Sarah Paulson has been having trouble sleeping throughout her Broadway run in “Appropriate,” the exhilarating, disturbing 2013 family drama from playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.
The actor has been performing in the revival eight times a week since December, first at the Hayes Theater and now at the Belasco. Paulson is a whirlwind of vitriol as Toni, a woman cleaning up her dead father’s creepy Southern house alongside her dysfunctional siblings. Toni loved her dad—so much so that she defends him when a nasty secret is revealed—and lashes out at her brothers with brash anger.
Before a Friday evening performance, Paulson is sitting on a burnt-pink couch in her dressing room, wearing an oversized orange turtleneck sweater. She looks comfortable; maybe that’s because she’s been working on winding down with a physical therapist after the show each night.
“Where I live while I’m doing the play is kind of ramped up to, like, 140—which means that when the play is over, my brain knows that I’m acting; my brain knows that [this] isn’t really happening. But my body, I don’t feel, does,” she says. “I think that’s probably why I’m not sleeping very well.” The physical therapy exercises have helped her rest—a little.
Simply watching Paulson play Toni can raise your blood pressure. The character is a brutal creation—often cruel and misguided, yet always deeply identifiable. She’s the single mother of an aloof teen (Graham Campbell) who finds herself tested by her family members: her older brother Bo (Corey Stoll), visiting from New York, whose perceived superiority irks her; and her younger brother Franz (Michael Esper), a screwup who’s reappeared after a long, mysterious absence, intent on claiming a portion of the inheritance.
“Appropriate” marks a towering return to the stage for Paulson, who last appeared on Broadway 14 years ago in Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories.” Three years later, she won an Emmy for playing prosecutor Marcia Clark on the FX series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” Now, she’s a first-time Tony nominee.
If the set of the show convincingly evokes a drafty and decrepit Arkansas estate, Paulson’s dressing room has the opposite effect; she wanted it to be “cozy.” On the coffee table, there’s a plush replica of her dog, Winnie, that was sent to her by a fan. (“It looks very much like her, although the eyes are too far apart and the snout is too fat. Winnie has a more narrow snout,” the actor says.)
On one wall hangs a poster of John Cassavetes’ 1977 film “Opening Night,” a gift from her girlfriend, Holland Taylor—a stage and screen actor best known for her 2013 solo play “Ann” (about former Texas governor Ann Richards), as well as her performances in the 2001 rom-com “Legally Blonde” and the 2003 sitcom “Two and a Half Men.”
Evidence of Paulson’s rituals is strewn around the room, including a tin of Grether’s Pastilles and a bowl of Ricola cough drops. She pops a Grether’s before she goes onstage, has another before act two, and saves the Ricola for act three.
“Nothing has ever been asked of me onstage in terms of what’s being asked of me in this play…. I don’t know how to do [it] if I’m not at a particular voltage.”
Midway through our conversation, she orders her usual pre-performance meal: A “Tunacado” sandwich from Joe & the Juice, with added egg salad. She admits that some people, including Esper, think it’s “disgusting”; but Paulson holds firm. She wants to have the extra protein and “a lot of food” before performing this play.
Despite her distaste for her costar’s meal choices, Esper wrote in an email that Paulson is “my favorite kind of person to be around, backstage or anywhere. She’s honest and kind and super serious about her work—and completely ridiculous and hilarious about other stuff.”
Whenever Paulson is in a play, she says she lives a “monastic life,” not going out to dinner or seeing friends. Every day is a “countdown” until call time. She’s treated the theater with reverence ever since her Broadway debut—which also happened to be her first professional job. At 19 years old, just out of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, she was cast as an understudy in Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Sisters Rosensweig.”
Paulson projects intensity when it comes to her work, but she wasn’t always this way. Before landing “Rosensweig,” she hadn’t yet gotten into college, though she was waitlisted at Carnegie Mellon and SUNY Purchase. “The truth is, I didn’t put a lot of effort into [those] auditions, nor did I focus too much on my schoolwork,” she remembers. “I was really focused on hanging out in the [Central Park Sheep] Meadow, smoking a lot of pot.”
As soon as she was cast in “Rosensweig,” however, she changed her behavior. Gone were the days of lounging around and partying; instead, she devoted herself to being a studious performer.
That approach has carried through to Paulson’s celebrated screen work, which includes supporting roles in acclaimed films like Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” and Todd Haynes’ “Carol,” as well as on multiple seasons of Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story” and “American Crime Story.”
But she admits it’s maybe been too long since she last did theater. Before “Appropriate,” her most recent stage appearance was in a 2013 Off-Broadway production of “Talley’s Folly” by Lanford Wilson. Unused to the physical realities of doing a show, she says she had “stage-muscle atrophy.” That time away meant a steeper learning curve when she was preparing for “Appropriate,” a challenging piece in its own right.
“Nothing has ever been asked of me onstage in terms of what’s being asked of me in this play—what my responsibilities are in this play, how much driving is happening energetically by the character,” Paulson says. “I don’t know how to do the play if I’m not at a particular voltage.”
Her costars feel that intensity. “Early in the run, I would amp myself up for my first entrance; but I quickly realized this was totally unnecessary,” Stoll recalled in an email. “As soon as I’d get onstage, Sarah would be throwing so much at me that all I had to do was react. She’s indefatigable and incapable of a false moment.”
Esper likens Paulson’s presence as Toni to a “vicious prehistoric predator.” But “Appropriate” director Lila Neugebauer notes that the star “brings a disarming vulnerability and tenderness in unexpected moments.”
To shape her version of Toni (she’s heard that her “energy” isn’t typical for portrayals of the character), Paulson recruited movement specialist Julia Crockett. The two first worked together when the actor was playing Monica Lewinsky’s betrayer Linda Tripp on “Impeachment: American Crime Story” (2021).
Paulson sought out Crockett because she wanted to evoke Tripp’s real-life physicality. She appreciates the movement specialist’s “outside-in” approach, which focuses on conveying a character’s internality through physical action. For instance, since Tripp is a character who’s always sniffing out gossip, Crockett had Paulson turn her head so she led with her nose.
“If I went in and played Toni with less of a razor’s edge, I don’t think I would be serving Branden’s play, and the play wouldn’t land the way it does.”
For “Appropriate,” Crockett came up with the image of Toni having an “internal bowling ball inside of her,” which now informs how Paulson walks as the character. “We also figured out a way [to show] what happens with a person who has to kind of gain control of their feelings and doesn’t always win. And there became this physical manifestation of my fists clenching.”
The actor began working with Crockett prior to the show’s four-week rehearsal period. During the last two weeks, Neugebauer allowed Crockett to be present in the room. “Julia and Sarah have a beautiful shared language as collaborators,” the director said via email. “Julia is a remarkably attuned observer of the human body, and it was a thrill to take in the rigor of her work with Sarah.”
After each eight-hour rehearsal, Paulson would retreat home to learn her lines and continue to work with Crockett. “The day was very long, and it was very intense,” the actor says. It marked a noticeable shift from her recent television experiences, in which she would only learn lines for the scenes she was filming the next day.
Sarah Paulson in “Appropriate” Credit: Joan Marcus
Performing “Appropriate” in front of an audience introduced an additional variable. As the family’s shocking story unfolds, viewers tend to react vocally. (One moment in particular, which I won’t spoil here, elicits gasps and uncontrollable, nervous laughter.) “It’s almost startling, but you have to sort of stop yourself,” Paulson says. “You want to be like, ‘What the hell?’ But you can’t.”
It’s particularly challenging for the actor when theatergoers clap in reaction to Toni’s siblings or sister-in-law (Natalie Gold) dressing her down. That response can make Paulson angry because it fails to acknowledge Toni’s pain and loneliness. “Are they holding onto the complexity of what this woman is going through?” she wonders.
Paulson’s guard goes up even when other characters in the play bad-mouth Toni. Before her final entrance, the actor plugs her ears backstage so that she doesn’t hear “some not-nice things about me.”
She has plenty of experience playing women who are easily judged, from Toni to Clark to Tripp. She credits McQueen with helping her refine her approach to these types of roles. On the set of “12 Years a Slave,” he forbade her from judging the loathsome slave owner’s wife she was portraying. Paulson recalls that the director asked her not to “turn [the character] into something more digestible,” because that would do a disservice to the film’s protagonists.
“It gave me a kind of insight [into] your responsibility as a storyteller,” she says. “If I went in and played Toni with less of a razor’s edge, I don’t think I would be serving Branden’s play, and the play wouldn’t land the way it does.”
Not that she doesn’t want audience members’ opinion of Toni to change after spending two hours and 40 minutes with her. “By the time we get to the end of the play, my hope is that you have a little bit of a different understanding of why this woman is the way she is,” Paulson says. “And therefore you have to then confront and contend with what you thought about her from the beginning and your willingness to forsake or toss her aside—or decide she was just a rigid, impenetrable nightmare of a woman.”
Whether or not audiences and critics like Toni, it’s clear that they like Paulson. The actor has received rave reviews and become a Tony front-runner. Paulson says that she never takes praise for granted. “It’s very hard to sit inside a dream come true and not feel, if you’re me: A) Is this real? B) Is it going to go away? C) How can I try to stay in the moment of this?”
When “Appropriate” was playing at the Hayes, Paulson was performing right beside Sardi’s, where her mother worked when the actor was just 4 years old. Decades later, her daughter’s name was on the marquee next door. Soon, the actor will be a permanent fixture at the fabled restaurant, as Sardi’s is hanging a caricature of her on the wall. Her mother, who was just 27 when she worked there, plans to attend the unveiling ceremony.
Paulson refuses to take moments like this for granted—or pass up opportunities like “Appropriate.” She committed to doing the production back in 2021 before the rest of the cast was assembled because she knew it was exceptional. Everything that’s followed has felt that way, too. “It feels really special to me, and I don’t ever want to be a person for whom it is not special,” she says.
This story originally appeared in the May 16 issue of Backstage Magazine.
Photographed by Tom Corbett on 4/5 at Colliton Studio in NYC. Make-up by Gita Bass. Hair by Lacy Redway. Styling by Emily Bogner. Cover designed by Ian Robinson.