Although Danielle Brooks is best known for her role as Taystee on the television show Orange Is the New Black, she is a creation of the stage. Our generation's drive to revitalize Black theater is rooted in her gift for externalized performance: she is the kind of actress who interprets the monologue as she delivers it. As Berniece in August Wilson's “The Piano Lesson” and as Sofia in John Doyle's revival of the musical “The Color Purple” on Broadway in 2015, Brooks brought the pain of life to her characters, her voice piercing the artificiality around her. For her, the act of inhabiting these women was personal. She recalled how recently, as a fifteen-year-old, I watched actor LaChanze play Sofia in the original musical production and burst into tears. Brooks won a Grammy and received a Tony nomination for her own portrayal of Sofia. She will reprise the role in a film adaptation of the musical, which will premiere on Christmas.
Wasn’t “The Color Purple” already wrung out? It's been more than four decades since Alice Walker published her epistolary novel—a long-form look back at the oppression faced by Celie Harris, a young black girl in turn-of-the-century Georgia—and in the intervening years, Walker's story has made into a movie, a musical, a revived musical and now made into a movie again. A few weeks ago, the latest film's director, Blitz Bazawule, admitted in the Los Angeles Times that he initially “didn't see why it needed to be remade.” '20s The Color Purple is a sweet, slicked-down show: the hubris of the original film, directed by Steven Spielberg and born of his belief that Hollywood can replace history, is not Bazawule's cup of tea. Humility and redemption are. The Ghanaian director has committed himself to high-class reverie, creating set pieces that spring from the imagination of Celie, played as a child by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi and as a wife by Fantasia Barrino, reprising her Broadway role. (Spielberg, as well as Quincy Jones, who produced the music for the 1985 film, and Oprah Winfrey, who played Sofia in that film, serve as executive producers.) As Sofia, Brooks turns the sun-bleached world upside down. Sofia throws herself into the lives of Celie, Mister (Colman Domingo) and Harpo (Corey Hawkins) and embodies self-determination, an idea that Celie, passive and sleepwalking, has not yet experienced. Brooks plays Sofia with unbridled passion, the connection between actor and character having been strengthened over so many years of knowledge. Even when the film's gloss raised doubts in my mind, I couldn't help but be blown away by Brooks.
I met Brooks at a Columbus Circle hotel earlier this month, about two hours after she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by a Supporting Actress. She was wearing a purple blouse and magenta knit pants and had a look of intimidated gratitude on her face. She is God-fearing, but she is also a researcher, and she could not understand how this fortune was given to her, the woman who was still the girl on the mezzanine. We talked about the state of black theater, the purpose of adaptation, and inner monologues. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
I was thinking about certain resonances and symmetries in your career. You were in the Broadway revival of the musical “The Color Purple” and now in the film, an adaptation of the musical. I read in an interview that your father took you to see the original production when you were a teenager. How was it?
It's crazy that we're here looking at this beautiful skyline on Fifty-sixth Street. I think the theater where I saw The Color Purple when I was fifteen was on Fifty-first or Fifty-second Street. So my emotions are very high right now, just like they were at Juilliard on Sixty-sixth Street, where I attended college.
The beginning of the journey begins with me getting an internship in New York at the age of fifteen. I'm from a small town, Simpsonville, South Carolina. I attended the Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, where I lived on campus. It was like a mini Juilliard. You had to audition. They only accepted a few. I graduated in a class of 95 students. I was the only black girl in my acting class. So winning this internship was a big deal. I was allowed to take one parent with me – I took my father with me. We had a great time in New York, getting to know this place and riding the ferries and stuff. But one of the things my dad did was take me to my first Broadway show. At the time, the only two black shows were The Color Purple and The Lion King. And so he chose “The Color Purple,” and thank God he did, because this little young woman with the curly hair and the chubby face was in heaven. It starts with two black girls in a tree. And I thought: What? This is what theater can be like?
Two years later I finally went to Juilliard. I didn't know how to do it because unfortunately my parents hadn't saved any money for me to go there. It was because of my godmother, who unfortunately passed away the same year I saw “The Color Purple.” She left twenty thousand dollars in her will so that I could go to college. During this time I met the incredible Corey Hawkins.
Who plays Harpo?
In this interpretation of “The Color Purple,” the film. We really got everything out of it, as he says. We were young, broke kids who sometimes had to jump the turnstile and sneak into Broadway theaters. Then I graduated, started auditioning for a lot of plays, and ended up doing Orange Is the New Black. My heart has always been in theater, and so it was really a pivot – one that I was excited about because it came with the check – but for me it was a pivot into the to enter the world of television. When I was doing this, I remember seeing a commercial where they were doing the revival of the musical The Color Purple and they were announcing Cynthia Erivo [as Celie] and Jennifer Hudson [as Shug Avery]. And I was sitting on my couch in Fort Greene and I was like, Oh man, I can't wait to see who they cast as Sofia. This possibility never occurred to me because I was working. How the hell are they supposed to get me to do eight shows a week? But somehow, by the grace of God, after all the no's off Broadway and on Broadway, the first Broadway show I was in was The Color Purple. It's so crazy, the full circle moments in this story.