Phylicia Rashad Knows Her Purpose

New York Times

24-03-2025

The first time Phylicia Rashad realized what she wanted to do with her life, she was making her way to the exit of a bustling auditorium. This was November 1959, in Houston, after a student music festival at the 9,000-seat Sam Houston Coliseum.
Rashad, who was then Phylicia Allen, had been the festival's mistress of ceremonies. Only 11 years old, she had won the role in a contest, beating out students from other Black elementary schools in her district, which remained defiantly segregated five years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Rashad spent six weeks preparing for the concert — practicing introductions for the performers and memorizing a libretto for an orchestra. On the night of the show, she wore a brand-new yellow pinafore dress over a white shirt, white shoes, white socks with a ruffled trim and a flower tiara on top of freshly done curls.
'When I walked out to the microphone to speak, I was suddenly in the spotlight for the first time,' she recalled in a recent interview. 'The light was so bright, I couldn't see anybody in the audience. So, every time I went up, I just talked to the light.'
As she was leaving the venue, Rashad overheard the mothers of some students talking among themselves.
'There she is,' she recalled hearing one say, gesturing toward her. 'There's that little girl who spoke so beautifully. Isn't she beautiful?'
Rashad had never thought of herself as beautiful. Among her family, she was sometimes teased because her rich brown skin was darker than that of her older brother, Tex, and younger sister, Debbie.
'My sister was cute as pie,' Rashad said. 'All the girls wanted to date my brother. And when I looked in the mirror, I thought, 'Well, God must've been on a lunch break.''
Hearing the women at the festival describe her as beautiful — while still buzzing with adrenaline from the spotlight — made something inside her click.
'When I heard that, I thought, 'When I grow up, I'll be an actress,'' Rashad said. ''I can play in the light and be beautiful all the time.''
Now 76, Rashad has been beautiful, and under a procession of spotlights, for more than five decades. She first appeared on Broadway as a standby in 1971 and has been known to millions since the 1980s as Clair Huxtable, the paragon of motherly grace from 'The Cosby Show.' In 2004, Rashad became the first Black woman to win the Tony Award for best actress in a play, for her performance in 'A Raisin in the Sun.' She has recently returned to Broadway — this time as a director — with 'Purpose,' the new play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the Tony Award-winning writer of 'Appropriate.'
Directing in theater, like motherhood, can be thankless work, promising neither the glamour of acting nor the esteem of playwriting. But Rashad has approached the role with the same passion and clarity of purpose that she has brought to every chapter of her voluminous career.
'It all comes back to serving the text,' she said, in the first of two conversations last month. 'As an actor, you're focused completely on whatever character you're playing. But as the director, I'm overseeing every aspect of the production, galvanizing all of these creative energies into alignment.'
AT BREAKFAST IN MIDTOWN on a windy February morning, Rashad wore a purple turtleneck sweater adorned with a long gold necklace and dark jewel pendant. She had waves of silver hair tucked neatly into a ponytail, a glistening French manicure and hands as soft as babies' cheeks. An air of stillness surrounded her, as if her mere presence were enough to dispel obnoxious or malign activity. Her voice was delicate yet resonant, her gaze jarringly direct.
Rashad, who has lived in Mount Vernon, N.Y., since the 1980s, arrived at the restaurant 20 minutes ahead of schedule. As it often does, her day had begun at 5 a.m., with quiet contemplation and a viewing of the sunrise. In 1980, after meeting the yogi Swami Muktananda at an ashram in the Catskills, Rashad began practicing Siddha yoga, which trains its followers to recognize the divinity in themselves and the surrounding world. She has traveled to study in India several times and once went to Australia with Muktananda's successor, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda.
'It's good to feel yourself a part of something bigger,' she said. 'If I didn't see a sunrise, if I couldn't see a sunset, if I couldn't take that time to just listen and take it in, then what is the day? What is life?'
Rashad had come to the city for rehearsals of 'Purpose,' which is scheduled to run until July in a Second Stage production at the Helen Hayes Theater. The play unfolds over a single night in the home of the Jasper family, a prominent political clan in Chicago, whose patriarch, Solomon, is an aging civil rights icon in the mold of Jesse Jackson. Solomon's sons — Nazareth, an aspiring landscape photographer and divinity school dropout, and Solomon Jr., a former state senator just out of prison for campaign finance fraud — are struggling to account for the paths their lives have taken when an unexpected dinner guest forces the entire family to question its foundational beliefs.
The previous day, Rashad and Jacobs-Jenkins had worked with the actors portraying Nazareth and Junior, Jon Michael Hill and Glenn Davis, to surface the emotions hidden behind their dialogue. (The full cast includes Harry Lennix, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Kara Young and Alana Arenas.)
'There is a lot of time wasted on the average new play because the director has to get the trust of the acting company,' Jacobs-Jenkins said. 'But when you have someone like Ms. Phylicia show up, who herself is a master actor, you can get into it really quick. Everyone is listening to her from minute one.'
Rashad first came to New York in 1968 for a summer internship, while studying theater as a sophomore at Howard University. She worked for a then-nascent Negro Ensemble Company, whose members would later include Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson and Laurence Fishburne. After graduation, Rashad moved into the YWCA on 51st Street in Midtown, above the Clark Center for the Performing Arts, then the home of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She first performed on Broadway in 1971, as a standby in Melvin Van Peebles's musical 'Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death,' an experimental ode to America's Black underclass that was nominated for seven Tony Awards.
As an ambitious Black actress in the '70s, Rashad paddled along the coast of stardom, never quite hitting the shore. At 26, shortly after giving birth to her first child, Billy, in 1974, she played both a munchkin and a field mouse in the original ensemble of 'The Wiz.' In 1978, while briefly married to Victor Willis, the lead singer of the Village People, she went on tour with 'Josephine Superstar,' a disco concept album inspired by the life of Josephine Baker.
'She was letting her hair down,' Debbie Allen said of her sister. 'Fully owning her beauty and her talent.'
After her marriage to Willis ended, in 1980, Rashad moved in with her sister. (In 1985, she married Ahmad Rashad, a sportscaster and former N.F.L. star, after he proposed to her during the Thanksgiving Day football game, in front of a television audience of 40 million viewers. The couple had one child, Condola, and divorced in 2001.) Allen, who was also an actress, as well as a dancer and choreographer, had recently shot the film 'Fame' — the acclaimed drama about a performing arts high school in New York — playing a role she would later reprise in an NBC television adaptation.
Rashad nearly gave up hope for her own breakthrough after being cast as Sheryl Lee Ralph's understudy in the original Broadway production of 'Dreamgirls,' in 1981. Three years later, while playing a recurring role on the soap opera 'One Life to Live,' her agent called about auditioning for 'The Cosby Show.'
'Cosby' was a sensation from almost the moment it premiered. Inspired by the comedy of its co-creator and star, Bill Cosby, the series introduced the world to the Huxtables — the charming, middle-class family of a proud but playful obstetrician named Cliff (Cosby) and an unflappable lawyer named Clair (Rashad). The show won three Emmy Awards — including outstanding comedy series — for its first season, which aired from 1984 to 1985, and averaged nearly 40 million weekly viewers, reviving interest in the sitcom as a format and propelling its network, NBC, to No. 1 in the ratings for the first time in a decade.
Early on, Rashad helped quiet a chorus of white critics who argued that the domestic reality depicted on the show was closer to that of a white family than a Black one.
'I consider the source,' she told a reporter in the fall of 1984. 'If the observation comes from white critics, maybe they have a problem in that they think of themselves as the only human beings on the planet. And when they see people who are not white in human circumstances, they feel we are not what we are supposed to be.'
Over the past decade, as Cosby has faced accusations of sexual assault and misconduct from dozens of women, the show's legacy has become fraught. Rashad declined to discuss the series for this article. In 2021, she apologized for a tweet celebrating the ruling that freed Cosby from prison after a court overturned his earlier sexual assault conviction. 'I am sorry,' she wrote, in a letter addressed, in part, to Howard University, where she was then the dean of its College of Fine Arts. 'I intend to earn your trust and your forgiveness.'
In recent years, Rashad has lent her screen presence to other television shows, including 'This Is Us,' and the 'Creed' films. But she has worked most consistently on the stage. In addition to her Tony-winning performance in 'A Raisin in the Sun,' she earned praise for her work in 'Head of Passes' and 'Skeleton Crew,' for which she won a second Tony Award, in 2022, for best featured actress in a play.
She has directed 10 plays in total, including several by August Wilson, with whom she worked as a performer on the original Broadway production of 'Gem of the Ocean.' In 2023, Glenn Davis, the co-artistic director of the Steppenwolf Theater Company, recruited her to direct 'Purpose,' an original commission that premiered in Chicago last spring.
SIX YEARS AGO, while she was in South Carolina visiting her mother, the poet Vivian Ayers, Rashad became the parent of a gray mackerel tabby cat she named Dolores. She had found it hiding in a tree.
'I was going to tell the neighbors that their dog had breached security and was in my mother's backyard when I heard a sound,' she said at breakfast in Midtown. 'I looked up, and on the lower branches of a magnolia tree was this tiny kitten with its tail standing straight up, shivering and shaking. I walked over and put my hands out but she backed up. I said, 'You don't have to be afraid. I'm not going to hurt you. You can come,' and she stepped into my hands.'
During rehearsals for 'Purpose,' Rashad became known for her gentle bedside manner. She would often approach actors quietly after a scene and whisper in their ear.
'She wants to protect what you're creating,' Davis said. 'She is very respectful of the actor's process.'
As a director, Rashad aims to create an environment where actors feel freed from the temptations of ego. She believes a performance is most powerful when approached as an act of selfless devotion, rather than 'people coming to see how brilliant you are, or how brightly you can shine.'
'When our work is understood and performed as an offering, it takes on greater significance,' she said. 'The first offering is to the work. And by serving the work, you are serving the people who you're working with, and by serving the people who you're working with, you serve the audience.'
At the restaurant, she thought back to the weeks she had spent preparing for the Houston music festival that she emceed as a child, where she overheard a group of women call her beautiful.
'It would take many years before I understood this, but what those women were saying had nothing to do with what I looked like,' she said. 'It was the fact that I knew that script and was speaking from my heart. That's what was beautiful.'