Audra McDonald is crouched over a curious white plastic box. “I swear this is a kayak,” she says as it suddenly unfolds like large-scale origami, making a satisfying crunch as it hits the pebbly shore. What will eventually be my vessel for the afternoon is now a flat piece of corrugated plastic.
We are perched on the banks of the Hudson River, just outside of Croton-on-Hudson, a storybook village about an hour’s train ride north of Manhattan. McDonald has lived here ever since she left the city in the wake of September 11. She had an infant daughter at the time and wanted some distance from the place she had called home ever since enrolling at Juilliard as an undergraduate in 1988.
The quiet of the riverbank is a stark contrast to the Broadway houses where McDonald has earned more acting Tony Awards than any other performer. After her first at 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 quite convey the transformative experience of seeing her onstage—her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the throes of addiction in Lady Day has stayed with me for a decade. (Along the way, there have been long-running parts on The Good Fight and The Gilded Age.) Onstage, she has the Midas touch and also something of its curse, as expectations rise exponentially when her name is above the marquee. This fall, she will play the role of Rose in Gypsy, the indomitable stage mother to the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee. The character of Rose is something like the musical theater equivalent of Lady Macbeth, with a dash of Medea—despicable and irresistible in alternating measures, an almost inevitable role for the great actors of our time to eventually take on.
Today, however, McDonald is river-ready in black leggings, a gauzy black T-shirt, and well-worn Tevas, her hair tucked neatly into a denim cap, with not a hint of pretense about her. She enlists me in pulling the white contraption’s straps and adjusting pulleys, and it begins to take a more nautical shape. “Lordy, it is hot!” she says, laughing.
“This place is bigger than you, that’s what I like about it,” she says of the arcadian landscape. This is Washington Irving country (the town of Sleepy Hollow is 10 miles south), with its glittering streams, ancient trees, and sylvan meadows. Growing up amid the suburban sprawl of Fresno, California, McDonald was not so outdoorsy, preferring her local theater, where, incidentally, she played a child extra in Gypsy when she was 10. Both parents worked in education, her father, Stanley, as a principal then a superintendent and her mother, Anna, as a university administrator. Anna sang and played the piano in the home, but education was paramount. “That was your weapon and your armor,” McDonald says. “My parents were proud that I was able to have a career doing this. They would have been just as proud if I had been a teacher.”
Once everything is buckled and strapped, McDonald guides me into my craft. “You have to sit down right away or else.” I collapse on to the seat, nearly capsizing before we even embark. She calls out 5, 6, 7, 8 with a dance captain’s staccato rhythm and gently pushes me into the water. Then she hops on to her own vessel, and we are off.