Denzel Washington received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden during a January 4 ceremony at the White House, where he was described as a generational talent and national role model.

“The admiration of audiences and peers is only exceeded by that of the countless young people he inspires,” the White House citation read. “With unmatched dignity, extraordinary talent, and unflinching faith in God and family, Denzel Washington is a defining character of the American story.”

Washington was one of 19 “truly extraordinary people” Biden recognized for “their sacred effort to shape the culture and the cause of America.” World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and primatologist Jane Goodall were among the other honorees.

The award was a year and a half in the making for Washington, whose many honors include two Academy Awards, a Tony Award, two Golden Globes, and the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award. He had been slated to receive the medal from Biden in July 2022, but a case of COVID-19 kept him from attending the ceremony that year.

This year’s honor comes on the heels of his starring role in the film Gladiator II, and as he prepares to return to Broadway to star alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in a revival of Shakespeare’s Othello. Performances are scheduled to begin on February 24 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Washington last played Shakespeare’s “noble Moor” five decades ago, as a Fordham senior. He starred in a March 1977 production of the play at the University’s Lincoln Center campus, about a dozen blocks north of where he’ll reprise the role next month.

Fordham Roots—and a Legacy of Giving Back

Washington grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, not far from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. He has often said that he “kind of backed into” acting—and fell in love with it—during his time at the University.

One of the first people on campus to recognize Washington’s potential was English professor Robert Stone. Decades earlier, he had acted with the legendary Paul Robeson in a Broadway production of Othello.

“Denzel gave the best performance of Othello I’d ever seen,” Stone told Fordham Magazine in 1990, referring to the 1977 Fordham production. “He has something which even Robeson didn’t have … not only beauty but love, hatred, majesty, violence.”

Since his college days, Washington has become a Hollywood and Broadway legend, deeply respected not only as an actor but also as a producer and director.

No matter how many accolades he amasses, however, he makes time to give back: For more than 25 years, he’s served as national spokesman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. And he gives to the Fordham community. In 2011, he made a $2 million gift to endow the Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre and a $250,000 gift to establish the Denzel Washington Endowed Scholarship for an undergraduate student studying theatre at Fordham.

Through the chair, scholarship, and campus visits, Washington has been a mentor to young Fordham artists.

Eric Lawrence Taylor, FCLC ’18, a former recipient of the Denzel Washington Endowed Scholarship, described the actor’s subtle mentoring style best in a 2018 interview: “In a very cool, non-publicity-seeking way, Denzel Washington has been mentoring artists of color for a long time,” he said, “and really providing space for a lot of us to succeed.”

VIDEO: Watch Denzel Washington Receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Fordham’s 6 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients

The Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor—is presented to individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, to world peace, or to other significant societal, public, or private endeavors.

Washington is now the sixth Fordham graduate to receive the medal since 1963, when it was established by President John F. Kennedy. Here are Fordham’s other honorees:

Cardinal Terence Cooke: A New York City native, Cooke was ordained a Catholic priest in 1945 by Fordham graduate Cardinal Francis Spellman, archbishop of New York. He taught at the University’s Graduate School of Social Service during the 1950s and earned a master’s degree from Fordham in 1957. After Cardinal Spellman’s death in 1968, Cooke was named archbishop of New York and, later, military vicar to the U.S. armed forces.

President Ronald Reagan honored him posthumously in April 1984, six months after Cardinal Cooke died of leukemia at age 62, calling him a “man of compassion, courage, and personal holiness.”

Sister M. Isolina Ferré: Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1914, the youngest daughter of one of the island’s wealthiest families, Ferré entered the Missionary Servants of the Holy Trinity in 1935. In the 1950s, her work as a nun brought her to New York. She earned a master’s degree in sociology from Fordham in 1961 while gaining national recognition for her work with Puerto Rican youth gangs in Brooklyn. She later established community aid centers in Ponce, and in 1988 founded Trinity College of Puerto Rico, a school that provides leadership and vocational training.

President
 Bill Clinton honored her in August 1999, praising her ability to combine “her deep religious faith with her compassionate and creative advocacy for the disadvantaged.”

Irving R. Kaufman: A 1931 Fordham Law School graduate, Kaufman is perhaps best known as the federal judge who sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death on April 5, 1951. But he also ruled in some landmark First Amendment, antitrust, and civil rights cases during four decades on the bench.

When he died in 1992 at age 81,
 The New York Times wrote, “It was Judge Kaufman’s hope that he would 
be remembered for his role not in the Rosenberg case, the espionage trial of the century, but as the judge whose order was the first to desegregate a public school 
in the North, who was instrumental 
in streamlining court procedures, who rendered innovative decisions in antitrust law and, most of all, whose rulings expanded the freedom of the press.”

President Ronald Reagan honored Kaufman in 1987 for his “exemplary service to our country” and “his multifaceted effort to promote an understanding of the law and our legal tradition.”

Jack Keane: A retired four-star U.S. Army general and widely respected national security and foreign policy expert, Keane grew up in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He began his military career at Fordham as a cadet in the University’s Army ROTC program. After graduating in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting, he served as a platoon leader and company commander during the Vietnam War, where he was decorated for valor. A career paratrooper, he rose to command the 101st Airborne Division and the 18th Airborne Corps before he was named vice chief of staff of the Army in 1999. Since retiring in 2003, he has often provided expert testimony to Congress. He received the Fordham Founder’s Award in 2004, and he is a Fordham trustee fellow.

President Donald Trump honored Keane in 2020, lauding him as “a visionary, a brilliant strategist, and an American hero.”

Vin Scully: A 1949 Fordham graduate, Scully is best known for his nearly seven-decade stint as voice of the Dodgers—first in Brooklyn, later in Los Angeles—and widely considered one of the best sports broadcasters of all time. He got his start at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station, announcing football, basketball, and baseball games before joining the Dodgers broadcast team in 1950. Scully was inducted into the broadcasters’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, and Fordham presented him with an honorary degree in 2000.

President Barack Obama honored Scully in 2016. “Vin taught us the game and introduced us to its players. He narrated the improbable years, the impossible heroics, [and] turned contests into conversations,” Obama said.

Take Frances Berko, for example. A pioneer in the disability rights movement, she earned a Fordham Law degree in 1944. By 1949, Berko, who had ataxic cerebral palsy, helped start United Cerebral Palsy. She later served as New York state’s advocate for the disabled.

“I’ve had much success,” she told a panel of legislators in 1981. “But the one achievement which I held most precious—for which I’ve most constantly striven—I’ve never been able to attain completely: that is, the full rights of a citizen of this country and this state.”

That achievement came in 1990 with the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In 1994, two years before Berko died, Fordham awarded her an honorary doctorate, and Janet Reno, then U.S. attorney general, called her “a symbol to me of what you can do and how you can do it magnificently.”

Today at Fordham, Berko’s spirit is evident in the work of senior Abigail Dziura, who has focused her research on improving the New York City subway system, where only 27% of all stations are considered fully accessible to people with disabilities.

In April, she earned a prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship, which recognizes college students dedicated to public service. “One of the hardest parts of advocacy work is knowing that you don’t always get to see the end result,” she told Fordham News. “Sometimes you’re setting things up for future generations because something can’t be completed for another 20 years. … But someday, I’d love to see a fully accessible New York subway system.”

The ever-striving, regenerative spirit that links Berko to Dziura and beyond is just one example of Fordham people working to build stronger communities. You’ll find more in our latest “20 in Their 20s” series.

“The history of this area is absolutely remarkable and unknown, including the history of Fordham,” said Harold Takooshian, Ph.D., a psychology and urban studies professor who teaches the course. 

Urban Psychology offers Fordham students and visiting students a dynamic learning experience in the middle of Manhattan, he said. Through lessons in the classroom and walking tours in the city, students learn how living in an urban environment impacts them—their personality, behavior, values, and relationships—and what makes New York City unique. 

The History Behind Fordham College at Lincoln Center’s Name

Since the course began in early July, the students have explored sites across the city, including the United Nations headquarters, Wall Street, and the Javits Center Expansion Rooftop and Farm. Their final tour, co-led by Takooshian and longtime city tour guide Lee Michael Klein, revealed little-known facts about the Lincoln Center campus and the surrounding area. 

One of their first stops was Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. “This became a world-class arts center. It was one of the first places to not just have a symphony, ballet, or the opera, but everything at once,” said Klein. 

In 1968—four years after the center was established—Fordham College at Lincoln Center opened its doors, said Takooshian. 

“The structure of the buildings in Lincoln Center is kinda weird, the way they put those windows, because it’s designed to match Lincoln Center,” said Takooshian. “Fordham College at Lincoln Center is literally part of Lincoln Center … It’s part of the complex that Robert Moses developed.” 

Denzel’s ‘16th-Century England’ 

Another highlight of the tour was a visit to the residential apartment garden where Denzel Washington practiced acting with his Fordham mentor and professor, Robert W. Stone, at 30 West 60th Street, where Stone once lived, said Takooshian. 

“This garden has been here since the building was built in the ’60s,” he said. The garden was freshly manicured with paved walkways and bright hibiscus bushes, but Takooshian drew the group’s attention to a shadier, less colorful part of the garden that borders 9th Avenue. “This side is older. Look over there, and you’ll see old benches and a tree with tiny little apples. I’m guessing that’s where Stone and Denzel met. It’s almost like being in 16th-century England.” 

While Takooshian spoke about the neighborhood’s history, a city ambulance drew near, siren blaring at full blast. 

“That’s New York, isn’t it?” Takooshian joked. 

‘No Matter What You See … There’s Always Something Else’ 

The afternoon tour was attended by a small but eclectic group of full-time Fordham students, summer session students, University faculty and staff, and friends of the group. Among them were students in Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies, including a former ballerina from Los Angeles, and two U.S. Marine Corps veterans. 

Yuntong Zhao, a student at Barnard College, said that as an international student from Beijing, China, the tour was a special experience. “I don’t really know the city as well, so it’s an amazing opportunity to learn while experiencing the city,” said Zhao, who is living in New York City for the first time this year. “When I was choosing summer classes, I found Fordham to have amazing course offerings. It’s one of the most flexible programs out there at this time.” 

The tour was a unique experience for longtime New Yorkers, too. “Being raised in New York, you become accustomed to not doing the touristy things,” said Sathya Samuel Hayes Houston Breckinridge, a summer student from Cambodia who was raised in New York City. “It’s definitely an experience to do the things I’ve always heard about.”

There’s always something new to see in the city, no matter how long you’ve lived here, said Klein, who made the city his home since 1992. 

“The thing about New York is that no matter what you see,” said Klein, “there’s always something you’re overlooking—there’s always something else.” 

All of those attributes are on display in The Tragedy of Macbeth, director Joel Coen’s bewitching, nightmarish film adaptation of Shakespeare’s proto-psychological crime thriller with Washington in the title role.

The film, shot in black and white on stark, expressionistic sets, casts a spell from the start: We hear the rustling wings of three black birds as they ascend and “hover through the fog and filthy air” of medieval Scotland. Washington’s Macbeth, a war hero, emerges from the fog and, emboldened by a witch’s prophecy, colludes with his wife (played by fellow Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) to assassinate King Duncan and claim the throne.

The film, to be released in theaters on Christmas Day and via AppleTV+ in mid-January, had its premiere across the street from Fordham, at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, during the 59th New York Film Festival in September. At a press conference following the screening, Washington, a 1977 graduate of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, reflected on his Fordham roots.

“This is a fascinating journey for me,” he said. “I went to school a thousand feet from here and played Othello at 20.”

It’s a theme that came up again on December 15, when Washington was a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Right away, the host prompted the actor by sharing a picture of him in his first big role: the title character in a fall 1975 Fordham Theatre production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones.

“I was a junior. I thought I was supposed to act mean and be serious,” Washington said.

“Do you have any advice for this kid right here, because he seems pretty confident already?” Colbert asked.

“Ignorance is bliss,” Washington replied, smiling. “That was the first leading role I ever played, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I would go out and peek and look at the audience, you know, count [the people], see if my mom was out there.”

Washington’s mother, who died earlier this year at age 97, was indeed there, he added. “Every night.”

Colbert then listed several of the Shakespeare plays in which Washington has been seen on stage and screen, including a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Coriolanus (1979), the film Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and a Broadway production of Julius Caesar (2005), and asked him how he prepared for his first experience with the Bard.

“After I did The Emperor Jones, I played Othello at Fordham University as well,” Washington said. “At the Lincoln Center library, they had records of the plays, so they had Olivier’s Othello. … I put the headphones on, ‘Oh, my lord,’” he said in a comically high-pitched theatrical voice, to laughter from the audience. “I was like, ‘OK, I’ll sing it like this and make it happen, and people seemed to like it.”

Watch Denzel Washington’s December 15 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

Winfrey, who co-hosted the nationally televised ceremony with Fordham graduate Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, added: “That Dr. McMurray has been able to accomplish so much is admirable. That she’s been able to accomplish this from a wheelchair is extraordinary.”

McMurray, then a professor at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Social Service, had been living with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a rare, progressively muscle-wasting disorder, for almost three decades. She was one of eight Black women—including Maya Angelou and Debbie Allen—honored that evening by Essence magazine for their remarkable contributions to society.

Prior to the ceremony, the magazine’s editor in chief, Susan L. Taylor, a 1991 graduate of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, told The New York Times, “The powerful stories of African American women are hardly ever told; the things we achieved unknown and the obstacles we overcame are not known by the larger society. This event is a celebration of our triumphs, tenacity, and our ability to endure and overcome.”

Eight months after being honored by Essence, McMurray died at her home in Manhattan. At 58-years-old, her life was short and significantly impacted by her degenerative disease, but she took to heart her parents’ childhood assurances that nothing could stand in her way. And her former Fordham colleagues and students recall a woman who set a high bar for excellence and proved that physical challenges don’t necessitate career limitations.

Supporting Girls and Women

Born in 1934 in Philadelphia, McMurray graduated from Temple University and earned a master’s degree in social service from Bryn Mawr College in 1962. She gained public attention in 1966 when she founded Project Teen Aid, a program aimed at supporting pregnant teenagers. At the time, teens were expelled from school when they became pregnant, something McMurray rightly believed to be devastating for their futures.

“Excluding pregnant girls from going to school with their classmates is really how you keep poor or Black or Latino girls from getting an education,” she told Essence magazine in 1992. “Girls often become pregnant because there is no emphasis on female education. There aren’t great expectations for either young men or women.”

The organization, which still exists, was so successful that in 1969, New York City Mayor John Lindsay appointed McMurray director of his administration’s Early Childhood Task Force, through which she was responsible for developing social services for children and families.  Then, in 1971, she became the first commissioner of the New York City Agency for Child Development.

Patricia Brownell, Ph.D., GSS ’78, ’94, associate professor emerita of social service at Fordham, and one of McMurray’s former students, said that as commissioner, McMurray “had been an advocate for publicly funded daycare and was very, very instrumental in getting the public sector daycare program funded and implemented.”

Letting Advocacy Do the Talking

Within a few years of her appointment, McMurray had undergone two hip replacements and was walking with a cane—making her disability increasingly visible. She resigned from the position in 1974. In the October 1983 issue of Working Woman magazine, Andrea Fooner wrote of McMurray, “Even an exceptionally strong and adaptive personality is not immune to the complexities of pursuing a career while handicapped. … Clearly her disability made her more vulnerable to attack.”

Elaine Congress, D.S.W., professor and associate dean of the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS), said McMurray wasn’t one to get into a “super battle,” preferring to let her advocacy speak for itself. “People choose what battles they want to fight,” she said. “She did it more by example, and she just focused on the issues.”

After leaving the Agency for Child Development, McMurray co-founded the Alliance for Children with David Seeley; served as the Community Service Society’s deputy general director for programming; and founded her namesake GLM Group, a consulting firm providing research, training, and technical assistance to government and nonprofit organizations working with families and children.

Inspiring by Example

But it wasn’t just students or children and families in need who were touched by McMurray. Susan Egan, Ph.D., GSS ’77, ’04, former assistant dean of GSS, shared an office with McMurray in the late 1980s. She said she soaked up inspiration by osmosis.

“I think without her realizing it, she was a role model to me because I just got to witness how she interacted with colleagues and students,” Egan said. “And I just thought she was brilliant and kind and even-tempered. I just learned from her by sitting next to her.”

According to Brownell, toward the end of her life, McMurray turned her focus to advanced health directives after recovering from a coma related to her disease.

“At that time, if somebody were ill and were unable to make a decision for how to direct their doctors, particularly in relation to terminating life support, it was impossible” to honor their wishes, Brownell said. “She was able to go, with her electronic wheelchair, into legislator’s chambers and give testimony as to how important it is for people to be able to direct their care choices.”

By the time McMurray was a professor of social policy in the doctoral program at GSS, she was paralyzed from the neck down, teaching class from a motorized wheelchair with the help of an assistant and a computer she controlled using a mouth stick. What stood out to her colleagues and students, though, wasn’t her physical disability, but her “remarkable” dedication.

Brownell, who had McMurray for two social policy courses, said she was struck by how animated McMurray was. “She was a very special mentor, particularly for social work students coming from the city, and a source of great inspiration,” she said.

“I think she brought out the best in people,” Brownell added. “She had very high standards for others and very high standards for herself, and she always met her high standards and really expected others to live up to high standards for themselves. It was very, very positive and empowering.”

Congress witnessed McMurray at work outside of the classroom as she interacted with students in her office and echoed this sentiment. “She was an incredible, incredible teacher,” she said. “What inspired me is how she had this terrible illness, it got worse and worse, but … she didn’t end up kind of sitting in a nursing home. What did she do? She had a doctoral class at Fordham.”

 ‘Building Blocks in Erecting the Temple of Human Rights’

In a video shown during the 1992 Essence Awards ceremony, McMurray shared her wish that every child in the world would “have the opportunities that I have had to realize my humanness—to become a human being, to be able to give and to receive, to use one’s talents.”

“I know I will not see it in my lifetime,” she said, “but I know if I could just change it for one child, I’ll be very happy.”

Upon receiving the award from Oprah Winfrey, McMurray received a standing ovation.

“This is a glorious evening,” she said, as the applause died down, “and I am so happy to be with you all and to know that God has kept me alive for this night.

“Yes, I have worked to keep pregnant girls in school, set up daycare centers for working parents, fought for universal preschool services and for the liberation of Black women and indeed for all oppressed people,” McMurray said. “But I see these as the building blocks in erecting the temple of human rights in celebration of God’s gift of life.

“So, remember: As long as there is one oppressed child, oppressed woman, oppressed human being in this world, the struggle continues.”

Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, received the inaugural Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee Living Legends Award from the Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on October 19 during a ceremony that, perhaps more than any other in the celebrated actor’s career, highlighted his deep connections to Fordham University.

Presenting Washington with the award was Fordham Trustee Anthony Carter, FCRH ’76, the president of Crossroads’ board of trustees.

“Forty-six years ago on the Fordham University Bronx campus, a place we called 80 acres of paradise, our home away from home, is where I met our honoree Denzel Washington, and where our friendship began,” Carter said during the ceremony at the State Theatre New Jersey.

He praised Washington for his “stellar body of work” and for taking “acting and the industry far beyond where anyone else has.” But he also honored Washington in deeply personal terms. “I see you beyond being a great actor. I see you as a man of principle; determined, focused and disciplined. … I know you to be a great man and a great friend who just happens to be great at what you do. And we all cherish that.”

In his acceptance speech, Washington spoke to his faith, saying, “Man gives the award; God gives the reward.” He said he was “grateful, honored, and humbled” by the recognition, and “blessed to have a strong family.”

“But the reality is, I’m just beginning. The rest of my life is dedicated to glorifying God, to being a living witness of the grace of God, the mercy of God, the patience of God.”

He thanked Crossroads for recognizing Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and others “who helped to teach me to be the actor I’m trying to become,” adding, “I am hopeful and humbled by the possibilities to come, on the stage and in the world.”

Washington, whose first stage role was in a 1975 Fordham Theatre production of The Emperor Jones, said later that those possibilities might include returning to Crossroads to star in or direct a production.

David Alan Grier hosted the ceremony, and various other luminaries paid tribute to Washington through performances and speeches, including Courtney B. Vance, This Is Us star Susan Kelechi Watson, Phylicia Rashad, and Stephen McKinley Henderson.

Rashad and Henderson are former holders of the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre at Fordham, a professorship Washington established with a $2 million gift to the University in 2011. That same year, he also made a $250,000 gift to establish an endowed scholarship for Fordham Theatre students, 12 of whom attended the ceremony in New Brunswick.

Carter gave the Fordham students a shout-out during the ceremony and saluted Washington for his commitment not only “to the generation of actors here and around the world who stand successfully on your shoulders” but also to “the next generation of great actors.”

The Crossroads Theatre Company, which opened in New Brunswick in 1978, focuses on telling stories of the African diaspora, and in 1999, it earned the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. After two years on the road, the company, which is the only professional black theater company in New Jersey, has settled in as a resident member of the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.

And yet, despite her brutal schedule, during a recent Monday afternoon workshop at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, Jackson arguably had as much, if not more, energy than her charges.

“When I get into it, the students give me so much joy and so much hope for what we got for the future in theater,” said Jackson, who sits on the board of the American Theatre Wing. “That they’re even interested! I live in California and most of those kids, they’re just trying to get into movies and TV, and I’m like, ‘Does anyone know what it is to love the theater?’”

Jackson told Broadway’s Playbill that her love of theater began after seeing the musical Camelot. She went on to develop extensive Broadway and off-Broadway credits, including roles in the acclaimed off-Broadway production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf and the Tony-nominated Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, as well as dozens of film and television productions, including Juanita, U.S. Marshals, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Malcolm X. Her Tony-nominated Broadway run in A Raisin in the Sun placed her opposite Denzel Washington in a production that has since become something of a feeder for the endowed chair he funded at Fordham. The play’s director, Kenny Leon, held the post in 2014 and actor Stephen McKinley Henderson held the chair in 2016.

Jackson said that for her role in To Kill a Mockingbird, a reinterpretation of the classic novel by Harper Lee, writer Aaron Sorkin, producer Scott Rudin, and director Bartlett Sher each played a role in convincing the actress that she wouldn’t be coming to Broadway to play a black maid without agency, as the character is portrayed in the book. The New York Times notes that Calpurnia, as played by Jackson, is the “needling conscience” to Atticus Finch, the play’s lead protagonist, played by Jeff Daniels.

The veteran actress has said in several interviews that to play the role, she has drawn on memories of her grandmother, who worked in service for a family. In her workshops, she tells students to draw on their own experiences, but she also wants them to examine the playwriter’s intent and align themselves to the language and culture they are intended to portray. She said that for today’s students who are awash in the selfie culture of social media, it can prove to be a difficult task.

In a Q&A following a monologue workshop, Jackson discussed teaching today’s acting students, respecting the lines of a playwright, and theater’s role as a conduit for change.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing young actors today?

The generation now seems to be of one mainstream thought that they’re all plugged into: “This is who I am. Find me like this. This is how you got to get it.” They are committed to you coming to them rather than them having to come to you. It’s their thing. I’m here to show you the practical side of working. How to get it together to be a professional.

You require the students to mark up their scripts to denote pauses, inflections, levels, and rhythm. Why?  

When you mark your script, you mark the lines in the natural way that you hear it. This is an unnatural thing that we’re being asked to do, which is to act. So, we actors have to try to render the language and give it back in a way that people already know. And the audience hears that. The students are all smart enough in the academics of it, but they have to go back and try to figure out what’s interesting and an interesting way to say it. This is a safe space. We are here to get it, to understand exactly what it is, so there is no good, better, best.

Watching you reminded me of watching a coach on the field: “Take a breath here, take a count there, modulate your voice, modulate your tone.” Tell me about coaching students in that way.

One of the students has a beautiful voice that is very low, way down here. And I said, “First of all, you’re going to give yourself vocal nodes trying to talk down there all the time.” I understand it’s a beautiful voice, but you can’t stay there. You have to give me some levels. I told them all from the beginning, “We’re going to get a big bag, and we’re going to fill our big, large imaginary bag full of tricks and techniques. So that when we need them, we’ll go into them and use them.” And one is the, “one, two, three,” count that I did today. That’s just a natural sort of beat between a phrase transition. Because sometimes you’ll pause and say, “Am I pausing too long?” And that pause actually can be measured: Count one, two, three. For actors who know it personally, their clock is tuned to that already. Later in your career, you’ll meet people while you’re playing and you pick up on the rhythm of what they know. And by and large you can hear it: your rhythm, their rhythm, and you just fall right in line. It’s like playing a symphony. That’s what I’m trying to teach them. That is taught. You can learn how to do that.

You read the script when the students perform and you stop them on the slightest mistake, even if they replace the word “the” with “a.” You told the students, “This is theater, not TV.” What did you mean by that?

It’s exactly that. The playwright’s a wordsmith. And if you’ve done TV, they write like this: “OK, yeah, do this line, do that line, change that.” But playwrights, they sit with a piece, they go over it, they do each line, they go through it. So out of respect for the playwright, you should really deliver the lines the way they wrote them. Don’t add, don’t take away.

With certain writers there’s a highly specific cultural rhythm. How is that accessed? 

With August [Wilson] people say he has to be taught to a certain rhythm, because of the cadence of how he wrote. But he didn’t create it. He just wrote what he heard. And he was so good at it that everybody thinks that he created this language. But it’s not just from Pittsburgh [the setting for most of Wilson’s plays]. I’m from Atlanta, Georgia. I know people who talk like that. It was the rhythm of their speech that he was able to access. For actors playing those roles, you need to have something culturally that you can lean on to get that.

The president of Ireland was here at Fordham recently and he said that with so many of our established institutions under fire, the arts have seized the moral center. Do you think that’s true?

I’m not so sure about the moral center, but isn’t that just a conundrum? You see how the tables have turned. It used to be that the moral-less people were in the arts. That’s how it was always viewed. But the arts have always given us a reflection of our better selves, of who we should be and while, like in the Janus picture, showing us who we are. It’s our job in enduring the most tumultuous of times: to create. That’s when you rally against what the ills are and try to provide at least a platform for conversation.

Well, I think our time is up.

Really truly. Sam is in town (actor Samuel L. Jackson, her husband), and he said, “Will you be home and have dinner?” I said I would.

In 2017, three of the five nominees for best supporting actress were African American. One was Viola Davis, for her role in August Wilson’s Fences, in which she played opposite Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, who also produced and directed the film. Davis took home the Oscar that night.

Davis had been nominated twice before: once for a brief supporting role in Doubt (2008) and once as lead actress in The Help (2011), in which she plays a domestic worker for a white family in 1960s Mississippi. The film was much loved by moviegoers—it received a nomination for Best Picture—and Davis’ work was critically acclaimed. But her character’s depiction in the film has been problematic for many academics interested the portrayal of African Americans on screen. One such thinker, Brandy Monk-Payton, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Communications and Media Studies, recently published an essay titled, “‘You Is Kind, You Is Smart, You Is Important,’ or, Why I Can’t Watch The Help.”

Monk-Payton said she used the “You is kind…” phrase because it is part of the dialect used by the 2009 book of the same name by author Kathyrn Stockett, who is white.

“I wanted to take back some of that language and insert my own thoughts on how this author took certain licenses with her subjects’ language to appeal to a white liberal imagination of what working-class black people would sound like,” said Monk-Payton.

The essay appears in a book of short essays published last month by Rutgers University Press, titled Unwatchable, where scholars take on certain media that they find unwatchable, from bloody horror films to real world violence to scenes that are just in bad taste. Monk-Payton’s essay speaks to her discomfort in watching a fine actress playing a maid. She noted that the content of the film is “ostensibly” about black domestic help in the 1960s, but it is told with a blind spot enabled by melodrama, she said.

“My essay is about thinking through what black women feel while watching a white savior narrative—what I call black women’s simultaneous endurance and exhaustion,” she said. “Another reason I chose this title because it reflects the racialized labor of care work, whereby Davis’s character has to routinely recite this mantra to affirm her white employer’s young daughter.”

That the Oscars often take place during Black History Month isn’t lost on Monk-Payton. She rattled off historic precedents of films that use “a certain kind of cheesiness in the service of creating the illusion of integration.” She noted that Imitation of Life, both the 1939 and the 1959 versions, also use the domestic worker and employer’s relationship as a device to examine racism. But she added that in 1959 version, which she called a “messy film,” director Douglas Sirk was at least “thinking about the role of melodrama” as a device that helps advance the story in a film, but that was 60 years ago. Her essay allows that “many melodrama films are compulsively watchable,” but those trafficking “in racial politics and white liberal guilt are cringe-worthy.”

“The fact that these kinds of films keep getting made is problematic,” she said. “They’re nostalgic looks at overcoming adversity through a liberal framework, a maternal melodrama, that thinks through these problems in a domestic realm, so it’s really alluring and very sentimental.”

She said contemporary films like The Help may not overtly present their characters as the stereotypical mammy figures, but the black maid trope is similar and affects how viewers misunderstand the hard labor performed by the character.

Ultimately, Octavia Spencer took home a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as a maid in The Help, which Monk-Payton said she can’t help but view as something of a throwback to Hattie McDaniel winning best supporting actress for also playing a maid in 1939’s Gone with the Wind.

She said that if there is a relatable scene in The Help for viewers like herself, then it’s that of an elderly maid (played by iconic and beloved black actress Cicely Tyson) being fired and sent away from the house where she works. In the scene, the maid, who has been with the family for years, turns then rests her hand on the screen door gazing at her former boss, who shuts the door in her face.

“She looks forlorn. I read that shot as this endurance and exhaustion being expressed through her averted gaze,” she said.

She said that talented actors, like Davis and Spencer, give in to the impulse to humanize these characters by taking the roles. She noted that Davis once said that she could bring something new to the well-worn character, but has since told The New York Times that she regrets taking the part because “it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard.”

Similar criticisms have been made about this year’s Oscar contenders, including Roma, which portrays an indigenous domestic worker living with a benevolent family in Mexico, and Green Book, which flips the script with a white chauffeur driving a wealthy black pianist.

More Voices in the Room

“The question is ‘Who is in the room when creating these movies?’” she said. “We need a more localized view, a multiplicity of voices in the room, more content that speaks to these experiences so that the films don’t have that translator aspect.”

Monk-Payton applauds another 2019 Oscar contender, Black Panther, for its importance in black cinema. While she doesn’t want to diminish “the enthusiasm and emotional attachment” for the blockbuster, she said it doesn’t quite match up to the subtlety of August Wilson’s Fences.

“Fences is refreshingly set in contrast to the spectacular quality of Black Panther; we need more of that kind of film,” she said. “We tend to forget about these quiet films that explore the quotidian, the ordinary.”

It’s a view shared by Davis, as she made abundantly clear on accepting her Oscar for Fences.

“Here’s to August Wilson, who exhumed and exalted the ordinary people,” she said.

“I can’t think in the face of you telling me who you think I am, with your loud self and your loud eyes and your loud guilt,” she says to Cabell, who is white. “I can’t hear myself think.” She then turns, comes down from the stage, and starts speaking directly to the audience.

It’s a charged moment in the play. And it’s all scripted. What starts out as a sitcom-like family drama becomes an exploration of race and the white gaze. Boateng played Keisha, the youngest member of the Fraser family, who calls out the white audience members for being complicit. “Do I have to keep talking to the white people?” she says, looking to the faces of color in the audience. “Do I have to tell them that I want them to make space for us?”

The monologue was written by Drury, but because Boateng was delivering the lines so frankly every night, she would have to field the audience’s reactions in the moment, from confusion to discomfort to outright anger. She recalls during one performance, when she asked those questions, a white audience member shot back, “Well, why would you want to keep talking to them?” When Boateng didn’t answer him, he said, “Oh, you’re going to keep talking over me. This is a monologue, it’s not a dialogue.” Boateng then went slightly off-script, she says. Without breaking character, she spoke a stern line to the man and continued with her speech.

Her grace under pressure got the attention of artists and critics. In his review for The New York Times, chief theater critic Ben Brantley called the play “dazzling and ruthless,” and wrote, “Ms. Boateng also winds up with the heaviest acting duties, and she executes them with unblinking, confrontational clarity.”

The play’s two-month run ended in August, and since then, Boateng has been keeping busy—shooting a recurring role on a Netflix television show in the city (she can’t say much about it until the show’s premiere in 2019) and finding more stage work.

“I’m the person who always gave myself challenges,” she says over coffee one November afternoon in the lobby cafe at the Signature Theatre, where she was in rehearsal for a revival of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine. (The show runs at the Signature from November 19 to January 6.) Even when she was young, Boateng says, “I would throw myself into the things that scared me.”

It was her bold performance in Fairview that got the attention of Fabulation director, the Obie-winning Lileana Blain-Cruz. “It’s been wonderful working with her,” Blain-Cruz wrote in an email. “She has a joyous spirit and she radiates on stage. Fabulation requires the actors to take on several roles, and MaYaa has done that with specificity and nuance.”

“There’s Room for Us”

With her current projects, like with Fairview, she is pushing herself out of her comfort zone. Which is how she got herself into the arts in the first place.

Boateng grew up in Hyattsville, Maryland, where got her first exposure to performance through stepping. “I joined this Christian performance group with the initiative to give inner-city youth something positive to look forward to, to keep them out of trouble,” she explains. That taste of performance led Boateng to audition for a local performing arts middle school. She got in, and then for high school, she attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Boateng credits the arts for giving her direction and purpose. Growing up in an area where “crime and violence were prevalent,” the world of performance was “a safe home for me,” she explains. Even now, when Boateng goes home to Maryland, she is met with excitement and awe from family and friends. Being a working artist, “it’s unheard of where I’m from,” she says. She tries to go home as much as she can, to show those in her hometown who aren’t always represented in entertainment that “they can do that too. There’s room for us.”

“A Reminder That I Am on the Right Path”

At Fordham, besides majoring in theater, Boateng took classes in sociology and philosophy. She credits the school’s well-rounded core curriculum to making her a “multifaceted artist,” she says. “What I learned is that I can pull from all those experiences and use them for the stage. Being a full person makes you a better artist.” At the start of her senior year, Boateng was named the inaugural recipient of an endowed scholarship established by Fordham alumnus Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, “a reminder,” she says, “that I am on the right path.”

After graduation, Boateng’s first professional gig was in Classical Theatre of Harlem’s July 2013 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was educational because up to that point, she hadn’t done Shakespeare before. Obviously, she had a knack for it. In summer 2017, after earning an M.F.A. in acting at New York University, she played the Soothsayer in Julius Caesar at Shakespeare in the Park, a controversial production in which Caesar was dressed to resemble President Donald Trump.

The show was met by protesters, who occasionally rushed the stage. While it was a scary experience, Boateng says it made her realize she wasn’t going to be satisfied doing work solely within the traditional theatrical paradigm, where the fourth wall can be unyielding and “oppressive,” and audiences have to be quiet. Theatergoers may have been angry at her and her castmates during Julius Caesar and Fairview, but that just meant the work moved them.

“It was exciting to know that this is what theater can do,” she says. “I don’t think people should come to the theater just to watch and go home. If you’re shook a little bit, that’s good.”

“Use Your Experience for Ammunition, and for Empowerment”

The projects that attract Boateng are usually things that are unpredictable. “I want to do work that is exciting,” she says emphatically. “That is bold, that pushes the mold, that doesn’t allow folks to be comfortable, that is about revolution. That gives voice to marginalized folks and says, ‘We exist, we’re here, we’ve been here, and we have stories to tell.’”

And Boateng wants to tell her own story too. She is currently working on a solo show, which recently had a workshop presentation at Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where she was a resident artist. In the show, she talks about her life in relation to that of singer, actor, and activist Eartha Kitt. She explains that Kitt’s given name was actually Eartha Mae, and the late Kitt considered Mae to be a separate persona.

The notion of masks and different selves fascinates Boateng, whose given name is Yaa, which means “born on Thursday.” As a child in school, she says she felt some shame about her name because her classmates would tease her about it. She wanted to have an American name instead, but her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, encouraged her to “love the name I was given.”

“She said they can call you Yaa, or MaameYaa, or MaYaa for short, but you are not changing your name,” Boateng recalls. “She taught me the full meaning of my name: MaYaa Amoakowaa Boateng. Amoakowaa can be translated as ‘one who fights,’ and so my mother taught me that I am that little lady born on Thursday who is a fighter.”

Boateng’s solo show, she explains, is about “learning to embrace who I am and where I come from. It’s about coming to a place where you accept the fullness of who you are. And you use your experience for ammunition, and for empowerment.”

So far, part of her experience may have been to make audiences and herself uncomfortable, but through it, Boateng found something valuable: herself.

“When I go into predominantly white spaces, it’s not always that easy to have that voice and to have that command,” she admits. “But I now have courage in my voice as a person of color, saying my voice is important, and I have a lot to offer, I have a lot to say.”

—Diep Tran is the senior editor of American Theatre magazine.

Known for his role as the chillingly cool and murderous Brother Mouzone in TV’s The Wire and for his numerous musical and straight roles on Broadway, such as Mafala Hatimbi in The Book of Mormon, Potts has been performing on stage and screen for more than 25 years.

But acting was never a sure bet for Potts. He said that when he decided to become an actor, his mother staged an intervention.

“I remember coming home from a summer job to find a dining room full of family and neighbors that my mother was dishing out food to. It was like an ambush. She said, ‘Sit down, we want to talk to you,’” recalled Potts. “There was a neighbor there who was a former Black Panther, she said, ‘Actor? Actor? Black people been acting all their lives; you need to do something that contributes.’”

Potts split his youth between summers in Brooklyn with his parents and the school year with his maternal grandparents in the small town of Wisacky, South Carolina. Both communities felt strongly that he should enter the professional class as a doctor or lawyer. When he got into Columbia College in New York City, however, his professors thought otherwise. One adviser told him that great black actors, singers, and writers do indeed make important contributions.

Though he may have diverged from what his elders wanted, he said his hometown of about 500 people influenced much of his education and artistry. With the church at the center of communal life, the call and response between the congregation and pastor stirred something that he carried with him to the theatre.

“Reverend Wright was an extraordinary preacher,” said Potts, recalling his church’s minister. “That man had this great bass baritone voice and he understood language and the music of it and the interplay of it. If you listen to gospel music or if you listen to Dr. King’s speeches, there’s the repetition of a phrase, the elaboration of it. It’s almost like classical music.”

Finding the music in his scripts became key to his craft. He noted that while Eugene O’Neill’s words captured the turn-of-the-century language of the New York denizens, so much of The Iceman Cometh relies on the actors understanding timing and “where the language lands and what words makes most sense in a sentence.”

Potts studied the great plays and literature in college, but the voices, he notices, were mostly those of European white men. It wasn’t until the gap between his bachelor’s and his master’s degrees, when he was in the Army Reserves, that he heard the voice of a black playwright that would change his life.

“I was watching the Tonys that year and it was the year that August Wilson’s Fences [the 1987 production]  was up for several Tonys, and I remember that great snippet of James Earl Jones and Courtney Vance,” he said of the play’s father-son climax. “That scene just blew my mind and awakened something again. I saw my life. I saw a piece that I understood. I recognized the characters. They sounded like people I grew up around.”

It was then that he decided to apply to Yale School of Drama—in secret.

“It was really one of these Hail Mary passes that was going to decide the course of my life,” he said. “I gave God an ultimatum: I said if I get in then this is what I’m meant to do.”

He would go on to graduate from Yale and perform in dozens of plays, movies, and on television. In addition to his role on The Wire, he’s also known for his role as Detective Maynard Gilbough on HBO’s True Detectives as well as recurring roles as Senator Fred Reynolds on Madam Secretary and as Sergeant Cole Draper on Law and Order. But his television work is informed by his work in the theater, he said, not the other way around. He has been lauded for his singing and acting on Broadway since 2005, where he has appeared in Lennon, Grey Gardens, and last year’s acclaimed production of Jitney, written by his theatrical hero, August Wilson. Much of what he’s learned on stage and screen, he plans to bring to Fordham students.

“I want students to learn as I have learned,” he said. “They need to ask, ‘How do you talk to people on stage?’” he said.

He said that too often actors perform and don’t listen. He described a far more empathetic approach to the craft rather than “showing off,” which he said he sees far too much of these days. Like the call and response between congregation and pastor, Potts said actors must connect with their audience. But most importantly, they must connect with each other.

“Directors love it when they see actors actually speaking to one another, actually having the conversation, as opposed to acting as if they’re having a conversation,” he said. “It’s absolutely vital to make that connection. Theater teaches you how to think deeply and listen. My hope is to impart that to these other young actors.”

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.