Free Friends: A Love Story by Angela Bassett Page B

deathbed.
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    For my performance thesis during my senior year I directed and acted in Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. I was The Lady in Red. I applied to perform the show at the University Theater on what would have been parents’ weekend. They didn’t pick us for the main show that ran on weekends—probably because we weren’t doing South Pacific. But they did give us the Monday through Thursday before the big parents’ day show. We figured that they felt we weren’t good enough to be the stand-alone show for parents’ weekend. But now I understand that it was incredible validation of our talent that Yale University—where the white sons and daughters of privilege prepared for the world—permitted us to perform on their main stage. Still, we put on the play and featured all these wonderful women who were strong, passionate, talented and had an artistic flair. Theshow was so moving and engaging that the university asked us to extend it for another four days. On top of that a black church and a community organization wanted us to do it for them. After a while it seemed like the play kept going on and on, but it was very well received. Auntie Golden came up to see it. “Wow, you’re really good!” she told me. That was very affirming, since she once thought pursuing theater would be a waste.
    So during my senior year I was acting and directing on campus, in and out of New York researching my thesis, and talking to theater greats like Lloyd Richards and Douglas Turner Ward. I also made friends with some of the graduate drama students, like David Allan Grier, Reg E. Cathey and Izzy Monk, who were actors (David’s also a comedian); Jim Simpson, a director, who went on to marry Sigourney Weaver; and OyamO, who wrote The Resurrection of Lady Lester. I performed in The Resurrection with some of the grad students at the Yale Cabaret that students put on. That year I decided to apply to both Yale and NYU drama schools, but when I went to NYU to visit, I realized I wouldn’t apply in time to get financial aid. So I had to put all my eggs in one basket. Jim Simpson agreed to critique my monologues. I did two—Lady Anne from Richard III, and Frankie from Ladies in Waiting. Then I auditioned for and applied to the prestigious Yale Drama School—and got in!
    Unfortunately, my mother was never able to afford to come to Yale to see me act. But she did make it up for graduation. She was so proud of me and I was grateful she had encouraged me to attend. My dad also came. I was a little reserved. “Oh, hello…” Still, it was cool to have them both there together, along with Auntie Golden, who definitely wouldn’t miss it. It was cool, it was definitely cool.
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    I started drama school at Yale that fall of 1980. There were about seventeen students in my class—about ten men and seven women. Of those, there were two black guys and two blackgirls: Charles Dutton, Roger Guenveur Smith, Sabrina Le Beauf and me. Two brown skins, two light skins. Our class was like the little orphan class. We didn’t have any big stars or any pretty, pretty, pretty girls or any handsome, handsome, handsome guys. By industry standards we were just a hodgepodge of regular-looking interesting/character people—you know: tall, skinny, bald, comely, black; no one voluptuous or blond. At twenty-one or twenty-two I was about the youngest in our class; the median age was around twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Most of the students had been out in the world. When someone would tell them, “You go from this class to that class, then take a test, then break down the set, then go to rehearsal and you will go from morning ’til night,” they thought, “Oh, please! I’m fully grown. I don’t feel like doing that. I’m sleeping in.” Or they had opinions and would challenge the teachers. “I