NEW YORK (AP) Tonya Pinkins knows how much it can hurt to save pennies.

About a year and a half ago, the star of Broadway's "Caroline, or Change" was on welfare and struggling to support her four children, the oldest of whom is now 16. One night she decided to use every bit of food left in her kitchen to make one abundant meal.

"It was applesauce and some peas and some leftover meat. They just loved it," the actress recalls. "I was feeling, 'Oh my God. This is it. I don't know what we're going to eat tomorrow.' And they were saying, 'Mmm, great meal, Mom!'" She felt like she was sinking.

Now Pinkins is playing a woman who knows the same pain. Caroline is a divorced black maid living in Louisiana in 1963. She struggles to support her three young children on $30 a week, and worries about a son fighting in Vietnam. The musical concerns the power struggle between the 39-year-old maid and the 8-year-old son of her white Jewish employers over the pocket change she finds in the child's pants while doing laundry.

The role will likely bring Pinkins a Tony nomination.

Her ex-husband, musician Ron Brawer, gained custody of their two children in 1993. Pinkins only regained the right to see their two sons three days a week in 1997, after paying thousands of dollars in legal fees. She continues to pay her husband child support. Pinkins also has two other children, ages 4 and 7, who live with her.

Before "Caroline, or Change," she had worked only sporadically since 2000.

"Thirty dollars ain't enough," she belts out in a deep alto as she dumps clothes into the washer in the opening scene of "Caroline." Standing with her hip thrust out to support a wicker basket full of dirty laundry, Pinkins just seems to know what she's talking about.

"The stuff that I lived, it comes out in my pores," the actress says in an interview with The Associated Press. "There's certain work on Caroline that I don't have to do because ... I'm speaking my life."

She returned to "All My Children" in December. And now hops from morning tapings to afternoon rehearsals for "Caroline." She sits in her dressing room on a worn sofa and wraps a bright orange and purple tapestry around her arms as a shawl. Only half-relaxing, she leans back into the comfort of the couch, but keeps her feet on the floor.

Pinkins says she feels incredibly lucky to be able to find success again after so much turmoil in her personal life.

"It had never been as low as it was after 'Jelly's Last Jam.' And this is higher than it's ever been," she says. "I have a lot of joy right now!" She laughs, as she opens her arms and throws herself back onto the sofa with a flourish. Pinkins is one of those few women who manage to be large without seeming heavyset. Her billowing purple cotton dress accentuates her thin waist and curvy figure, making her seem like she was just built on a larger scale than the skinny women of the world.

Since November, "Caroline, or Change" had been playing off-Broadway at The Public Theater before it moved to Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theatre. The almost entirely sung-through show is Tony Kushner's first musical. Kushner, who won a Pulitzer Prize and for his apocalyptic and Tony Award-winning play about homosexual relationships, "Angels in America," says "Caroline" was his opportunity to make a musical about the real issues affecting many people's lives.

"So often it's assumed that musical theater is going to be about silliness and never about the things that people contend with in their lives," Kushner says.

Those issues are both as small as pocket change and as large as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which occurs in the first act of "Caroline." Composer Jeanine Tesori uses rhythm and blues, gospel, pop and klezmer music for different characters to express different views of this changing world.

It's the historical context that gives meaning to the music, Kushner says. "What's the connection between these amazing popular musical forms and the world that created them?" asks Kushner. "The minute you ask that question about the world, you're into the realm of politics."

Yet, says Pinkins, the play's racial issues were unlike her own experience growing up in Chicago in the 1960s as the daughter of civil servants her mother drove a bus and her father was a police officer.

"I did not have any awareness of the struggle," she says. "It wasn't like my family was at home teaching me about the leaders." Growing up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, Pinkins attended magnet schools where white students were bused in. "It was always completely diverse," she says.

Pinkins exudes a natural glamour that's far removed from her onstage character. A few strands of golden highlights shine from the dark mass of hair piled on her head as if to remind you that this is a woman who would never feel comfortable in the white uniform and orthopedic shoes that make up Caroline's daily uniform.

"I had a flair for the dramatic even when I was a little child," Pinkins says, citing her high school prom as an example. She insisted on posing with her date in the most dramatic photograph possible. "I did a picture where I was laid back over his arms, in a dip," she says, leaning back over the arm of the sofa to demonstrate. "It was scandalous!"

An elementary school teacher first encouraged her to try out her flamboyant personality on the stage and later persuaded her to attend an open call that led to a part in "Merrily We Roll Along" when Pinkins was 19. Her parents weren't surprised when she left after her freshman year at Carnegie Mellon to join the show, she says.

Pinkins has remained flamboyant. Even today, she wears her makeup in broad strokes: A deep purple blush accentuates her high cheekbones and a thick stripe of metallic blue eye shadow draws attention to her deep eyes. Her face changes expressions quickly as she mimics the characters in every story she tells. ?

She drops her voice a few octaves and starts talking in quick, clipped sentences to quote director George C. Wolfe when he asked her to read for the role of Caroline: "We're doing this play with this lady and this little boy. He tells her he wants to drop a bomb on all the Negroes. She tells him that hell's a hot place where Jews go when they die. You should play that part." Wolfe had directed Pinkins in both "Jelly's Last Jam" and later "The Wild Party" on Broadway.

Her stories are told with gusto - a woman far removed from Caroline Thibodeaux. This is a woman who, once she found her way out of the quagmire of divorce, decided to teach workshops for actors about having the right attitude to achieve success.

"I try to teach people that everything that's already in their life is a result of what they thinking," she says. "It's all about the story you have for yourself."

Yet her own story still isn't a rag-to-riches tale. Her salary of $2000 a week is meager compared to the upward of $15,000 a week that many Broadway stars make, although much more than she made in the off-Broadway production.

"But I'm here and I'm doing my show," she says. "I certainly didn't do the show for the money. I did this show when I was eating avocados and grapefruits because everything I made had to go back to take care of my kids."

By HEIDI VOGT Associated Press Writer 04-27-2004