A Conversation with Christine Toy Johnson
On Sondheim's generosity, Weidman's mentorship, and reuniting with old friends
Christine Toy Johnson has forged a remarkable career at the intersection of acting and writing, performing in the first revivals of Pacific Overtures and Merrily We Roll Along and serving on the Dramatists Guild Council. This March, she’ll star alongside Francis Jue—her friend since that Pacific Overtures revival—in What Became of Us at George Street Playhouse. In our conversation, she reflects on Sondheim’s generosity in the rehearsal room, John Weidman’s influence on her writing, and preparing for an intimate two-person play. Our conversation begins below:
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It’s so good to meet you. I’d love to start with What Became of Us, which you’re starring in alongside Francis Jue in March. It’s a two-hander, in which you and Francis play siblings. What has preparation been like so far?
Francis and I met during the first revival of Pacific Overtures, when we were both very young. I don’t tell anyone my age ever, but we were very young, and we’ve been really close friends ever since. That’s a huge shortcut to preparing this play. We’ve known each other through so much of our lives, and so we already have a trust and a deep bond over various life events. That helps in the preparation of this kind of play, because we are essentially telling each other’s life stories in it.
Because there’s so much material to learn, I started really diving into it at the very beginning of this year. Right after the Christmas holiday, I made myself a schedule of how many pages I want to try to do per week, per day, leading up to the rehearsal period. By the time we start rehearsals, I want to be very familiar with the material, so that I can get into the creative process with everyone else in the room—the director, obviously, and Francis—without the burden of feeling like, how will I ever learn all these lines? I’ll already have done a lot of the groundwork.
From what I’ve been able to read about the play online, it seems to explore this idea of being drawn back together through memory and choice. That strikes me as quite a Sondheimian setup. With your wealth of Sondheim experience, are there any touchpoints in his work that connect to this play?
That’s an excellent question. I hadn’t really thought about that in those ways. But now you mention those themes, I’m thinking back. I was fortunate enough to do the first revival of Pacific Overtures, and then the first revival of Merrily We Roll Along, when it was off-Broadway at the York Theater. I also did this beautiful production of Sunday in the Park with George at the Guthrie in 2017. There are a lot of ways in which Sondheim and Weidman, Sondheim and Lapine, Sondheim and Furth all mined those threads of looking back, and what do you learn from the past. There’s often an intentional, personal excavation of your own actions, and how learning about them—or discovering things about what happened years ago—might impact your current situation, your current life.
We recently put together a feature for the 50th anniversary of Pacific Overtures, and so many people talked fondly of the Promenade revival. I’d love to know more about being part of such a major revival, a revival where all the creative parties are still alive, in the room, and able to steer the piece forward.
Pacific Overtures definitely continues to be a touchstone of sorts in my life for two reasons. One, it was my first time working with Stephen Sondheim, and the idea of being in the presence of such greatness continues to be something that I’m always very, very mindful of and appreciative of. One of the things that I learned from him, that has stuck with me for all these years, is this: the first time he came to give a notes session to the company, as you can imagine, everybody was nervous and excited. “Excited and scared…” Because here he is, he’s watching our work, and he’s bringing his insight to it.
Now, as members of that cast, as women, we were Kurogo, and we had hoods over our head for most of the performance, until “Next.” But still, there was that thrill and excitement of him coming. And what I learned was that he started every note by saying to the person he was addressing, “You know that moment? I think that’s swell. I think that was swell. And I have a thought about how we can X, Y, Z.” It seems like a simple thing, but it has really set the bar to me for all these years about how to give feedback, or how to receive feedback, and how that affects us as artists—to hear a positive thought from someone that you really respect, admire, and then what that does to unlock your potential to delve further into the material and really unlock your potential. That’s what I learned.
The second thing is that John Weidman has remained a close personal friend and mentor. We both serve on the Council of the Dramatists Guild. He was a past president for about 10 years, and he’s so instrumental in all the work that the Guild does to protect writers. I’ve been serving on the Council for the past 10 years, and we work very closely together. He has also read plays of mine, come to see readings of mine, given me really incredible feedback.
I did want to tell you one funny story about Pacific Overtures that I think you might enjoy. I had the really good fortune of going to two parties at Steve Sondheim’s townhouse in Turtle Bay. The first one was on the closing night of that Promenade production of Pacific Overtures. We had access to, like, three of the floors. Upstairs, on the second floor, I remember there was this grand piano, and shelves, and awards, and so we were all running around, just like, oh my god, look at this piano. That’s where he wrote this song. There’d be a pencil on the piano, and we’d be giddy with just the idea of being in his space where he created stuff.
And so I was coming downstairs… I wasn’t drinking or anything, I swear. I was just really giddy to be there. I probably had a little too much energy. And I fell from a pretty high stair and landed at the bottom of the stairs, the wind knocked out of me. I open my eyes, and there’s Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman standing, looking at me. And Steve says, “Do you need anything? A drink? A pair of flats?” John Weidman says, “A lawyer?” As you might know, John Weidman got his training as a lawyer first.
Cut to many years later, and I host a podcast for the Dramatists Guild called Talkback. I’m about to interview Lisa Kron, who has also become a close friend. She, of course, is the Tony Award winner for writing Fun Home, and also an amazing actor and Tony Award nominee for acting in her own play on Broadway, too. I’m telling Lisa this story that I just told you, and she said, “Oh, I was there. I was ushering. I had just come to New York, and I was ushering at the Promenade. I was a friend of a person who was running the spotlights, and we went to the party, and I saw you fall.” And then she said, “I swear I didn’t push you.” So it’s become a running joke when we talk about it: “Oh, right, that party where I pushed you down the stairs.”
Writing is such an important part of your creative life. Where did that journey begin for you? I’m fascinated by the perspective that side of your work brings you when you’re employed as an actor.
I didn’t start writing until quite late compared to many people. Everyone’s journey is obviously different, of course. And like a lot of actors of color, I started writing because I wasn’t seeing stories on stage or film and television that reflected my lived experience as an Asian American woman, as someone whose family has been here really off and on since the 1800s.
That journey has been incredible for me, because I feel like I found my voice in terms of what I want to say in the world and the questions I’m always asking myself. Because I’m very service-oriented in my advocacy work, I feel very strongly about illuminating the beauty of a wider worldview. Whether that’s through the stories I write, or the stories I tell that are written by other people, or the advocating I do for underrepresented voices, it’s very important to me that that’s a core part of my being.
A lot of writers have what they call an essential wound. I think mine is wanting to belong, a sense of belonging, because there’s been so much othering in society. That’s a long way of saying to you, through all of that exploration, that I do find that I approach mining the subtext of characters that I’m writing and that I’m playing in similar ways: looking at their personal arc, what their hopes and dreams are, what their essential wounds are, and how they want to have impact in the world.
With John Weidman being such an important friend and mentor to you, can you put into words the influence his advice, or indeed his own work, has had?
First of all, being a writer is incredibly wonderful, and also incredibly difficult. I always think about the line in Merrily We Roll Along, actually: “Write what you know [heart], not what you know [head].” That’s so right. And so if you write what you know, and you’re putting it on the page, and everybody has an opinion, and you’re starting to get notes on those things, it’s all in the way that the feedback is given and how it’s received, for me.
So, on a very basic level, the compassion and kindness with which John would give me feedback laid the groundwork for how I learned to give other people feedback. And that’s adjacent to how Steve Sondheim gave us those notes in Pacific Overtures.
Also, I just admire his work so much. He’s so smart. I mean, that seems so simplistic, but he’s so smart. But really, his sense of humanity is central to the way I believe he has been able to see characters and give me feedback on their trajectories. He has always been able to mine the humanity of people, and their flaws, their layers of personalities, and that has really inspired me. He’s also very self-deprecating. He’s very loath to come off as, “Well, I know everything, so I’m gonna tell you everything”—although I do feel like he knows a whole lot of everything.
He came to a presentation of a new musical I’ve been working on, Fusong, that has subsequently gone through a million rewrites. He came to the presentation, he printed out the script, he took me out to lunch, and he asked me three questions. Not prescriptive things. He just asked me three questions, and I went, “Oh, yes, I see that. I’m gonna be right back… I’m gonna rewrite the script.” His questions really helped me to unlock discoveries within the show, without him trying to dictate anything, or put me down, or criticize.
I told him that he makes me really proud to be a book writer, because everyone blames the book for every problem in every musical, even though it’s a collaboration. But I’ve learned so much from him about that aspect of things, about the architecture of a show.
It’s been so good to talk to you. It’s late January, and you open What Became of Us in March. What does the timeline look like between now and then?
It’s a quick process. It’s only three weeks of rehearsal and a three-week run. Francis is doing Tartuffe right now at New York Theatre Workshop. I’m also doing an audio play production of Cymbeline, currently recording as Cymbeline. So I’m trying to navigate all of the prep, but we don’t get in the room together until February 24th. And then we start performances March 17th, which is three weeks later. So it’s going to be really quick, which is why all the prep work is necessary now, but we’re really excited about getting the chance to work together again.
What Became of Us plays at George Street Playhouse from March 17. More information and tickets available here.
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