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Pinkins says she’s not worried about mustering the energy to do double duty, even though she’s got several kids running around at home. “Caroline is really fulfilling and exciting and energizing,” she enthuses. “It’s just a gift to get to do it; it completely fills me like no other project I’ve ever done. I think that the piece is a major work in the history of the American theater; I believe that people will be writing dissertations on it for the next ten or twenty years. It’s just so moving for people, and to get to play this character I can so totally relate to…. I feel like I’ve lived the life she lives, so to have the opportunity to express that humanity so that it touches other people is incredible. It’s not just a black woman’s story; women, mothers, even men have called to say they’ve left the show weeping. It’s the kind of show where at the end, you just want to sit and weep.”
The play is set 40 years ago, Pinkins explains, “on the eve of Kennedy’s assassination. The play deals with the changes that are going on in the world, as [Kennedy’s death] was the death of innocence in America. The world was changing, civil rights was happening, and Caroline is a Negro maid working for a Jewish family who just can’t change. She’s so stuck in the old ways that she just can’t change. So it’s really about the world changing, which you see through her children and through the people she works for, and her struggle with that. There’s no big event that happens in the play, but he [playwright Tony Kushner, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Angels in America] has captured all these giant feelings in the simple, mundane tasks of these people’s lives. It’s just so real!
“You really owe it to yourself to come down and see this play,” she grins. “It’s just that good. We’ll be at the Public Theater until January, and then after that, hopefully, we’ll head to Broadway.”
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