On Dec. 2, Tommy joined the theater faculty for a virtual town hall on Zoom, where she responded to questions about her acting class at Fordham, her first experience working on a major motion picture, and the ghosts that find their way into all of her projects. Clint Ramos, head of design and production, moderated the discussion. The following is an edited excerpt.

Clint Ramos: How has your experience [at Fordham]been so far?

Liesl Tommy: The students that I have been working with have brought me joy every single session. They embody the things that I value the most in artists, which is curiosity and passion. It feels like that rush that one gets from rehearsal, of being in collaboration, of being with inquiring minds.

CR: What were the important [lessons]that you really wanted for them to get?

LT: The lesson plan that I had set for myself for the semester pivoted quickly in the face of what I was receiving from the students, in the face of their needs. My class is Creating a Character, and I pivoted from a pure acting class to something that was more spiritual. What I focused on was them as artists. Who are they, what are their voices, what are their dreams for themselves? And how do we make concrete practice manifest those things, in this time of turmoil?

CR: You’ve had so much success in directing. Is there any part of you that wants to go back to acting?

LT: No. I think that once you turn the corner [and spend]too many years away from it, your body changes and your performance muscles shift. I was an extremely disciplined actor because I had come from a dance background. I was one of those people who if I didn’t have literally three hours of physical activity a day, I didn’t feel like myself.

Once I switched to directing, the gaze shifted away from me, and I felt like my energy shifted from my body into my head. My workouts became much more about stress relief than being in top physical shape. I still work on monologues sometimes as a self-soothing activity, just to keep the connection between language and thought alive. When I’m talking to actors about that, about communicating thought, I just feel like I could never forget the thing that I’m asking them to do.

CR: When you’re talking about developing a practice for an actor in your class, is there anyone that you’ve said, ‘This works for a person who has trouble with this,’ and ‘This works for a person who has trouble with that’?

LT: There is a physical and a vocal practice that actors should be doing daily so that no matter what happens in that audition, that rehearsal room, or what happens as they’re walking down the street, they have connected with their pure self and their instrument.

The most important practice is one that allows you to know where your own power lies when people and forces are trying to take it away from you. I speak especially as a television director, when you’re walking into environments that are not always yours, that you didn’t create. Especially as a woman of color, you never know how welcome you are going to be in these environments.

CR: Do you think that informed your methodology in casting? You’ve been ahead of the curve in terms of really pushing for what we now call “nontraditional casting.”

LT: The phrase “nontraditional casting” isn’t useful for me because I grew up in South Africa, where people of color were in the majority. There was a huge Indian population, there was the indigenous population, and then also the African population. I just grew up saturated with every kind of person, eating every kind of food, and listening to every kind of music, and all of it synthesizing into a community.

I never really looked at it as nontraditional casting, I just looked at it as casting. But I never did what people call color-blind casting. When I cast outside of the dominant culture’s aesthetic, it was always with a political point of view that I was using to unpack ideas in the play.

CR: What was it like leaping from theater to a major-studio-backed motion picture?

LT: I’d always wanted to direct a film, and after Eclipsed we started kind of prepping for that. I was able to do a lot of very different kinds of television in a quick space of time with the eye on film eventually. Then, insanely, the Aretha Franklin biopic happened, and I chased it very hard. I had a very clear vision for it. The thing that I learned in television was that when in doubt, focus on storytelling. And I knew how to block, I knew how to compose, and I knew how to talk to actors. In my experience, even the stars, if you’re giving them something that will make them better, will not challenge you. They are so smart, and something magical happens. And then you’re on your way.

CR: What is the most important lesson you’ve learned throughout your career?

LT: Know what you love and then do that. There are certain things I just love and I put it on stage or on film all the time. As an artist, I accept that there are certain themes that in this lifetime I am meant to explore in my work, and I don’t fight it. I always put a ghost in everything that I am in charge of, and every single time it opens up something new in myself and my humanity.

CR: Yeah, what is that ghost thing?

LT: I don’t know, I just feel like we’re always learning about grief and we’re all haunted. I just feel like no one talks about it, but I feel like it’s one of the unifiers. Everybody eats, everybody drinks, everybody breathes air, everybody is haunted by grief.

CR: Anything that you can say to us that may have helped you buoy you forward?

LT: So much of our work is about muscling through. That’s good because we’re able to make magic happen with very little resources in the theater. But it also means that we put our minds and bodies through a lot.
I have realized that caring for my nervous system is what’s going to give me longevity in the business. I used to think it was money, I used to think it was maybe having a position of authority, being an artistic director or whatever. But it’s not that. So, the thing that I would say to everybody is, just make sure that you’re taking care of your nervous system and don’t close down to your community during this time. For us, that flow of energy is really survival.

From Intern to Executive Producer

In recent years, Johnson has emerged as one of Broadway’s most successful producers. He has a five-year winning streak on the line, having won a total of seven Tonys since 2013.

He got his start in the business as an intern for Joey Parnes Productions during his junior year at Fordham, when he helped coordinate the annual Tony Awards show. It was then that he met Fordham alumna and legendary Broadway producer Elizabeth McCann, LAW ’66, who became a mentor to him.

“For the 10 years that I was in an office with her, Liz gave me this really broad perspective about the business,” he told FORDHAM magazine in 2014. “What she taught me, as a theater producer and as a human being, was priceless. She’s like my third grandmother.”

A Return to Roots

If Washington wins next month, it will be his second Tony Award. He won the Tony for Best Leading Actor in 2010 for his role in Fences, a role he reprised in the 2016 film adaptation he directed and co-produced.

In mid-April, he returned to the Lincoln Center campus, where he surprised students and filmed an interview for CBS Sunday Morning.

New York Times critic Ben Brantley has praised Washington’s “center-of-gravity performance” in Eugene O’Neill’s “behemoth barroom tragedy,” The Iceman Cometh. For the Oscar- and Tony-winning star, the role marks a return to his roots. In December 1975, he made his New York stage debut in a Fordham Theatre production of another O’Neill play.

“You know, my first role on stage, when I was a student at Fordham, was in The Emperor Jones,” he recently told the Times. “I’ve always loved O’Neill, and here I am, 40 years later, coming back to him in Iceman.”

Washington and Johnson are not the only ones with Fordham ties among this year’s Tony Award nominees. Christine Jones, who held Fordham’s Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre in 2013, is up for a Tony for Best Scenic Design of a Play for her work on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

The 72nd Annual Tony Awards will be held on June 10 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

But before they could throw themselves into the classic protest anthem, which opens the production, award-winning actress Regina Taylor—the play’s director and playwright— had a few guidelines.

“I want your total commitment to every moment,” said Taylor, who is the Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre. “Your total commitment is very important as we are piecing things together.”

Accompanied by the sounds of folksy guitar and ukulele riffs, the young actors clapped and stomped powerfully as they sang.

Some lyrics were as moving as they were prophetical: “There’s a battle outside/And it is ragin’/It’ll soon shake your windows/And rattle your walls/For the times they are a-changin’.”

For Taylor, the song sets the tone of Magnolia, which opens at Pope Auditorium on Oct. 5 and has performances on Oct. 6, Oct. 7, and Oct. 11 through Oct. 13.

 She wrote Magnolia during the 2008 presidential election when Barack Obama made history as the first black president of the United States. It originally premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, where the Golden Globe winner, whose credits include I’ll Fly Away, Courage Under Fire, and Romeo and Juliet, has served as an artistic associate for 20 years.

A Season of Social Consciousness

Though set in 1963 Atlanta, Georgia and inspired by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s 1903 play, The Cherry Orchard, Taylor believes Magnolia challenges viewers to examine issues on race, gender, and class in today’s society. The play is part of Fordham Theatre’s mainstage season, What Does It Mean to Be an American?, and is one of many plays that Taylor is producing outside of the Fordham community this season that centers on resistance.

“It’s a privilege to be a writer in these times [and]sieve through the great changes happening right now to create work tied to social consciousness,” said Taylor.

While Magnolia’s main characters—Thomas, a black businessman and Lily, a white heiress— seem like they come from different walks of life, Taylor said they have more in common than you’d think.

Lily, played by Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) junior Addison Thompson, is a bohemian who was born on the Magnolia estate. She leaves Atlanta to escape the confines of being a white woman in the south 1963. When the matriarch of the family falls ill, Lily must return to confront her complicated legacy and try to save the estate from foreclosure.

Born on the same estate is Thomas, played by FCLC senior Eric Taylor. He now lives in segregated Atlanta Georgia in the affluent black neighborhood of Sweet Auburn.

Thomas vows to never return to Magnolia because of its memories. It is where his great grandparents were slaves and where his brother was lynched.

“He wants to chop down every one of those [magnolia]trees, and burn down the plantation where he came from,” said Taylor.

Getting at the Root

Taylor said the magnolia trees are symbolic because it also calls attention to the deeply layered and tainted soil that both Lily and Thomas come from.

She emphasized that the magnolia trees have a root ball intertwined with several shoots, which then bear trees of several hues.

Like the root balls, we are all joined sharing the struggles of freedom— both good and bad.

“Even as we try to chop, burn, or erase the awful parts of the past, we may not be able to dig up all the root balls,” she said. “They shoot back up in time. Each generation must wrestle with the past and the struggles of freedom and equality.”

National acrimony was evident during and after the 2016 presidential election, and it became even more apparent after white supremacists and neo-Nazis staged a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia this summer, said Fordham Theatre’s director Matthew Maguire. President Trump’s casting of blame on “both sides” for the Charlottesville violence may have made it tempting for many to dismiss Trump supporters, but Maguire feels conversations should continue.

Fordham Theatre’s mainstage season, What Does It Mean to Be an American?, is meant to be a nudge in that direction.

“In his farewell address, Barack Obama said ‘If we want change, we have to go the long route, which is to talk to each other,’” Maguire said.

“I hope audiences come away from these plays feeling that they want to pick up the mantle and engage with others who they might otherwise be tempted to shut out.”

The plays include:

Magnolia, written and directed by Regina Taylor, the 2017 Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre;

October 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13

The Way West, by Mona Mansour, directed by Caroline Wood;

November 8, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18

Beautiful City, by George F. Walker, directed by Elizabeth Margid;

February 22, 23, 24, 28 & March 1, 2

Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, directed by Dawn Akemi Saito.

April 11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21

Magnolia, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard set in Atlanta in 1962, touches on issues of both race and class, and features a newly elected mayor who has overseen the construction of a wall between a black and a white neighborhood.

The Way West revolves around a family matriarch who is an absolute believer in the pioneer spirit of the country, and who maintains a steadfast faith in self-reliance even as her world disintegrates. Maguire said the character will resonate with those who don’t believe the country needs a social safety net.

“Self-reliance is one of the founding myths of our culture. There are plenty of places in the United States at the moment that are still fueled by the nostalgic myth,” he said.

“Is the America that we once knew ever going to come back? And how do we reinvent ourselves? This is play that might get people from two sides talking to each other, because there is a spirit in it that’s indefatigable.”

The spring semester will kick off with Beautiful City, which follows the story of a rapacious landlord trying to take over a whole neighborhood, and the people who, in their fight to stop him, enlist the help of a woman who has magical powers. Befitting its tradition of performing at least one play that is a classic, the season will conclude with Macbeth, whose focus on the abuse of power speaks for itself, Maguire said.

“What does it mean to be an American? Is there an allegiance to a wider abstract? If you’re an oil worker in the bayou, a lobsterman in Boston, a Cajun, a Wasp, or if you’re Thurgood Marshall, what’s the commonality? What makes an American? It’s not so simple to say an allegiance to the Constitution, because that’s too abstract,” he said.

“Plays should be able to change people’s lives, so that when they leave, they see the world differently, and they decide to do something. These plays do that—and are all enormously entertaining as well.”

Taylor is known for her role as Lily Harper in the acclaimed 1991 series I’ll Fly Away, where she received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Drama in 1993. She most recently starred in the CBS crime drama Elementary, and in Damon Cardasis’ indie flick, Saturday Church, which had its world premiere at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.

“I’m very excited about working with Fordham University as the Denzel Washington Chair,” said Taylor. “I’m honored to join the amazing people who have taken this chair in the past and whose work I’ve admired, from Stephen McKinley Henderson to Phylicia Rashad.”

In addition to roles in TV shows such as The Unit and Dig, the Dallas-born actress has also starred in films such as The Negotiator, Losing Isaiah, Lean on Me, and the thriller Courage Under Fire, which also featured Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77. An accomplished playwright and artistic associate of Chicago’s famed Goodman Theatre for 20 years, Taylor has worked on several Broadway and off-Broadway productions. They include As You Like It, Machinal, Jar the Floor, The Illusion, and Romeo and Juliet, where she was the first black woman to play Juliet on Broadway in the classic William Shakespeare play.

Matthew Maguire, the theatre program’s director, described Taylor as a “triple threat” that the Fordham theatre community can learn a lot from.

“Her bio is one of the most important reasons why we selected her for the Denzel Washington Chair,” he said. “She is a major artist, and most importantly, she works in every medium—theatre, film, and TV. But no matter what she’s doing, she always returns to the theatre.”

Taylor will help to kick off the theatre program’s 2017 season by directing a production of her 2009 play, Magnolia, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

 Set during the civil rights movement in Atlanta, Georgia in 1963, Taylor’s play chronicles the tensions that sprout after the city’s new mayor builds a wall to prevent black home owners from moving into a white neighborhood. In the midst of this controversy, Lily, a white landowner, returns from Paris to find her family’s Atlanta estate in foreclosure, as businessman Thomas, a descendent of former slaves to the estate, has already made plans for its future.

In her role as director, Taylor will guide and train the Fordham actors who will star in the play, which is a new approach to the Denzel Chair, Maguire said.

“Regina is vastly experienced,” he said. “Students will see her working with designers and other actors. They will also see the freedom with which she approaches a classical work [like The Cherry Orchard through Magnolia].”

Taylor said that although it is set in the sixties, Magnolia speaks to the current political and racial climate.

“Back then, there was a wave of change where you didn’t know what institutions would survive—what needed to change, what we needed to hold onto, or what we needed to let go of,” she said. “It’s the same now. There are great debates happening on all sides.”

Taylor said she hopes the Fordham production of Magnolia will challenge people to think deeply about how we we’ve progressed as a nation.

“I’m looking forward to the conversations and dialogues that I hope this piece will provoke and invoke,” she said.

Together with Viola Davis, Henderson and Washington starred in the 2010 Broadway production, which won the Tony for best revival of a play, a best actor Tony for Washington, best actress for Davis, and a best supporting actor nomination for Henderson. Much of the Broadway cast has been retained for the move to the screen.

A theater professor emeritus from the State University of New York at Buffalo, Henderson knew August Wilson and has acted in his plays on and off Broadway. He sat down for an interview with Fordham News to discuss Wilson, acting, and teaching.

How did you first meet August Wilson?

I closed in a play at The Totem Pole Playhouse near Gettysburg. While driving through Pittsburgh I learned that he was speaking in a neighborhood called Homewood. I heard August speak there, and it was something so genuine and true. It was clear he saw the beauty in people, and he wanted to make sure the rest of the world saw what he saw. I felt that I was on a journey to meet this guy, and I got to work with him from 1996 until his death in 2005.

You’ve worked with director Lloyd Richards. What was his role in Wilson’s legacy?

If there were to be a Mount Rushmore of acting teachers and theater contributors, Richards would be on that mountain with Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Stanislavski. He was the first African-American Broadway director, doing Raisin in the Sun in 1959. It took Lloyd Richards’ career in the theater to bring August to his highest level onstage, and it took Denzel’s journey and his brilliant career to introduce Wilson to this larger audience. Now more people can see the contribution Wilson made.

What was it like to transition Fences from the play to the film?

In the play I had the best seat in the house: It’s just Viola, Denzel, and me for much of the first scene. So to have that happen on film and to be with these incredible artists is just wonderful. With Denzel’s stature [in Hollywood]we were able to get three weeks of rehearsal before filming. For actors, film really is this intimate experience, whereas in a play the audience can see everything. In film you have to make choices as to who the focus should be on. But we were in great hands because Denzel is the director.

Is something lost in the translation to film?

When Laurence Olivier said he would do Shakespeare on film, there were purists who said the public wouldn’t go to the plays. It was the exact opposite. It enhanced their love and appreciation of Shakespeare. In Fences, we were all quite aware that actors have been doing these roles for a few decades and nobody will be able to satisfy everyone. But now more people will know what a contribution August Wilson made to American theater.

This play was set in the 1950s and written in the 1980s, is it still relevant?

It’s a classic, and a classic is something that is never finished saying what it has to say. It could be written in Sophocles’ time, or Shakespeare’s time, or in the 60s, but it still has something to say. I think August was one of those writers who wrote about human nature. He knew that a playwright, especially a poetic playwright, has a cultural gift. They come from a specific culture but they write about what it is to be human—and very specifically from their own cultural point of view. And August came to us from the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and his stories and his characters still speak to people everywhere.

The play uses the everyday language of African Americans, with liberal use of the N-word. Given current concerns about safe spaces and cultural appropriation, how do you teach texts to students from a variety of backgrounds?

It would just be impossible to work on an art form outside of the context of the social issues at the time. In terms of safe spaces, we have to make the classrooms the safe space. The students have got to be able to trust that we can say things here and we can grow. If you’re fortunate enough to get to play roles, you needn’t be limited to the ones that were written only for your culture. Especially while you are in a training program, while you are developing your craft. You can indeed have a wonderful career later doing your own culturally specific roles if you choose —and many British actors have said that they’re Shakespearean actors and they proudly do his work almost exclusively. It’s perfectly alright if an African-American actor says ‘I’m going to work only in my culture.’ But most artists have worked on characters that are simply human. African-American students must often end up playing a “white role” in order to be cast at all in some programs. There’s also a proud tradition: James Earl Jones has played Lear, Andre Braugher played Iago, and Diana Sands has played Saint Joan. It goes on and on. So, how can I turn to a white student and say you can’t play this or that role? Of course they can, and if they are going to play it with distinction someday professionally, they must be allowed to work on it while they are training.

Videos of McKinley Henderson by Miguel Gallardo. 

New arts and sciences faculty members, along with their departments, include:

Westenley Alcenat, instructor, Department of History;

Elissa M. Aminoff, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Psychology;

Joshua Bennett, instructor, Department of English;

Md Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science;

Stacey D’Erasmo, associate professor in the Department of English;

Emanuel Fiano, instructor, Department of Theology;

Claire Gherini, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of History;

Sarah E. Grey, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science;

Hans-Joachim Hein, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics;

Diana B. Heney, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy;

Kei Kobayashi, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics;

Tyesha Maddox, instructor, Department of African and African American Studies;

Bryan N. Massingale, S.T.D., professor in the Department of Theology;

Brandeise Monk-Payton, instructor, Department of Communication and Media Studies;

Zein Murib, instructor, Department of Political Science;

Meenasarani Linde Murugan, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies;

Scott Poulson-Bryant, instructor, Department of English;

Andrew M. Simons, instructor, Department of Economics;

Richard Teverson, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Music; and

Matthew D. Zeigenfuse, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Psychology

In the Gabelli School of Business, new faculty appointments include:

Mengjie Huang, instructor, Accounting and Taxation;

Francis E. MacCrory, III, Ph.D., assistant professor of Information Systems; and

Wong Kyung (Alice) Min, instructor, Management Systems; and

Dominik Molitor, Ph.D., assistant professor of Information Systems;

New to the Graduate School of Education is:

Tiedan Huang, Ed.D., assistant professor of education.

The School of Law welcomes:

Janet M. Freilich, associate professor of law.

The Graduate School of Social Service welcomes:

Dana Alonzo, Ph.D., associate professor of social work;

Matthew Chin, instructor in social work; and

Abigail M. Ross, instructor in social work.

Two new visiting faculty members have been named as Endowed Chairs. They are: Stephen Henderson, the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre; and Reverend Michael A. Zampelli, Ph.D., the Loyola Chair in Theology.

This past spring Henderson joined Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, and Viola Davis in the film version of August Wilson’s Fences, set to be released this December. The three starred in the 2010 Broadway production which won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play. He also starred in the Pulitzer Prize winning play Between Riverside and Crazy in 2015. He recently retired as a theater professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, a position he has held since 1987.

“As an actor you’re fortunate to have a tough schedule. That means you’re working,” said the veteran actor.

From playing opposite Washington in Fences in 2010 to a recurrent role as a judge on TV’s Law and Order to his role as a White House servant in the film Lincoln, Henderson has transcended the limitations of a single medium. He credits his experience in stage acting, however, with giving him the chops to do so.

“The theater is where acting began, so if you want to study the craft of acting you want to study the history of it,” said Henderson.

Henderson, a native of Kansas, has performed extensively both on and off Broadway. He studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Purdue University, and at the Juilliard School. He also studied with the late director and actor Lloyd Richards, the former dean of the Yale School of Drama.

When Henderson started out, he said that theater was about “consciousness raising” and about “being involved in the process of citizenship.” It’s a stance that he still holds to this day, he said.

“Theater is a great service to the public, to the community, and to society,” he said. “It allows us to commune in our humanness.”

Matthew Maguire, the theatre program’s director, introduced himself to the actor in 2006. At the time Henderson and director Israel Hicks were making the argument that it was time for the great plays of the African-American canon to be considered great American plays, said Maguire.

“It was from him that I got the idea to ask actors to play across ethnic lines in acting class,” said Maguire. “The actors of color have always played Shakespeare and Chekhov, but the white actors never play Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson. Now they do, thanks to Stephen.”

Maguire called Henderson a Sensei, a “teacher of teachers,” whose support was key in bringing the Fordham program forward when it came to racial issues in acting. Maguire said he had long ago asked his students to cross ethnic lines by playing roles of other races, which made some students uncomfortable. He said it wasn’t fully understood until Henderson told the students to prepare for the role as they would any other: through a close reading of the text.

“The larger sense of what it is to be a human being pervades his work as a teacher and an actor on the stage. He’s got this amazing balance of affirming students, but there’s no lack of rigor in his approach. As a teacher, he’s tough.”

Henderson said he is not a purist when it comes to teaching, and said he intends to pass on a variety of methods he’s learned over the years. But while he holds various methods of acting in high regard, he said good acting always refers back to the play and the audience.

“The work is text specific,” he said. “You’re examining a piece of dramatic literature, and the artist has to come up with a series of exercises on how to best to serve the play.”

“You start with the rules, but it’s not about the rules; it’s about the exceptions. What is right for you in this moment? It’s not a self-absorbed journey. It’s about the others in the room.

“It certainly isn’t just about entertainment. We may do it for the audience, but it’s always done on the art’s terms.”

Hanks named several actors—Garbo, Hepburn, Brando, and others—who “need only one name to conjure the gestalt of their great artistry.”

“The cliché ‘the list goes on and on’ does not apply here,” he said, “because it doesn’t. The list is finite … but it includes the actor who is being given the Cecil B. DeMille Award tonight.”

Hanks, Washington’s co-star in the 1993 film Philadelphia, presented a montage of highlights from the actor’s acclaimed performances in Malcolm X, The Hurricane, Training Day, and Flight, among other films.

“These clips will remind us that a single name can be a superlative, synonymous with extraordinary,” he said. “A single name can define an artist who is a peer and equal of all of the greatest legends of our craft.

“And if Washington doesn’t ring out loud enough, then let the first name carry all the weight—and that name is Denzel.”

Upon receiving the award, Washington said the honor left him “speechless,” literally and figuratively. “I lost my speech,” he acknowledged when he got to the stage.

But his wife, Paulette, and three of their four children joined him. With his family’s warm support, the actor charmed viewers, thanking his agents, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which presents the annual lifetime achievement award), and his mother “for convincing my father that we needed more than 25-watt bulbs. He thought that we could save money.”

A Promising Stage Debut: “Not Only Beauty but Love, Hatred, Majesty, Violence”

The renowned actor, who grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, did not set out to become one of Hollywood’s brightest lights.

As an undergraduate at Fordham College at Rose Hill during the 1970s, he played basketball and considered a career in medicine before shifting to journalism. During his junior year, however, he transferred to Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he found his calling on stage in the theatre program.

“I bluffed my way into my first [college acting] job,” Washington told Merv Griffin in 1985, eight years after earning his Fordham degree. “They were doing Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, and I was up for the leading role in the first play I had ever done. …  I got good feedback right away, which was very important, and I said, ‘Oh, this is what I’m supposed to do.’”

One of the first people at Fordham to recognize Washington’s potential was Robert Stone, a longtime English professor at the University who decades earlier had acted with the legendary Paul Robeson in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s Othello.

“Denzel gave the best performance of Othello I’d ever seen,” Stone told FORDHAM magazine in 1990. “He has something which even Robeson didn’t have … not only beauty but love, hatred, majesty, violence.”

Academy Award-winning actor José Ferrer, who had played Iago in Othello with Robeson, was among those invited by Stone to see the young star in a Fordham production of the play.

“Ferrer … said, ‘Denzel’s too young, but my God, what a career he’s got ahead of him,’” Stone recalled. “Some seer he was!”

VIDEO: Watch Denzel Washington reminisce about his Fordham days and talk about the joys of being a new father during a January 1985 appearance on The Merv Griffin Show.

After graduating from Fordham, Washington received critical acclaim for his work off Broadway and in several feature films. And he rose to fame playing Dr. Phillip Chandler on the popular TV series St. Elsewhere from 1982 to 1988.

In 1989, his film career took off with the movie Glory. He played Trip, a formerly enslaved fugitive who joins other African-American soldiers to fight in the “all-colored” 54th Massachusetts Regiment during the Civil War.

Trip is a complex character—angry and rebellious, an instigator—and the role was attractive to Washington, he said, because it contradicted Hollywood’s stereotypical depictions of Black people in American history.

“Some people say, ‘Trip could never have been that outspoken; it’s too modern,’ and I say you’ve been affected by Gone with the Wind. Not everyone talked like that woman with the high voice; we weren’t all just victims,” he told FORDHAM magazine in 1990, after winning a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for his work in the film.

In saluting Washington at the Golden Globes Sunday night, Hanks referred to the actor’s “mysterious power not just to hold our attention but to demand it.” That power is especially evident in Glory during this scene in which Washington’s character is whipped.

A Model for Students: “Take What You Have and Use It for Good”

Throughout his long film career, Washington has not forgotten his acting roots on stage. He has returned to New York to work on Broadway, winning the 2010 Tony Award for his lead role in the revival of August Wilson’s Fences.

And he has long been a champion of theater education at Fordham. The two-time Oscar winner served on the University’s Board of Trustees from 1994 to 2000. And in 2011, he established the Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre with a $2 million gift to the University. He also contributed $250,000 to establish an endowed scholarship fund for students in the Fordham Theatre program.

“It’s not what you have; it’s what you do with what you have,” he told Fordham students during an October 2012 visit to campus.

“My life is not typical in this profession, but one thing I know I have in common with everybody here is the ability to give back. Take what you have and use it for good.”

“I admire actors so much. They bare their soul. They rip their skin open, take their heart out, and go like this—” said JoAnne Akalaitis, her hand outstretched. “Night after night after night. It’s amazing what they do.”

The significance of one’s own story is at the core of this year’s advanced acting class, thanks to the leadership of Akalaitis, the fifth Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre.

“I think the bottom line with acting is emotion,” said Akalaitis, an award-winning director. “What an actor uses is his or her imagination and personal history—especially that history—to invent their characters.”

A “giant in American theater,” as Fordham Theatre program Director Matthew Maguire described her, Akalaitis is the second director to be named to the chair, following Kenny Leon in 2014. Over her decades-long career, which includes five Obie Awards and a Drama Desk award for direction and sustained achievement, Akalaitis has become renowned both for her original work and for her reimagining of classic works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Beckett, and others.

Creating a character

In her class, Creating a Character, Akalaitis is helping Fordham acting students delve deep into their art. The students work together on scenes from plays, paying special attention to believability, honesty, understanding storyline, and being in touch with both one’s body and one’s emotions. To do this, actors must go back into their own past experiences. By drawing on real emotions, actors can truly empathize with their characters, rather than merely impersonating them.

“If you’re 18 years old, you’ve got 18 years to work with,” Akalaitis said. “A lot can happen in 18 years.”

Before becoming a director, Akalaitis spent 22 years as an actor. She studied with the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, the Open Theater in New York, and with acting virtuoso Jerzy Grotowski. From Grotowski she gained her appreciation for the “medium” actors use to create their art: namely, their personal histories.

Eventually, though, Akalaitis realized that she did not want to spend her career relentlessly revisiting the past—nor did she like acting very much.

“I only liked rehearsal, not performing,” she said. “I was interested in the process, not in repetition.”

Still, her work as an actor became the foundation of her ethos as a director. Theater, she believes, is an “unlonely pursuit.” It is unique in the sense that it is a collaborative process. Each stakeholder in a play—from directors, to playwrights, to actors—has an equally important role in bringing the story to life.

It was this philosophy of collaboration that she had in mind when she founded the critically acclaimed Mabou Mines theater company in 1970 with her ex-husband, composer Philip Glass. Located in New York City’s East Village, the company is an artist-driven coalition dedicated to experimental theater.

“Actors could become writers, writers could become directors, directors could become designers,” she said of Mabou Mines, where she remains a mentor in the resident artist program. “We supported each other in a way that was very unusual. I didn’t ever have to ‘break into’ any [new undertaking]. It was there for me.”

Teaching the next generation of characters

Akalaitis has had scores of young actors under her tutelage. Before occupying the chair endowed by Fordham alumnus Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, Akalaitis has done workshops and taught at various universities, including Yale, Harvard, and her alma mater, the University of Chicago. She also holds two named professorships—the Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Theater at Bard College and the Andrew Mellon Co-chair of the Directing Program at Juilliard.

“I like being in urban universities. It feels as if the world is passing through,” she said.

Her stint at Fordham marks her first experience at a Jesuit school (“Though, [in high school]I was an incredible fan of the St. Ignatius basketball team on the west side of Chicago,” she noted), and she says she can appreciate the differences.

“I’m impressed at the diversity here [at Fordham],” she said. “There’s a variety of types and styles and ways of thinking. It feeds into a very refreshing creative energy… And the camaraderie between students in the theatre program is inspiring.”

Meanwhile, Akalaitis is also working on a play she has called Bad News! i Was There…, a compilation of messenger speeches—the bearers of bad news—from classical plays.

It’s the sort of pursuit that she wouldn’t be able to turn down even she wanted to.

“Every once in a while I make these announcements that I’m giving up theater for good,” she said. “I call people and tell them I’m giving it up, but no one takes it that seriously.”

“So, [in the case of Bad News,]about two years ago I’d given it up again when someone from Poets House called and asked me to do something for the River to River Festival. I said, ‘No, I’m not in the theater anymore.’

“But then I had an idea for a new show.”

JoAnne Akalaitis, an award-winning director and founder of the experimental theater company Mabou Mines, will join Fordham’s theatre program this fall as the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre.

“JoAnne is a giant in the American theatre,” said Matthew Maguire, director of the theatre program. “Her work with Mabou Mines was the finest work I saw in theater when I arrived in New York, and it transformed the way I saw the possibilities of the theater.”

Akalaitis’ decades-long career includes five Obie Awards for direction and sustained achievement. She founded the critically acclaimed Mabou Mines theater company in 1970 with her ex-husband, composer Philip Glass. Located in New York City’s East Village, the company is an artist-driven coalition dedicated to experimental theater.

“Mabou Mines is one of the most important experimental theater companies in the United States, and it is still going strong,” Maguire said. She has also lent a radical perspective toward re-imagining classic works, including plays by Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Euripides, and Shakespeare.

She accepted this year’s chair after its initial holder, actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, withdrew this month due to an urgent health issue.

Akalaitis graduated from the University of Chicago in 1960 with a degree in philosophy, but later decided to pursue acting. She studied theater with the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, The Open Theater in New York, and with acting theorist Jerzy Grotowski in France.

She has directed at the American Repertory Theater, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the New York City Opera, Goodman Theatre, Harford Stage, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, the Guthrie Theater, and the Court Theatre in Chicago, where she was artist-in-residence.

She is the former artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, a position that she was appointed to by its founder, Joe Papp.

Papp said Akalaitis has “the most original mind in the theater today.”

“As a leader, she is independent. She doesn’t recognize boundaries and you can’t pigeonhole her. She has great drive. And she is very astute about how the theater is run.”

In addition to directing, Akalaitis has held several academic positions, including the Andrew Mellon Co-chair of the Directing Program at Juilliard and the Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Theater at Bard College. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, and a Pew Charitable Trusts National Theatre Artist Residency Program grant.

“We are thrilled that she is doing us the honor of joining us for a semester as the fifth Denzel Washington Chair,” Maguire said.