeper. Charles’s friend Reggie, from the midnight cabaret, had this girlfriend named Irene whom I knew.

  Debbi said, “Irene told me I would like you if I knew you.”

  “Oh, really?”

  I guess that was, in a way, her admission. (The “other woman” always knows about the first woman, right?) But how in the world would we have gotten to know each other with all this stuff going on? So we talked cordially. In the meantime my sister kept flitting around the table, because she knew—and everyone else in the room knew—our history, and they were all kinda lookin’. I don’t know if they thought a fight was gonna break out or what. At one point Charles came over to the table and said, “How y’all doing?”

  “Oh, we’re good. Real good. How are you doin’?”

  I guess he could handle it when he had one woman over here and the other over there. But once we were talking to each other, he must have wondered, What in the hell are they telling each other?

  D�
��nette came by the table yet again—this time with her camera—and took a picture of us together that opening night: Debbi and me. I still have it today. The whole interaction was nice. It was very empowering. Once again, I was no longer mad at a woman—this time, a sistah—over a man. I didn’t feel insecure anymore. I wasn’t having a conversation with him and by default making her feel insecure. I wasn’t giving him more power and her less power. Instead, let’s settle stuff. And that evening that’s what happened. In that moment we fell in like with each other, and all of the nonsense was over. Eventually Charles married Debbi Morgan, the actress and soap opera star (they’ve since divorced). You know her as the first Dr. Angela “Angie” Baxter Hubbard Harrison Foster on All My Children, the first Dr. Ellen Burgess on General Hospital and Port Charles,Mozelle Batiste Delacroix in Eve’s Bayou and Twana in Woman Thou Art Loosed. To this day, when Debbi and I are in each other’s company we’re genuinely happy to see each other.

  That era—the mid to late ’80s—marked the rise of August Wilson as a great American playwright. All told, ten of his plays made it to Broadway, the most of any other American playwright and certainly more than any African-American. His death from liver cancer in 2005, at age sixty, brought his life to an early end. Lloyd Richards directed five of Wilson’s plays. This great director/playwrighting team garnered many of the theater’s highest honors, including Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes for their work together. Although the two ultimately chose to go their separate ways, the mark they left on the stage was indelible. Lloyd passed away on his birthday in 2006 at the age of 87.

  But back in 1988, August Wilson was it! Like Ma Rainey and Tony Award-winner Fences, Joe Turner was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. Delroy snapped back from his opening-night snafu and was nominated for Best Featured Actor. Today you know him for his fabulous acting in Get Shorty, The Cider House Rules or Lackawanna Blues, among others. L. Scott Caldwell, Ahren Moore and Kimberly Scott were all nominated for Best Actress (L. Scott won). And August Wilson, the play and cast were nominated for all sorts of Drama Desk awards. As a performer it was exciting to see black faces on Broadway and to receive such wonderful acknowledgment and recognition. It was finally “C.P. time” in the best sense of the term—a time for black actors to shine! The door to the world of theatrical acting opportunities that had been all but slammed shut to black actors of earlier generations was beginning to crack open, in large part because August Wilson’s genius couldn’t be denied. A whole new generation of black actors was getting ready to step through it. I didn’t know it yet, but I would be one of them.