Staging a Revolution

Caroline Clay MFA ’13 knows that if she wants to see more (and better) roles for black performers—and make no mistake, she does—well, she’ll just have to develop those roles herself.

The actress and playwright, who appeared in the 2017 Tony-winning play “The Little Foxes” on Broadway and next month will be seen in D.C.’s Studio Theatre production of “The Skeleton Crew,” strives to shine a spotlight on, as she puts it, “unsung sheroes”

“Woe is the artist who’s standing by waiting for opportunities to be created for them—particularly artists of color,” says Clay. “It’s a waiting game. I don’t know that I have that much time.”

Clay’s drive is rooted in her upbringing in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, where she was immersed in the city’s rich African-American history and culture. Her parents were active in the civil rights movement, and her father had a career in government, working as undersecretary of housing and urban development in the Carter administration.

Although Clay’s parents took her and her brother to the Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, the Folger Theatre and D.C.’s many other cultural offerings, Clay describes herself as “a secret artist” during her childhood. “I hadn’t really danced, but I knew that I could, I hadn’t really acted, but I knew that I could,” she says. “You could call that extreme narcissism, but there was something in me that I knew I needed to express.”

At the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Clay came into her own as a performer, cutting her teeth on works like Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (She also won “best attendance” as a senior superlative, a dramatic turnaround from her days of making up excuses to stay home from her traditional junior high, where she felt lost among the masses: “I had cramps 300 days a year there,” she says.)

After graduating from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, Clay spent years working as an actress until 2010, when, in her mid-40s, she enrolled in UMD’s now-defunct graduate program in performance. She was intrigued by the possibility of adding teaching to her skillset. “As much as I held a hairbrush in front of a mirror doing an Oscar speech, there’s a part of me that would love to be a tenured professor at a little college somewhere in the Midwest,” she says.

“I remember thinking she was really, really honest, and really, really talented,” says Alvin Mayes, director of undergraduate studies in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. “She has a lot of depth in her performances and her portrayal of characters.”

It was at Maryland that Clay began to delve into writing and directing. “If you’re a good writer, you can generate your own material,” she says. “That’s so important.”

Her thesis focused on one of Clay’s “unsung sheroes”: Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, a civil rights advocate and outspoken feminist. Clay’s one-woman show, “Let It Flo!: Radicalism’s Rudest Mouth,” tells, as Clay puts it, the “flawed, nuanced, complicated, complex” story of Kennedy’s life and career. Clay continues to be perform the piece at theaters around the country; she is currently in talks with Harvard’s American Repertory Theater for a yearlong residency to continue to develop the work and eventually produce it there.

Maryland also gave her the opportunity to direct—she helmed the university’s 2014 production of “Twilight Los Angeles: 1992,” Anna Deveare Smith’s play about the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King.

Clay’s career most recently took her to Broadway, where she co-starred alongside Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon in the critically acclaimed production of Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes.” Clay agreed to play Addie, a loyal maid, only if the original script’s many uses of the n-word were cut back—which they were. Entertainment Weekly noted that Clay and fellow supporting actor Charles Turner “bring dimension to roles that could easily fade into the background.”

Clay points out that Addie is similar to African-American characters who appear in many of Hellman’s plays, sometimes problematically: a moral compass. “You have greedy, ambitious white characters and an uneducated but wise black person who’s able to say, ‘But your soul is bereft if you cannot find love.’ From an actor’s perspective, I found that quite delicious.”

Next up for Clay is “The Skeleton Crew,” about workers in one of the last remaining auto factories in Detroit. The play, which opens next month, is written and directed by African-American women—a selling point for Clay.

“Until my last croak, I’ll be a voice for authentic, real, top-down diversity in theaters,” says Clay. “Only then can we really have true discourse. Everything else is just noise.”