From No Home to Back Home on Broadway: Spotlighting stage veteran Terri White
Written by admin2 on November 5th, 2009Filed under: Themes, Bum Deal
Terri White getting made up in the St.James Theater on Broadway. (Photo by Piotr Redlinski)
An overwhelmingly moving story…after the jump!
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Quoting the New York Times, in an article by Susan Dominus titled From No Home to Back Home on Broadway:
Midway through “Finian’s Rainbow,” which opens Thursday on Broadway, the stage veteran Terri White delivers a bluesy, rasping version of the song “Necessity.” The character wants to play, to rest her “head in the shade,” but, Ms. White belts out, turning to the face the audience directly, “the rent ain’t paid!”
It is one of those crucial moments in musical theater, a flash of heartbreak that tethers the fanciful, carefree world of the show to the familiar, harsh realities of the everyday.
If Ms. White’s delivery feels particularly authentic, it is because she has lived those lyrics more personally than even the most diehard method actress would want. In the summer of 2008, Ms. White, 61, could not make rent. She was evicted from her apartment of 14 years, after a breakup with a longtime girlfriend. She could not work. She also could not find a way to ask for help. For three months, when she was not crashing on a friend’s couch, she slept in Washington Square Park. [...]
In the park, Ms. White slept on a bench near the bathroom because it made her feel more civilized. She knew some of the longstanding homeless there from her years in the neighborhood (they often tried to bum cigarettes as she smoked on the sidewalk). And she got to know the temporarily homeless like herself.
“Their clothes did not look like they were from Goodwill,” she said. “They looked like they’d had jobs.”
Ms. White never mentioned to the others who slept in the park that she had performed alongside Glenn Close in the Tony-nominated “Barnum,” in 1980; nor did she ask about their pasts. Severely depressed, she was too proud to reach out to social services, and kept the extent of her problems from friends. “Most of them are barely getting by in their tiny apartments as it is,” she said. “People in New York, they need their patterns. You can’t interrupt them.”
To avoid the police, Ms. White usually alternated sleeping for an hour with walking for an hour, which is what she was doing when she ran into Officer David Taylor on Grove Street at 4 a.m. one day last fall. Officer Taylor had come to know Ms. White when he was patrolling the West Village. He admired her energy, and, off-duty, came to see her perform. He had never seen her looking like she did on Grove Street. “She is usually someone who lifts your energy if you’re feeling down,” he said. “That night she looked soulless. I was concerned for her — scared.”
Officer Taylor made a few phone calls. A friend in Jersey City had a place with a basement apartment no one was using. Ms. White moved in the next day, rent-free. She got herself back into the mental shape to take advantage of opportunities that came her way. An old friend in the Florida Keys invited her to perform at her nightclub, and another friend bought her a plane ticket.
In Florida, she met Donna Barnett, a stately 62-year-old jewelry designer — and, like Ms. White, a cigarette fiend, a fan of road trips and musicals and Maker’s Mark. The two fell in love, and moved in together. When the call came for an audition for an Encores! concert performance of “Finian’s Rainbow” (a predecessor to the Broadway production), Ms. Barnett paid her airfare back to New York. After months of coming close, but ultimately hearing “No thank you” — she auditioned nine times for “Chicago” — Ms. White landed the part of “Finian’s” Dottie.
So, now, almost a year to the day after she last slept on a bench, Ms. White is back on Broadway, in a play she first performed in as a child, at the St. James Theater — the very place she earned her Tony nomination for “Barnum.” On Sunday, she and Ms. Barnett are having a commitment ceremony at the St. James.
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If you live anywhere near NYC, go see Finian’s Rainbow >>
Then…
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