Though Julie White earned a 2019 Tony nomination for her role in the three-person Gary: A Sequel Titus Andronicus, her first exposure to the stage was on a much larger scale.
“I was in choir and at the University of Texas they were doing a production of La Boheme and some of us kids got to be the urchins. ... The director had a note and it was that my red shawl was too red, that it was taking away from Mimi's red dress and they took my red shawl away! And I was like, ‘Damnit, I want the red shawl!’”
But White has made a career in plays; Gary is her eighth on Broadway and marks her third Tony nomination.
Yet it was a play she did Off-Broadway that marks her most significant personal growth: “Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates, that she wrote for me as a solo performer, it sort of changed my ability with confidence onstage.”
White plays the role of Carol the midwife in the Taylor Mac–penned sequel to Shakespeare’s gory tragedy. It was actually an injury that brought White to the production in the first place. Andrea Martin was originally cast in the role of Janice and Tony nominee Kristine Nielsen as Carol, but when Martin injured herself, Nielsen assumed the role of Janice and White came in and learned her part in only six days.
As the shrieking midwife—horrified that she didn’t “save the baby!” in Titus—White has the audience in stitches. She wields a desperate energy as well as prowess in her physical comedy—fake blood spurts and all.
In the video above, White shares her quote to live by and what theatre means to her.
