That transformation was key to my next step as an artist, to knowing that's what acting is. It isn't just posing; it isn't just being a version of yourself in a way that was free. Performing wasn't just performing; it was transforming. I think that artists find that in many different ways, and as actors, there are many ways into that.
I would encourage you, as I do if you're an actor, to know your own equipment, know your own psychology, and use the great teachers that are synthesized in my favorite teacher's book, Bobby Moss, who I studied with later, Intent to Live that distills down Uta Hagen, Stella Adler, Bobby Lewis, and Stanislavski. The great teachers at the Group Theatre believed that the method needed to be altered to be constructive rather than destructive to artists.
David Milch's mind is so singular because he uses language in a way that defines character. That's what all good writers do: use language to get to the heart of something. He would use malapropisms to make up words, and Milch loved playing with that. As someone who played the love interest of such a unique character as Andy Sipowicz, I found it fascinating. Through Sylvia and David Milch's understanding, his wife humanized him. Sipowicz was portrayed as an addict, a very flawed human who had many addictions. David Milch is now suffering from Alzheimer's, so we won't get his words again. However, the words that he has to offer are timeless because he studied Robert Penn Warren and had many mentors throughout his vast literary education. That is key. I love speaking Noël Coward’s words. As a bon vivant, he wrote musically, to charm us and amuse us. So, going and reading Noël Coward is important for actors to learn those cadences and the musicality of a certain era.
Of course, Shakespeare comes to mind. I also think of the female playwrights who delight me now, whether it's Caryl Churchill. She has that singular mind and plays with gender so well, challenging gender norms. Seeing Cloud 9 when I was in college blew my mind open because men were playing women, and women were playing men. Of course, Shakespeare was doing it too, but her work felt more intimate; it was in a small theater. That’s another thing I encourage actors and audiences to do: go see things in small theaters. See it up close because that will excite you and help you learn the craft.
Sharon Lawrence is an acclaimed actress best known for her Emmy-nominated, SAG Award-winning role as ADA Sylvia Costas on NYPD Blue. She has delivered memorable performances in Desperate Housewives, Monk, Law & Order: SVU, Criminal Minds, Shameless, and Queen Sugar. On stage, she’s earned praise for roles in The Shot (a one-woman play about the owner/publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham), Orson’s Shadow, and A Song at Twilight. She starred in Broadway revivals of Cabaret, Chicago, and Fiddler on the Roof. Her recent work includes the neo-Western series Joe Pickett, opposite Michael Dorman, and the films Solace with Anthony Hopkins and The Bridge Partner. Lawrence is also a dedicated advocate, serving on the boards of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, WeForShe, and Heal the Bay, and is a former Chair of the Women In Film Foundation.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Given your background in theater and television. You’ve worked on Broadway. You've done Chicago. You were Emmy-nominated for your role as Sylvia Costas in NYPD Blue. All these shows are very well scripted and you have extensive rehearsals, so how does that absence of rehearsal in White Rabbit, Red Rabbit work? Is that kind of thrilling yet frightening?
LAWRENCE
It is thrilling. It is frightening. And the exhilaration that I, as an actor, the first time I am married to a text is often, in my estimation, the purest version that will ever exist for me. It takes a long time to let words play. Actors often talk about the word "play." You're doing a play or playing a character, whether it's on screen or on stage. The goal in that flow state, that anybody who creates understands, is where you're playing you, where you are out of the way.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You have often played really powerful, vulnerable, yet powerful people. You played Vivien Leigh, the actress, dealing with mental health and all the kinds of issues she waded through. You’ve played very powerful characters. When I see you on screen, I feel, oh, you're so capable and steely. It’s just a shorthand I see in your different roles, like in Cabaret or Chicago on stage, or Queen Sugar. It's just this quality. I don't know how to describe it, and yet all these roles are different, but that’s an area I think you hone very well. I don’t think it’s accidental that these roles find you because you communicate that. It's obviously in your DNA, from your father’s background in news journalism and your degree in journalism, your awareness of political events and power plays is something you've imbibed from a young age.
LAWRENCE
That is true. I was born this way. By this way, I mean an extrovert, and I had a safe and uncomplicated childhood. That is luck. You can argue if you believe in a more metaphysical sense that we choose the scenarios we are born into. If I did make a choice, I made a good choice in ways to be a storyteller who can, without harm, play characters who are challenged, like Catherine Graham. I have never experienced the trauma she experienced, so I'm safe when I play her.
I believe there is something to be said for coming up in the era that I did, which meant that I was watching women evolve in our culture. As a young woman, I saw and benefited from the freedom of women who were just coming into the workplace, living as single women in television shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That was so influential. Ask any woman my age, and you will recognize the subversiveness of a character who not only had a career but was unmarried and could discuss birth control in certain episodes. I grew up in an era where the birth control pill was normalized as my sexual maturity was developing. I had choices; I had bodily autonomy. The images of women I saw were appealing to me. They chose to pursue their creative power, and it was celebrated. That is why I believe the vibration of the characters I play has that quality.
I played queens who were given respect early on in my career, and I portrayed sexual beings who gained power from their inherent qualities. When you marry those two things together, like I was able to do, as a reader absorbing stories, material, writers, and styles, you start to build a matrix of what qualities you can bring. One of the first transformative acting roles I ever played was Electra in an adaptation of the Greek tragedy during college at UNC Chapel Hill. I really transformed for the first time. I mean, I was playing a character with such great pain. Electra has a daddy complex, is betrayed by her stepmother, has an odd relationship with her brother, and she is exiled. She is set to inherit power, but she goes mad. There are women around her who gather and see that wound. She is very much human, not a goddess, stripped of her power, mourning it and ultimately engaging in self-harm.
In our version, she was depicted doing self-harm. We created a very androgynous version of her. I chopped my hair off to play her and wore a burlap sack so all sexuality was gone. This was very interesting to me as a 20-year-old not using that. I carried an Uzi submachine gun. I wore a black leather motorcycle vest with one arm removed and a football shoulder pad sticking out the side. She took on the power of the male and yet the vulnerability of the female, using a knife for self-harm. Like you'll find, this is a trigger warning, but I used the knife to dull the pain by grinding it into my palm instead of cutting. I had never witnessed these things; they were suggested by the directors. I became somebody else, and it didn’t mess me up because I was old enough and mature enough to understand what I was doing.
LAWRENCE
But there's a playfulness apart from the political aspect of this. In White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, the term alone draws you in. I'm certainly in a lineage of many respected actors who have done this, so I have faith that it would be worth my time. The structure supports the artist. However, it requires a certain freedom. That freedom, as I was talking about earlier, is what actors are always searching for. It can take years to accomplish, where you are carried by the material, you're not ahead of yourself, you're not behind yourself, you're right in the moment.
We will be grappling with what is true, what is art, what is journalism, and what is being represented as truth—as fact—when it is indeed created out of intention, whether benign or nefarious.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And in theater, have you done also a lot of improvisation? Does that help prepare you for something that is this unexpected?
LAWRENCE
That’s important too. Viola Spolin wrote the definitive book on theater games, and Alan Alda was a mentor for me. By the way, he has a great podcast, Clear and Vivid, where he is committed to teaching scientists how to communicate their work better to laypeople. It was through improv that he does that. If you are a scientist who wants to secure grants to make your work accessible, you can follow along on Alan Alda’s podcast and also recognize that theater games and improv are great ways to learn to communicate better.
It’s challenging, but it's a freedom you probably won’t find in other ways. It’s structured; there's a process. It isn’t a free-for-all. It's very well designed to open you up in ways that delight you and encourage you to communicate better.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yes, and I will second that. Alan Alda was supposed to come on our show, but he was wrapping the film finale of Ray Donovan, so it didn't happen. Clear and Vivid is excellent.
You mentioned David Milch’s recorded lectures. They are really beautiful. I'm always quoting him when he quotes Kierkegaard: “The spirit rests transparently on the spirit that gives it rise.” These are some of the insights Milch embeds in his writing. As you said, all these great writers build upon the writers of history.
LAWRENCE
They were products of their time, yes, and he will say that they are products of their time. It was a boys’ club, but that does not negate the power of the poetry and the aspiration for transformation. We, as women and as underserved communities, those who are not privileged, when you read Maya Angelou, when you read Ta-Nehisi Coates, or when you read Lynn Nottage, you must read all the cultures. It’s my homework too. I'm at the point in my life where championing those coming up and supporting others brings me joy.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I’m wondering, what is the key or trick for you to make it new while knowing what's coming? You have to believe it’s for the first time. I guess part of that may be interesting for both audiences and for yourself as Katharine, especially when we consider the MeToo movement. I assume your role was forming at the height of MeToo, all this awareness, and you're portraying an intimate depiction of domestic violence while playing the head of a newspaper at a time when newspapers had more power. I don’t how many local newspapers we’ve seen close recently. So many journalists are losing their jobs, and we’ve observed this decline. The Washington Post is now hanging on by a thread. They’re being supported, but not all newspapers have a good business model. This all makes it relevant, especially with recent events like Signal Gate, which is different but still serious. We have plans leaked to The Atlantic due to incompetence—not a sinister situation, just carelessness. It all resonates so powerfully, and for the audience, it's fresh.
LAWRENCE
Technology has drastically changed our communication skills, putting us at risk of unintended consequences. Our wisdom has not caught up with our technology. Signal Gate is a prime example of hubris as much as carelessness. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a journalist misused technology out of an inherent drive, leading to a fatal flaw in the culprits' choices. They just can't resist telling the story to people who do not need to be in the room. That carelessness stems from an impulse to broadcast, appropriate or not.
I believe that's why a free press will always be a goal of a free and progressive society. Oppressive regimes aim to control it because they know its power. In Katharine Graham’s time, those who may not know, Nixon resigned because the press, particularly The Washington Post, uncovered wiretappings. It’s interesting to see now that taping and revealing conversations is at risk because our technology makes it easy. Nixon and his party believed it was indeed a breach of democracy. “Democracy dies in darkness,” a motto of a national newspaper, is very true. Graham used her power and influence at great risk because the president was controlling the FCC, which was overseeing their licensing and broadcasting.
We now see the levers of government being pulled—almost in an extortionary way—because those few entities that control global media are concerned about access. This administration’s choices to control what will be broadcast deals with not just licenses but hardware. Only dominant powers can control access to things like satellites. The value systems and beliefs of those in power create either a vacuum or an open or closed system.
It’s a sacred thing that we do. I don’t want to make it more precious than it is, but it is, in a way, a sacrifice. We must understand how to wield that power constructively rather than destructively. Good programs and teachers know how to do this. Performances will offer this up, but it takes time to prepare yourself for it. I’m relying on the upcoming artists, and we have NEA grants being cut, along with grants here in California. We must invest in artists. That’s going to take private money, as we can’t rely on the government. It’s why I’m a board member of a theater company, raising money and supporting them financially because I believe we must grow artists—they don’t just happen.
Yes, my background in dance—I didn’t start young, and I wasn’t a dance performer. I always performed; that was how I was built. I didn’t have to overcome many societal obstacles to express myself in a way that felt natural. I talk about it as hardware and software. My father was a journalist but also an amateur actor. He was really good and had encouragement back in his high school days in the 1950s, which fostered that in a public system. It was a value from my family, and I don’t discount that. It’s one of my great blessings.
Had I been like my husband, who is an athlete and given that freedom to pursue it, I might have chosen a different field. This was what worked; it was what I was gifted with. I say this because it came through my hardware—the way I was wired—and the software in the culture built around me, but it was up to me to develop it as a tool.
Ballet was a foundational aspect because it taught me to connect within my body. I understand the difference between movements that are inherent to Sharon and those that are instructive and evocative of another type of carriage. I walk differently as Katharine Graham than I do as myself. I know how to find her walk. First of all, she was tall, and while I am not tall, I know how to seem tall. Women who are uncomfortable with their height often bring their shoulders down and look under their eyes, bowing their heads in deference, based on the culture and era in which they were raised.
I have often said that if I can get the hair right and the shoes right, I understand the character's carriage. For certain characters, you want to be in heels; they give a feminine quality, whether it's one that is sexually powerful or vulnerable. In Katharine’s case, I wear flats because she did, allowing a flexibility of movement. I don’t just play her; I play her husband and her mother. I’ll position myself to play men. Some people have asked why I prefer to be called an actor instead of an actress. It took me a while to understand, but it’s because if I am called an actor, I can play anything. If I'm called an actress, I can only play women. I embrace the term actor because I play men in this role. That maleness is a stance; it involves a groundedness. It has to do with feeling comfortable. Actors often have to lose their inhibitions around their pelvic area because it’s highly sexualized.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I want to delve into your animal activism. You're an advocate for the oceans. There is a real animal intelligence and a communication with animals; they think with their whole bodies. An animal would never say, "I think, therefore I am." If they meet a human or another animal, they can read the situation instantly. They are equipped with an awareness that we often forget in our overthinking, which creates blockages and procrastination. Conversely, non-human animals gauge situations and take decisive action. Nietzsche said, “knowledge kills action,” and I believe so does fear—fearing our fears too. Tell us a little bit about your advocacy for the oceans, which has been long-standing.
LAWRENCE
I got involved with ocean conservation because I had the privilege of scuba diving. If you have seen under the surface and witnessed a dead reef, you know it is not nature; nature doesn't kill reefs. They die due to imposed conditions like ocean acidification, which is tied to rising temperatures. The science shows that these temperatures have escalated rapidly because of human impact on the planet.
I'm not going to debate that because I believe in the science. It's also practices like logging that lead to silt entering the ocean faster, essentially drowning reefs. The sunlight filtering down is part of a reef's biochemistry, and when you see a dead reef, it's a skeleton that formed far too quickly. Reefs build over time, but when they look white and bleached, it's an indicator of dramatic change. I couldn’t ignore this issue.
I got involved with PADI, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. I did public service announcements for them and hosted a special about dolphins. I was in the water scuba diving with dolphins, which is rare because they aren't accustomed to scuba equipment. On a vessel called the Stella, we free dove with dolphins, specifically with a pod studied by Dr. Denise Herzing for the past 30 years. The dolphins are curious about us, wanting to absorb our presence.
Like dogs, dolphins exhibit a desire to get closer to us. They use echolocation, which allows them to recognize when a woman is pregnant, as they're mammals and are familiar with pregnancy. If you're close enough, you can feel them scan you with sound waves.
We learn so much through observing animals. By studying them closely in person over long periods, we can recreate aspects of those animals in performance. It may sound odd, but if you've engaged in the exercise and been guided through it, you can tap into a very primal aspect of your character, transforming in front of others.
