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The quiet of the waterfront is a stark contrast to the houses of Broadway, where McDonald has won more acting Tony Awards than any other performer. After her first at age 23 for Carousel, she went on to win for Master Class (1995), Ragtime (1998), A Raisin in the Sun (2004), the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess (2012) and Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill (2014). The accolades don't convey the transformative experience of seeing her on stage—her portrayal of the addiction-struggling Billie Holiday in Lady Day has stayed with me for a decade. (Along the way, there have been long-running roles in The Good Fight and The Gilded Age.) Onstage, she has the Midas touch and also her share of curses, as expectations rise exponentially when her name is on the marquee. This fall, she'll play Rose in Gypsy, the indomitable stage mother of comedic performer Gypsy Rose Lee. Rose is something of a musical version of Lady Macbeth, with a dash of Medea—despicable and compelling in equal measure, a role that seems almost inevitable for the great actors of our time to eventually take on.
Audra McDonald was hunched over a strange white plastic box. “I swear this is a kayak,” she said as it suddenly unfolded like a large origami, making a satisfying crunch as it hit the gravelly shore. What would last be my boat that afternoon was now a flat, corrugated piece of plastic. We were sitting on the banks of the Hudson River, just outside Croton-on-Hudson, a fairytale village about an hour’s train ride north of Manhattan. McDonald had lived here since she left the city after September 11. She had a young daughter by then and wanted to be away from the place she’d called home since enrolling at Juilliard as an undergraduate in 1988.
Today, however, McDonald is ready for a river trip in black leggings, a thin black T-shirt and old Tevas, her hair tucked neatly into a denim cap, without any pretense. She asks me to pull the white machine’s straps and adjust the pulleys, and it begins to take on a more nautical shape. “God, it’s hot!” she says, laughing. “This place is bigger than you, which is what I like about it,” she says of the Arcadian landscape. This is rural Washington Irving (the town of Sleepy Hollow is 10 miles south), with its sparkling streams, ancient trees and lush pastures. Raised in the sprawling suburbs of Fresno, California, McDonald wasn’t much for the outdoors, preferring the local theater, where, incidentally, she played a child extra in Gypsy when she was 10. Both her parents worked in education, her father, Stanley, a principal and then a superintendent, and her mother, Anna, a college administrator. Anna sang and played piano at home, but education was paramount. “It’s your armor and your weapon,” McDonald said. “My parents are proud that I was able to pursue this career. They would be just as proud if I became a teacher.”
