Two-Time Emmy Winner Uzo Aduba on Being Proud of Her Orange is the New Black Co-Star & Making Her London Debut in The Maids

Uzo Aduba is a two-time Emmy winner for her performance as Suzanne (a.k.a. "Crazy Eyes") in the prison drama Orange is the New Black and revealed her gifts as a belter as Glinda in NBC’s The Wiz Live! The New York theater veteran is now making a scorching London stage debut as Solange, one of two sibling housemaids alongside Zawe Ashton’s Claire, in the 1947 Jean Genet classic The Maids, directed by Jamie Lloyd at Trafalgar Studios; Laura Carmichael from Downton Abbey plays the woman whom the two maids serve. Broadway.com caught the dazzling newcomer to the West End for a chat directly following a recent matinee.

I’d have thought from the intensity of your performance that you’d be too exhausted immediately afterward to do an interview but here you are.
It is “pass the smelling salts” at times with this play, but I think we’re now at the point in our run where we’re learning how to revive after each show so we can make it through the rest of the week. It’s like being shot out of a cannon on this one; we keep wishing they’d put a bed onstage.

You and Zawe own that stage for nearly two hours, no intermission, and then Laura joins you midway through, with no let-up.
When we first started, we were like, “what have we just done to ourselves? Pass the Xanax!” It’s certainly not the kind of show where we’re off out and partying every night; we go home and recuperate in time for the next one.

So much of the play is about play-acting: Solange and Claire playing at being Madame even as what they might really like to do is murder Madame.
And what we got from Jamie [Lloyd, director] was that we have to enter fully into that side of the piece because overindulgence and exaggeration are part of what Genet is. We’ve got to invest in the joy and levity in the play, not just the pain.

You’ve gone from a prison series on TV to a play that, metaphorically at least, takes place within in a cage.
Doing this has really made me start thinking about cages and prisons and how they don’t have to be literal: someone in Rikers Island [New York’s main jail complex] isn’t the only person who’s caged; a trophy wife can feel caged. Your surroundings can be gilded and beautiful, but you’re still in a cage.

Have you stopped to compare Solange and Suzanne?
Oh, yes. I do think: which of these women feels more free? I think having now started to really sweat in Solange's skin that she feels more trapped to me than Suzanne.

How did this offer come about?
At some point last year, I said to my team that I really wanted to do a play because I was missing it and I really wanted to sing, and the first thing that came back was The Wiz on TV, and would I be interested in that? I thought, “Oh my God, are you kidding? Absolutely!”

So you went from a stage show on screen to the real thing.
Absolutely. Shortly after The Wiz, we were going through things that I might be interested in doing and the third play that came along was The Maids on the West End, and that made me really sit up—I mean, who in America doesn’t dream of playing the West End?

Had you been to London before?
This is actually my fifth time here, so coming to London wasn’t in itself that foreign an idea. I actually knew a bit about the theater here, which was part of why I felt so excited to be a part of it.

You worked with a British director before when you did Coram Boy on Broadway in 2007 with [Tony nominee] Melly Still.
And what I’d discovered with Melly and with Jamie is the emphasis on movement in a play; it’s not just like in musicals where the choreography is important. Here, it’s about making movement part of the actual vocabulary of the piece so that the result is less cerebral.

Is there pressure following your two Emmys to keep up your visibility on screen?
Sure, except pressure is what you make it, and I want to make theater a priority. I love it. I love going to watch it, talking about, participating it—theater in whatever capacity.

That’s lovely to hear.
And it’s true! The theater feeds me, and I personally believe that it makes every actor stronger; the exercise this show is giving me physically, vocally, emotionally, mentally will not only help me with Orange, but it will further the work I do in other roles. I have no interest in running away from it; I want to ruin towards it.

What about a stage musical? That seems inevitable at this point.
Oh, absolutely. That will happen. I really love to sing, and I would love to do anything that excites me. I never got to see Caroline, or Change, for instance, but I have the cast album and think it’s fantastic—that’s the kind of show I like. Passing Strange as well.

Have you seen [Orange co-star] Danielle Brooks on Broadway in The Color Purple?
Of course, and it was divine. I shouldn’t have had make up done that night because I was a sobbing mess. I was so happy to watch her become part of our tribe because it is a tribe and one that not everyone gets to be part of, and there she was in a show she loved so much. It just made me so proud to know her.