For Angela Brazil, getting into the philosophy of Tiny Beautiful Things’ “Sugar” was about understanding radical empathy – both on and off the stage.
Angela’s connection to Tiny Beautiful Things is personal. Mikey Perlman, a graduate of the Brown/Trinity Rep MFA directing program, introduced Angela to the show when it first debuted in New York in 2016. After perusing the script, Angela read the original book.
“I went down the rabbit hole of that book, and I have had an ongoing relationship with it since,” Angela told us. “It’s the book I pick up as a touchstone to remind and teach me how to live my life.”
Since then, Angela has used both the book and the play’s script in classes she instructs at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. But the lessons Angela learned and teaches from the book apply to more than just academics. Key to both the original Tiny Beautiful Things book and the stage adaptation is what Angela describes as “radical empathy.”
Tiny Beautiful Things book author Cheryl Strayed defined radical empathy as being honest with one another, seeing the best in people, and sharing a piece of yourself to get the core of understanding other people. Angela implements this in her classes: One of Angela’s courses provides middle and high school teachers with resources on practicing radical empathy in the classroom, alongside interpreting Tiny Beautiful Things as literature.
This idea of radical empathy is especially timely today, Angela said. Trinity Rep cast Angela as Sugar (Cheryl Strayed’s pen name) and slated Tiny Beautiful Things to run in the 2020-21 Season, but this was of course delayed due to the national pause in live performances. But the pandemic and concurrent political events made the show’s themes of empathy and isolation particularly relevant now.
“I’m not alone in realizing there’s something about what Strayed is doing that speaks to us in the now,” Angela said. “Not just in moments of isolation and COVID, but in this place where we are challenged by the lack of the ability to communicate with each other if we find ourselves on opposing sides of, for example, a political spectrum. The honesty that Strayed proposes can actually go a long way towards real conversation, and I hope, bridging divides. She’s intimately replying to people who are writing to her with family issues, personal issues, issues within themselves, but the way that she is proposing that we move forward together, and how to hold conversations with honesty and love with each other. It eddies out into a larger thing that I will just call hope: that there is actually hope for us.”
In this vein of hope, which Angela feels is part of radical empathy, Angela recently began keeping a gratitude journal, where she keeps track of her own “tiny, beautiful, things” in life. Chief among them are interactions with her family, including her 11-year-old daughter, 16-year-old son, and husband, fellow resident actor Stephen Thorne. She said that she tried to keep this in mind – being present, seeing what’s in front of you, responding with sincerity and gratitude – as she prepared for the role of Sugar, particularly in how she responds to letter writers.
Outside of considering the show’s themes and their real-life connections, there were other challenges that came with becoming Sugar. Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame originated the role at The Public Theater in New York, while Reese Witherspoon portrayed Cheryl Strayed in the film Wild, based on another one of Strayed’s memoirs. Noting that she bears little to no physical resemblance to Cheryl Strayed, Angela discussed the questions that came regarding where she and director Curt Columbus could take artistic liberties while still respecting Strayed’s true experience.
“With any role that is based on a real person, there’s a certain level of interrogation that we have to do in the rehearsal room,” Angela reflected. “So where do we have a theatrical license to just sort of create the character? That is an exciting conversation to have, but also one that is also just a different set of questions that we get to ask, as opposed to a completely fictional script with all fictional characters.”
What Angela hopes is that she can tap into the true radical empathy the real Cheryl Strayed introduced as Sugar, both in her performance and in her own life.
“I feel a great responsibility to the material,” Angela confided. “And I feel a great responsibility to coming to every rehearsal and show in a way that Cheryl Strayed herself comes to her readers. At one point she says ‘I will be open with you, I will be bare. I will show you my brokenness and my strengths.’ And I hope to do that every minute of rehearsal and performance of this play.”
