Susannah Flood, Star of Pulitzer-Winning ‘Liberation,’ on Her Journey to the Tonys

Susannah Flood is nominated for the best actress in a play Tony for her performance in Liberation, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama last month.

What does it mean to me to be nominated for a Tony for the first time? To answer that question, I really need to go back to my parents. Allow me to explain.

They move to New York, young, with their own dreams and ambitions; she’s from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and he’s from Texas. She stands in the non-equity line all day to try to get auditions. He tries his hand at producing and directing. It’s hit and miss. They both start teaching at The Actors Studio; they meet; they have a child. Just one, a girl. Sponge-like, she begins to absorb what’s important to them and there’s really no turning back.

For Christmas, when she’s nine, her mom buys her a seat in the back row of the balcony at Les Misérables because she’s worn out the cassette of the original cast recording staging it with Barbies. When she’s 12, living now in Santa Fe, she joins a community theater and upstages all the other weasels in The Wind in the Willows by saying all her lines a half second behind the group. She says her character is “slow.”

Her parents divorced. She moves in with her dad and stepmom for high school. California. Los Angeles. As if she needed any more encouragement. Things start to get serious in high school. In her senior year, she’s voted “Most Dramatic” in her class and takes it as a compliment. For the talent show, she does Nina’s breakdown scene from the fourth act of The Seagull — by herself — in the dress she wore to homecoming and a shawl. Her father is becoming concerned. “Acting is just controlled humiliation,” he said, sitting at the dining room table, the script open between them. It’s what he teaches all his students and he believes it. But this is something else. When she’s finished, the auditorium immediately fills with a knee-jerk round of polite applause that is somehow more embarrassing than stunned silence might have been. Not even one hormonal teenager can get it up to laugh or jeer. They just want whatever “that” was to be in the past as quickly as possible. He’s wondering, what can I say to her that is both loving and true? The problem is she doesn’t know enough even to be humiliated, even to consider it as an emotion she could feel in this moment. She’s not bad, per se… in fact, she might be good… she’s just unwatchable. For example, he likes the feeling of the warm sun on his shoulders, but he doesn’t want to stare directly into an eclipse. He likes ice cream, but he wouldn’t like it out of a cannon.

It’s a similar thing a few years later when, standing in the kitchen after dinner one night, she tells him she wants to apply to graduate school. “Why?” he asks. Record scratch. “How can you ask me that?” she fires back. But what is he supposed to say? He’s been teaching acting for almost 30 years now and he’s seen a lot of talented, deserving people work endlessly without recognition. And this particular person — his only child — is still young and green. She’s looking at him with indignant tears in her eyes, somehow lacking self-awareness and simultaneously brimming with confidence to the point of delusion. Could she actually bring harm to herself? Like, what if this decision ruins her life?

OK, well. Time passes. Her life isn’t ruined; it’s just beginning. And again, it’s hit and miss. He’s still scared, but he’s also delighted. For example, he’s proud when he sees her play Ophelia, but he starts to worry again as she tells him laughingly how she terrified some audience members when at intermission they saw her, through the glassed walls of the lobby, leave the theater in costume to actually pick flowers on the hillside across the street. People say no to her many, many, many times; she acquires her humiliations and disappointments, one by one, and mostly she uses them to build up a patina. But then, one night, she calls him from a small town where she’s doing summer stock. She’s standing by the shore of a lake as the sun is going down and now she’s scared, too. “What if I’m not great?” she asks. “What if I’m just… good?” “Well,” he says, “good is all there is.”

And then, many years later, a play comes along. A new play. Untested. Fittingly, it’s called Liberation. And the woman — because she’s a mom now, and he’s a grandpa — tries to take his advice as far as it can go: every unanswered question, every banal whispering distraction, every spectral form through which humiliation can threaten an actor, she brings onstage with her as if there was nothing to fear. (Honestly, at this point, she’s given birth, so being bad in a play just doesn’t seem as scary anymore).

Thank God, the play is good, the director is good, the other actors are good, the designers are good, and along come some very brave producers who bandy together an army of determined and generous people, and now he’s back in New York, where it all began, and he’s going to see his daughter on Broadway. He’s in his eighties now and it’s winter, cold. He watches her walk out on stage to begin the play. She’s alone. She looks scared and delighted. She walks straight down to the lip of the stage and smiles out at the audience. “Hi!” she says. “Hi.”

During the last scene, he cries, and not because he’s so relieved, not because he sees in her some kind of payoff for his own faith and dedication and earned wisdom, the decades he has spent thinking about acting. Not only that. Mostly, he cries because he loses himself in the story. Afterward, they get soup. As he gets into a cab at the end of the night, the wind is barreling down 6th Avenue, and over it she calls, “Thank you for everything you taught me.” He says, “It was the best thing I ever did.”