In the April issue of Boca magazine, award-winning actor Elizabeth Price discusses her life on and behind the South Florida stage, from surviving a potentially career-ending injury to portraying one of the 20th century’s most enduring antagonists. In this exclusive Web Extra, she shares more about her start as an actor, the projects that have stretched her, how social-justice attitudes have shaped theatre curricula, and more.
What was your entry into acting; how did you get your start?
I started as a kid. I did theatre in school, and then at about fourth grade, the drama musical instructor said, “you seem to be pretty good at this, and you seem to know everybody else’s lines. You might consider doing community theatre.” So I started doing community theatre, and did it all through the rest of my school years. And then did it in high school.
So when I got to college, I had some immature ideas. I didn’t believe you could be taught acting, which is ironic. I didn’t declare a theatre major. Instead, I was an English major, and just would audition for the shows. It was ridiculous. I didn’t understand anything. I took one independent study, but I thought you either have it or you don’t. And after college, I wanted to move to L.A., but my dad bargained with me; if I came back to Texas for a year he’d match my savings, and if I still wanted to go after a year, I could go. And while I was back in Dallas, I started doing extra work and trying to get into film and TV stuff. And then I went to L.A. after a year.
I was there for the next three and a half years trying to be a movie star. I never was able to do anything more than tiny, tiny parts, lots of extra work, independent and student films that didn’t get much exposure. I worked at Disney as a performer. It never really went anywhere, and after living there for a few years, I was pretty miserable. It was a hard city. I decided to give up acting. I was like, “I’m just going to direct and produce.”
And I went back to Texas, this time at Austin, and I directed and produced for a nonprofit that made industrial and educational films. I didn’t think I’d act again. And then I had an opportunity to go to Italy to take care of my cousin’s kids. It was supposed to be for three months, but I stayed for three years. So I didn’t do any acting or directing or producing for those three years, and when I came back, I got married to an Italian and we moved to New Mexico, and there I started doing theatre again. That’s where this phase of my life begins.
By the time I moved to Florida, I was like, I think I really want to do this. I want to give it another shot. So my ex-husband taught at Barry, so I could go to Barry for free, and I got a BFA and took acting classes for the first time, and loved them, because I knew I had hit a wall—and this time I learned all kinds of stuff. I had great experiences, and I also directed. And then I decided I’d go to grad school, and that’s why I moved to Boca, in 2012.
What are some of the roles you’ve had that really stretched you as an actor?
I would definitely “What the Constitution Means to Me” (City Theatre, 2022). That’s the biggest thing I’ve done yet. And it was incredibly challenging. I had never done something so close to a one-woman show. And the material is challenging. But one of the most difficult things is speaking directly to the audience and attempting to have sort of a conversation, and establishing a connection, so that they don’t shut off as we deal with difficult truths.
And then, what comes to mind is the last show I did at FAU as part of my grad school work, which was “August: Osage County.” I played the oldest daughter, Barbara. It’s an epic show, three hours long, and the transformation that character goes through, as some of the others do, was really demanding, and it really required you to strip yourself down.
Speaking of “What the Constitution Means to Me,” for all of the mental stamina and memorization that a show like that requires, do you wish it had run longer?
I did wish the run were longer. But I did think to myself, maybe I could perform this with another theatre company, or wouldn’t be incredible to travel with this or tour with this. It is a lot, and it’s over in three weeks. But the honest truth is that I was exhausted after three weeks, because it depleted me. It required so much energy each and every performance to conjure and then sustain that a part of me was like, we did it! Now we can just celebrate. I felt triumph but also relief.
When you took on polarizing topics in that play, such as abortion and the rightward shift of the Supreme Court, there was a likelihood that a minority of the audience will be on the opposite side of the playwright on these issues. When building your performance, did you think, I need to communicate and come across as likeable to these people as well?
I definitely would look out and sense, some of these people are bristling right now as I bring this up. It’s going to happen. And I have a tendency to want to be liked and to please, though I’ve gotten better at that in the last couple years. So I did think, I’ve got to win them over, but I would temper it with, I also need to let them have their own experience and their own journey. But that was a conflict for me.
So what I would do is I would focus on the personal stories and how I’m talking about them because they’ve affected me and my family personally. And another person may not agree with the way I talk about those other things, but they can hear another person’s personal story. And they can’t necessarily argue with another person’s personal story. So I would return to that; I would focus on, this is just mine, and we can relate to each other as humans potentially in these moments. And then when I would go back into some of the statistics or the history, I would say, come with me, and then I’ll take you back. So it was a dance, but it was full of conflict for me.
I also sensed that, because I talk about sexual trauma, sexual abuse, gender-based abuse, I would sense in the audience, not only are there people who have experienced that; I would also sense sometimes, statistically, there are people in this audience who have been perpetrators as well. Then it would become something like, we all need to talk about it. But I would feel people dealing with that—questioning their own histories and their actions. Our understanding of consent, and what coercion is, and what we do when someone is vulnerable—it’s evolved.
Your next project is “Cry, Old Kingdom” from New City Players (April 13-30 at Island City Stage, 2304 N. Dixie Highway, Wilton Manors). What excites you about directing this piece?
Officially I’m assistant directing, co-producing, and I’m the production manager, because the woman who is directing I have worked with; she was actually my student, and we codirected a piece. She will be taking the role of director for the first time in a major production. What excites me most is to see Marlo Rodriguez fully get to step into her own as an emerging director. She is Cuban and Haitian, and the story is set in 1964 in Haiti when Papa Doc Duvalier is still in power.
It is about an artist who has had to make very difficult decisions, as so many artists have through time, and who has decided he has to go underground to save himself. They faked his death, but his wife has continued to live in the community but has lost all status. She works in a market, and really struggles for a living. And he continues to paint, in his studio in hiding but has lost all of his inspiration. So what happens to an artist who no longer gets to share his work, who has lost inspiration, and one day he’s walking on the beach, and he comes across a man building a boat to try to migrate to Miami. And he says, I’ll let you come build your boat in my studio, you’ll be protected, if I can paint you. And he finds his new inspiration. And by the end he has to make a decision that affects all of their lives. It’s a thrilling story to watch an artist re-find inspiration. I love the piece.
What’s your vision for the look and feel of it; will be a highly theatrical experience as opposed to a realist one?
I think it’s going to be its own unique blend of the two, because the playwright has included silences where things happen without dialogue, and that allows for more theatricality. But it’s not that we live in a dream world. We’re in an altered reality in the play. So the dialogue still has the feeling of realism. Every now and then there is some poetical language, but they don’t speak in a way that doesn’t sound like everyday dialogue most of the time. He’s created a world with a little style that goes along with it.
Shifting gears, the theatre community at large is probably the space where wokeness, whether you look at the term positively or pejoratively, has most taken root in our culture.
Yes. They are on the forefront of it, because what I see happening in departments is that systemic problems that have existed for a while, once that turning point came in the summer of 2020 when people began to speak more to power, it was then students who finally said, I can say something now. Or I can say, this needs to change. So absolutely, it’s been huge in the student population.
Has that come across in how students respond to material, particularly plays from the past that might be considered classics but that are not the most enlightened from today’s standards?
I’ll tell you what I ended up doing in my class, and then observing. I wouldn’t always, let’s say, go into my curriculum, and say, “I’m going to take these plays out because they’re problematic.” But what I instead did was I said, “I need to go do the research to find what playwrights of color have not been in the canon and have not been taught in classes. And I need to add those in.” And what ends up happening is, I need to pull this out because there’s not room. I feel like that’s a little more what many have done—let’s bring in playwrights who haven’t been studied or produced or who have fallen into obscurity. It’s easy for us to say, were their playwrights of color writing plays in America in 1900? I don’t know, I was never taught. We find out, yes, there were. So we rediscover them and bring them into the classroom. That’s been my journey.
This Web Extra is from the April 2023 issue of Boca magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
