This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
As the matriarch of “The Refuge Plays,” the actress takes the stage for the first time in 10 years.
Nicole Ari Parker is totally crushworthy. Whether you first fell for her in her numerous film and television roles, like Becky Barnett in the 1997 film Boogie Nights, or as Teri Joseph in the 2000 to 2004 TV series Soul Food (where she met her husband of 22 years, actor/director Boris Kodjoe), as the devious Giselle on Empire, or during her recent turn as Lisa Todd Wexley on And Just Like That, Parker enchants viewers with her performances, making the deep character work she does look effortless.
On the topic of deep character work, the NYU Tisch School of the Arts grad recently returned to the stage in the lead role of Early, the matriarch of The Refuge Plays. It’s a role that demands that she morph through the ages of 18 to 80-plus over the course of three and a half hours, and Parker rises to the occasion by commanding the stage in concert with her fellow actors, giving us an expertly nuanced performance.
The last time Parker performed on stage, she starred as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire in 2012 — she’s just been booked, busy, and blessed on television in the years between. Since The Refuge Plays recently premiered, she’s been in “full eight-shows-a-week swing,” she says. When we connect for our interview, she’s absolutely radiant and congenial in spite of nursing a cold and a torn calf muscle. The volatile New York climate has proved an adjustment: “It’s 90 degrees one day, and 60 the next!” she says.
Nicole Ari Parker attends the 2023 God’s Love We Deliver Golden Heart Awards at The Glasshouse in New York City.
Arturo Holmes//Getty Images
The stage, after all, is where Parker feels most at home. Her penchant for storytelling is what has always driven her: “I love weaving a story together and telling that story, but I also have always been that kid. I wrote shows and would perform them when all the grown-ups were there. I was a kid in the ’80s, so I watched Dallas and Knots Landing, and I was raised on Good Times and The Jeffersons — I rewrote an episode of Dallas. I was always performing.”
She starred in the very first play she ever saw — as Anne Sullivan in a play about Helen Keller, learning sign language for the role — but she was especially enchanted by Broadway musicals. “My heart just swelled when I would see someone tell a story through song and dance,” Parker explains. “I saw Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues. Shirley McLean and Stephanie Mills on Broadway doing The Wiz. At my grandmother’s house, I would watch Sweet Charity and A Star Is Born, with Judy Garland. I always felt, like, giant jazz hands,” she laughs. “I just wasn’t blessed with a singing voice, and I’m very upset at God about that. We have an ongoing conversation when I say my prayers at night: ‘If you give me a voice, I promise I’ll make you proud.’” I ask if she has ever trained. “I think I’m in let-it-go mode right now,” she jokes. “It’s still there. It might happen. You never know. The right part. In the right key!”
She was drawn to The Refuge Plays because she wanted to work with director Patricia McGregor. “We were talking over the course of a year about schedules and projects, and she had this on her calendar, and I said yes right away. I wanted the challenge. I hadn’t been onstage in 10 years, and I just jumped right in.” Early is a complex character with many layers, and inhabiting her through a tremendous age trajectory was the kind of challenge Parker was looking for. “The thing that I love about theater is that it maximizes you,” she relates. “This was a play that did just that. You really get to the core of her essence and why she is the way she is.”
The Refuge Plays is largely about generational trauma and how the ghosts of our ancestors are always looking out for us, and Parker sees it as a reverent exploration of familial dynamics. “It was a chance to use all of the things that I love, like history. Digging into a playwright’s vision and just being maximized again, you know? I love that Nathan Alan Davis gives us the opportunity to see where she [Early] came from,” Parker explains.
“Paying attention to all those details of why you know that one family member is cranky. You know they’ve been put into a box, in a way, but then [you get] the chance to discover why. People don’t know the things that even our grandmothers have been through. My husband’s mother is German, and she’s the daughter of World War II — in Germany. She lived till 95, so my kids had a great-grandmother for a while, which I love, and we got a lot of stories. And my mother, a Black American from the South, was born in 1943, so there’s so much history that informs quirks, humor, irritability, impatience, judgment that often comes from our grandmothers.”
One way she prepped for the role was a mindful exploration of how the physicality of a woman in her 80s might reflect her emotional experience, right down to how she carries herself. “You don’t ever want to over-age because 80-year-olds still want to walk,” she says. “There’s the inner propelling to live, to walk, to be, to be self-sufficient. I wanted to be mindful and respectful of that. In terms of her body posture, I really took cues from her life. Who wants to outlive their children? Grief has very specific body locations and affects the way people breathe. It all goes under the category of old age, but loss, grief, trauma, and unresolved anger have different ways of informing how a person moves. You might see an old lady walking down Broadway, and her head is down. If she went to the doctor, there is some form of scoliosis or degenerative bone issues, but really it’s tremendous grief, so I really took the cues from the play and tried to create her walk and her will.”
Nicole Ari Parker attends the Jean Paul Gaultier Haute couture Fall/Winter 2023/2024 show as part of Paris Fashion Week.
Pascal Le Segretain//Getty Images
Intrinsically, Parker says, “a true sense of right and wrong” is something that lives in both Early and herself. “I mean, I’ve grown spiritually and emotionally, but there is a part of me that’s very salt of the Earth, very law of the land,” she explains. “I always think that we live by three laws: the law of God, the law of the king, and the law of the land. They don’t always go together. If you do something to me, the law of God says I have to have compassion and forgive you. The law of the king, which is our legal system, means that you can pay for those damages, or I can sue you or anything like that. But the law of the land is ‘I’m coming over to your house and kicking your butt,’” she says with a mischievous grin.
In contrast to her iconically fashionable personal appearances and TV roles, Parker spends most of the play barefaced with rumpled hair, in a housecoat and slippers. To her, it’s all the same — a costume. “It’s all make-believe and all fun,” she says. “Sometimes [on TV], I am wearing the equivalent of both of my children’s tuition. I don’t know what that’s like in real life!” she laughs. “Even my underwear is, like, mortgage. It’s all the opportunity to live truthfully in imaginary circumstances.”
Her dream role would be to develop Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway. When asked what advice she’d go back in time to Tisch to give herself, the answer comes easily: “I said all the things to myself; I mean that’s why I’m still here,” she says. “There’s a line in the play where Early says to her great-grandson, ‘The silent messenger slips her long fingers through the prison bars of your ribs and squeezes. Why do you think we still here, huh?’ It’s because there has always been something. My dad even said, ‘You’re going into the business of no. You have to hold that yes.’”