By Barbara Seaman Center Theater Group Perfomances - Ahmsen Theatre - November 2004

IT IS PERHAPS THE TRUE MARK OF A DIVA that Tonya Pinkins's life constantly equals or exceeds the lives of the characters she plays in drama and tragedy. "I feet like I'm having a moment of grace," she confided to a People Magazine reporter in 1992, when she was 30. Pinkins was very busy, but she wasn't complaining. "I have all this energy that needs to be doing something." Back then, she began her days at 5:30 a.m. in her Chelsea loft, having breakfast with her two young sons, Maxx and Myles, and, when he was awake, her musician husband, Ron Brawer. By 7:30, she was on the set of the ABC soap opera All My Children, where she played the role of Livia Frye, a street-smart attorney. In the afternoon, she bathed her kids, gave them dinner and headed off for Broadway, having just won a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical, as Sweet Anita, the red-hot lover of Jelly Roll Morton (Gregory Hines) in Jelly's Last Jam. Pinkins was used to multi-tasking: in addition to maintaining both theatre and television jobs, she went to great lengths to make sure her children received proper care. On matinee days, she raced home on her bicycle between performances to breastfeed baby Myles.

Brawer had a six-figure job as music director of a different soap opera, Another World. The two bought a second home in New Jersey. As a chic interracial couple, they were drawing plenty of notice and were included in an article in Ebony Magazine called "Guess who's coming to dinner now? The sudden upsurge of black women/white men celebrity couples."
Then, suddenly, everything changed. As she was leaving the theatre one night, a stranger handed Pinkins something to sign. She assumed he was a fan waiting for an autograph. Upon closer examination, she discovered with shock that the man was serving legal papers. Brawer wanted a divorce, but that was the least of it. He asked for and got, custody of the children-an unprecedented decision at that time. Pinkins was so undone that she quit jelly and began waging a crusade to win back her family. It was a losing battle, but 12 years later, she returned triumphantly to Broadway in the title role of Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's new musical Caroline, or Change. Tesori's music is a blend of rhythm and blues, klezmer, soul and operatic ensemble. Caroline's "eleven o'clock" number, "Lot's Wife," has been compared to great soliloquies such as "Rose's Turn" in Gypsy.
In spring 2004, theatre critic Jesse Green asked to visit a workshop created by Pinkins called the Actorpreneur Attitude. Afterwards, he noted in The New York Times, "Most actors' lives improve if they become successful. For Ms. Pinkins, success was directly implicated in the events that nearly ruined her in i992....Most of the young actors were probably unaware of the enormous pain she had suffered on the way, nightmares even by theatrical standards. They didn't see a 42-year-old woman who had almost gone mad, but a radiant sibyl with a magic formula."
I was there to witness everything that happened, as part of a group called The Coalition for Family Justice (CFJ) that accompanied her to court sessions and on through the futile appeals. Pinkins, who described herself as "a mother who is also an actress," was punished for her Tony. She was 19 years younger than her husband. She was a bigger artistic success. She was black. A New York State Supreme Court Justice, Lewis R. Friedman, said he found both Ms. Pinkins and Mr. Brawer to be fit parents but he "believed the father to be better able to provide emotional and intellectual guidance."
In October 1993, on behalf of the CFJ, I responded to Justice Friedman in the "Chronicle" column of The New York Times: "It is almost unprecedented, where the children are so young (Maxx was five, and Myles three) to award them to the father when the mother is, by the judge's admission, a fit parent. In the past, one of the things women could count on was that, unless they were shown to be unfit mothers, they would almost automatically get custody of children of such tender years. This is a very dangerous decision."
She was banned from and lost her equity in the loft and the New Jersey house. She used up all of her savings and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees in the hope of increasing her visitations. Despite this heartbreak, Pinkins kept going. She finished college in two semesters and began to take law-school credits. She set out to warn other women about her experience, holding a seminar at the Beijing Women's Conference in 1995 and developing a documentary film called "Who Gets the Kids?"
Tonya Pinkins has had to fight before, to remain undaunted in the face of great odds. She was born in Chicago, when her mother was just 15. Pinkins was the only child in a matriarchal family home that included her mother, grandmother, two aunts, two great-grandparents, and even a great-great-grandmother. Her father was a cop whom she hardly knew, but his mother, Holly May Christopher, was her salvation. "I lived with her at times. She was a fabulous woman, and she loved me. I tried to be like her. She was a great cook, had great clothes, grew the most exquisite roses, enjoyed going to the race track." Holly May lived to see her granddaughter, at age 19, in her first Broadway show, Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. To this day, the only photograph that Pinkins keeps on her dresser is a saucy-looking picture of Holly May.
The other bright light of Pinkins's childhood, as is true for so many people, was a teacher. A former stand-up comic, Harris Goldenberg ran a mostly extra-curricular Gifted Acting program for the Robert A. Black elementary school in the Chicago neighborhood known as "Pill Hill," so named because that was where the rich doctors once built their mansions. "I noticed her when she was in sixth grade," Goldenberg, recalls. "No one could take their eyes off her when she was on the stage." When Pinkins was studying at Carnegie Mellon on a scholarship, she received a clipping from Goldenberg that producer Hal Prince and composer Stephen Sondheim were sending a scout to Chicago to hold auditions for a new musical that called for 23 teenage actors. Goldenberg urged her to try out, certain that if Sondheim and Prince heard her sing for just a few minutes, they would hire her on the spot. They did, so she dropped out of Carnegie Mellon and began her life in New York.
Merrily We Roll Along ran for only two weeks on Broadway, but when it closed, Pinkins bid farewell to Pittsburgh and elected to stay in New York, waitressing and building a thick and varied resume. It was during this time that Pinkins formed her enduring professional relationship with George C. Wolfe, which continues to this day. Their first project was a cabaret act telling the story of Pinkins's life, which Wolfe wrote and directed in 1984. They have since collaborated on The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1990), Jelly's Last Jam (1992), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1994), The Wild Party (2000) and, most recently, Caroline, or Change. In 2000, Pinkins dropped out of the role of Muzzy (the part played in the 1967 film by Carol Channing) in Dick Scanlan and Jeanine Tesori's stage version of Thoroughly Modern Millie. "I love Dick and Jeanine and I knew it would be a hit, but Muzzy as a black woman was unjustified. I couldn't believe in my part. I waited, and lo and behold, Caroline was gifted to me."
Tesori praises Pinkins as "a high-road kind of diva. She has a vision for her life, and she follows through. She parts the waves." Caroline, or Change is an operatic musical, almost entirely sung through. Pinkins plays a worn-out maid for a Jewish family in the segregationist south of 1963. The story, based on incidents from Tony Kushner's childhood, is dedicated to Maudie Lee Davis, who still works for his father. The undercurrents of connection, need and resentment between the little boy and the maid are cathartic for many in the audience.
At 42, Pinkins is radiantly beautiful, a marked distinction from the dour expression she wears as Caroline onstage, a role that brought her her third Tony nomination. (After her win for Jelly's Last Jam, she was also nominated for her role in Play On in 1997.) All of the actresses nominated for the 2004 best lead in a musical were outstanding, but as Jesse McKinley wrote in The New York Times: "Ms. Pinkins, your Tony is waiting." She was indeed the leading contender for the Tony Award at this year's award ceremony but she was let down yet again. Playbill Magazine recalled, "Every prognosticator in town predicted Tonya Pinkins...but instead the name that popped out of the envelope was Idina Menzel for Wicked."
Today, Tonya Pinkins is moving ahead, making a happy new life with her two younger children, Maija and Manuel. She bought a modest but lovely house in Jersey City, where she plants flowers just like her grandmother Holly May. Pinkins reflects on all the changes in her life, noting, "I denied myself a home for a lot of years, because I didn't feel I could have a home without alt of my children in it. I finally said, 'Well, you have two other children, and you need to make a home with them.'" The new place has enough sleeping space to accommodate Maxx and Myles when they visit.
As for the post Caroline era, Pinkins has longed to play Carmen, and is writing, with Graciella Daniele, a new version for herself. She holds workshops and is writing a book for Hyperion. Also, ace lawyer Livia Frye has returned to All My Children. If only Pinkins had found herself a lawyer as smart and dedicated as the one she plays on television.