INTERVIEW: Reza Salazar on making art (and sandwiches) in ‘Clyde’s’ on Broadway
Photo: Clyde’s stars, from left, Uzo Aduba, Kara Young, Ron Cephas Jones, Edmund Donovan and Reza Salazar. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus / Provided by Polk & Co. with permission.
One of the most celebrated new plays to open on Broadway this season is Clyde’s, written by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage and directed by frequent collaborator Kate Whoriskey. The show, playing in a Second Stage Theater production at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater, features Uzo Aduba as Clyde, the owner of a sandwich shop in Berks County, Pennsylvania. She employs the help of workers who are formerly incarcerated, including Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones), who tries to teach the younger staff — Jason (Edmund Donovan), Rafael (Reza Salazar) and Letitia (Kara Young) — the art of making the perfect sandwich.
On its surface, Clyde’s is a workplace comedy about the interesting conversations that happen amongst colleagues, all of whom operate under the watchful eye of Clyde, who has offered them an opportunity of employment but has nonnegotiable rules about keeping that job. However, Nottage goes deeper with these characters, who each individually open up about their dreams, their realities, their romances and their feelings about the society that has pushed them aside.
For Salazar, who also appeared on Broadway in Nottage’s Sweat, the opportunity to work with the writer again was a most welcome one. “I’m a big fan of Lynn and Lynn’s work,” Salazar said in a recent phone interview. “I was part of the world premiere of this play when it premiered in Minnesota the year before the pandemic, 2019. It was called Floyd’s back then, and I was part of that world premiere. I was part of the initial table read of the play, and I fell in love with it from the beginning.”
Salazar said he tries not to intellectualize this role, or any of the other roles he has played. He’s not looking to read between the lines; instead, he tries to portray Rafael with honesty and honor the life that the character has lived.
“For me, Rafael is a romantic,” he said. “He’s a little bit impulsive. It represents that side that I think we all have inside of us, that side who wants to live life to the fullest. My character is learning how to control those highs and lows because life, as we know, moves and transforms, and it doesn’t stay the same obviously. So Rafael is learning how to navigate the highs and lows in life, but giving his 100 percent. He gives it his all at each moment.”
The actor, who has also performed in Richard II, The Tempest and Oedipus El Rey, called the environment at Clyde’s an “ecosystem,” and the workers’ hopes to build the perfect sandwich is a metaphor for the learning they are experiencing while being employed by Clyde.
“Each of us can add our little ingredient to create the perfect sandwich, if you will, and each of us has something unique to offer,” Salazar said. “Rafael has that vulnerability, that impulsive[ness], being very present in the moment, and that’s the thing that sometimes is a little bit dangerous for him because I don’t think my character knows what to do with all that energy every time. There are moments where Rafael is there with all this energy boiling out of him, and he means well. But he just hasn’t learned how to control that, how to measure that in his life.”
Performing Clyde’s, both in Minnesota and New York, has opened Salazar’s eyes to the prison system and how it’s painfully broken in the United States. He has educated himself about the realities of incarceration and what life is like after someone serves a prison sentence. These lessons have helped inform his performance.
“Sometimes we cannot be defined by the choices that we make in life, and I think that is very true to this character,” he said. “We all have stereotypes that we’re trying to erase and take away in our lives, but we have them. We hear someone went to prison, and automatically we might have a stereotype of a person and what they did and how they got there. So the beauty of this play, to me, is that you can come into the theater, thinking, oh, I’m going to go and see a play about formerly incarcerated people, and they look this way, mostly Black and Brown folks. I already come in with ideas and preconceptions of what I might have grabbed from society. And then you are there, and then you get to hear why they did what they did, what got them to a place in their life to make that decision or not make that decision. And that is to me the essence of the play because the audience is laughing, and they’re with us — they’re having a great time, it’s a very funny play obviously — and then boom we kind of zoom in to the essence of these human beings.”
Salazar said he leans into the comedy earlier in the play because he knows this moment of reflection is coming later in the narrative, and what’s coming, in his words, is “real” and considers the nobility of the human beings on stage, regardless of what they may have done in the past. This experience for Salazar is yet another example of how he has grown as an artist when working with Nottage and Whoriskey.
“I have grown as an artist with Kate and Lynn,” he said. “I know in my heart how much I have grown. It is because I don’t come from any fancy school. I didn’t go to Yale or Juilliard. I didn’t go to any fancy actor schools or programs, and I’ve always felt as an actor, as a Brown actor perhaps, I could never give more than what I was hired for. I could never sit at a table read or at a rehearsal and say more than what I was hired for as an actor, but with Kate and Lynn, when we’re working together, when we do that first table read, we really dissect the piece and talk about experiences. And I feel like Kate and Lynn create this very safe space for that collaboration to happen, and I’ve never felt that before, that I could give more, and my life experiences can contribute to the journey of putting a play together or a piece of art together.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Clyde’s, featuring Reza Salazar, is now playing as part of Second Stage Theater’s season at the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. Click here for more information and tickets.
