“Today was so magical,” Tracee Ellis Ross said. “I feel aflutter.”
It was a sweltering evening at Bar Pitti in Greenwich Village this month, and Ms. Ross had just finished her first onstage dress rehearsal for the play “Every Brilliant Thing.”
In the one-person, interactive Broadway show, a narrator compiles a list of delights — ice cream, hammocks, “kind old people who aren’t weird and don’t smell unusual” — to prove to her depressed mother that life is worth living.
The show, which has been nominated for a Tony, is Ms. Ross’s Broadway debut. She succeeded Mariska Hargitay and Daniel Radcliffe and is the final performer to lead the play at the Hudson Theater. Ms. Ross’s first show was on Tuesday and the show is set to close August 9.
“It’s so perfectly me,” Ms. Ross, 53, said. “It’s about something real and something important and told through the lens of sheer joy.”
Known for her leading roles in the television series “Girlfriends” and “black-ish,” Ms. Ross said that it had been a dream of hers to be on Broadway. Instead of throwing a birthday party to celebrate turning 40, she rented stages in New York City and Los Angeles and invited her friends to watch her perform a one-woman show. She started by taking off her dress and standing in her bra and underwear.
“I haven’t been trying to do Broadway,” she said. “My goal is to do great things and to do material that makes my heart light up.”
To perform in “Every Brilliant Thing,” Ms. Ross rented an apartment in Lower Manhattan for three months. She has lived in Los Angeles since 1999, but considers herself a New Yorker.
As a child, Ms. Ross was enrolled by her mother, Diana Ross, at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side for eight years and at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx for three years. After graduating from Brown University, Ms. Ross worked in Manhattan as a fashion editor at Mirabella and New York Magazine.
“Then I jumped off the cliff and became an actor,” she said.
The executive editor of television at Variety, Michael Schneider, said that if Ms. Ross’s only acting credit was “Girlfriends,” it would be enough to cement her status in Hollywood. “But then came ‘black-ish,’ which made her one of TV’s top actresses and led to so many more opportunities, from hosting a night at the Democratic National Convention to now her new stint on Broadway,” he said.
On her way into Bar Pitti, Ms. Ross ran into the owner Giovanni Tognozzi and gave him a hug.
“That makes me so happy that he is here,” Ms. Ross said. “I used to come here three times a week with my best friend Samira. It was our kitchen, and for my 23rd birthday I took over the whole place.”
Samira is Samira Nasr, the editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar. Ms. Ross and Ms. Nasr are still close friends.
“When I first got here, my friends had a dinner, and I thought I was having dinner for Samira because she had just had a birthday,” she said. “They were like: ‘No, Tracee. This is your welcome back dinner.’ I said, guys. I’m not here. I’m only here until September.”
To adjust to her new dwelling, Ms. Ross recreated the aspects of home life that are most important to her.
One of those things is laundry.
After waving to the actress Famke Janssen, and before the actress Minka Kelly came to the table at Bar Pitti to say hello, Ms. Ross scrolled through her phone in search of a picture of her clothes neatly drying on a rack.
“I mean, the joy,” Ms. Ross said enthusiastically after finding the picture.
Before coming to the restaurant, Ms. Ross had gone to a market dressed in a vintage Chanel jumpsuit to buy ingredients for a pasta recipe that included butter, shaved Parmesan and lemon.
“I cannot keep enough food in my body right now,” she said. “It’s been eight hours a day onstage working and standing. Taking notes. All cylinders are firing. There’s also not enough time to sit down and calm down to eat.”
“Every Brilliant Thing,” written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, is a 40-page script that takes about 80 minutes for Ms. Ross to perform.
Mr. Macmillan said that Ms. Ross has approached the play in a unique way. “She’s finding moments in this play that I’ve never seen before,” he said. “For this play to work, the audience needs to really care about the protagonist and want them to succeed. Tracee doesn’t need to work hard to win us over — she has such innate warmth and openness that we’re on her side from the very beginning.”
Ms. Ross didn’t memorize the script. Instead, she spent weeks discovering the “shape of each scene” and used her imagination to create a biography and memories for her character.
“If I mess up a word,” she said, “I know what I’m trying to say, and I can always fill it back in because I know what the experience was.”
The process, Ms. Ross said, was like “swallowing a whale. It was my job to digest the whale and mama bird it to the audience so they could grasp it.”
To prepare for 40 shows in five weeks, Ms. Ross is taking care of herself both physically and emotionally.
That means not reading books.
“They require my imagination, and my imagination is working already,” she said.
But watching television is OK. “It’s being fed to me,” she said.
Basketball games are also fine. Ms. Ross watched the Knicks during the N.B.A. finals with friends from a box suite at Madison Square Garden.
“I’ve never gone to a Knicks game and not sat on the floor,” she said. “We can all roll our eyes at that. I’m rolling my eyes at it. But the boxes at M.S.G. are so amazing. I almost loved it more because I could see and feel the whole thing.”
The day before the show opened for previews, Ms. Ross got a facial at Crystal Greene Studio on the Upper East Side.
“I’m using the vehicle of my face more than normal,” she said. “I am making sure I take care of it. It’s my bread and butter.”
Before lying on the table to receive her treatment she looked calm and relaxed — not like someone who was hours away from making their Broadway debut. But before the session began, Ms. Ross explained that she was “really comfortable being afraid.”
“My mom told me a long time ago that anxiety and excitement are the same thing, just with a different label,” Ms. Ross said. “As I’ve grown, I say it a little bit differently, which is that fear and anxiety are the same. Just one has breath, and one doesn’t.”
The post Tracee Ellis Ross Is Back in New York City, Living a Dream Come True appeared first on New York Times.
