Interview: Uzo Aduba on Taking on the Tough as Nails 'Clyde' at the Hayes Theater

Drizzle on some optimism and you've got yourself a darn satisfying sandwich. Or, really, a taste of life that may be in reach. It all depends on how you view life at Clyde's, now on Broadway, where sandwiches become a symbol of hope-where each deli meat and leafy green represents the potential for the future. The very act of imagining one's future, how it'll look, taste and feel, are revealed as they build some of the best sandwiches in town.

Our chefs are the diverse characters we meet at the truck stop restaurant "Clyde's," ex-convicts hired by Clyde herself (one tough cookie, played by Emmy Award and Screen Actors Guild Award winner Uzo Aduba), now finding themselves as sandwich artists serving up unique creations to the restaurant's hungry crew of truckers and others coming and going.

Artisanal sandwiches may be lost on that cast of customers, but it's not about them. Each sandwich component represents our chefs' personal hopes and dreams for the future. They serve as both an analogy and a gift-the care with which they were built represents the dream, the rotation of orders mean each time that dream is put out in the world, even if it's consumed without care.

Now now, don't get any ideas about Clyde. She isn't Mother Teresa, she's just one bad ass mother (symbolically and euphemistically speaking). Tough as nails, Clyde has no time for sentimentality. She expects excellence or will show you the door. There's no daydreaming, there's just hard reality. She's the warden in a jail that pays its prisoners in dreams. Not a sweetie pie, but she's one of very few people who would ever give them a second chance.

That's not to say Clyde is heartless. She's just hidden. Underneath her hard-as-nails exterior must be someone deeply loving to give society's throwaways a second chance.

"Full stop now, I did not expect myself to be playing a part like this woman, Clyde, but I'm really enjoying it and grateful," said Aduba in a recent interview. "It is a dream to be able to be doing a play of Lynn's (author Lynn Nottage). Because I've been a huge fan of hers for the longest time for a variety of projects."

About Clyde, Aduba says "I think she to me, Clyde, is someone who has had very big dreams over the course of her life. I think she's a woman who has dared to dream... but time after time after time, has watched them squelched. And I think when you have seen all of your dreams dashed, sometimes you stop dreaming."

"it's not for lack of wanting to dream. It's lack of seeing dreams come true."

And yet Clyde secretly encourages the dreams of her employees, giving them a second chance when society might otherwise discard them. Aduba says in part they're just trying to make it through to something better and Clyde supports it through tough love. "I think she is trying to keep them from experiencing the devastation she has felt with her dreams not coming true."

"I think they are people who are unfortunately often forgotten," said Aduba. "We are often captured by the stories of being incarcerated or prison, industrial complex, from prison side of it, but less so the life after, the rebuilds that are necessary for people who have been incarcerated."

Famed for her work on TV shows such as Orange is the New Black and Mrs. America as well as on Broadway in Coram Boy and Godspell, Aduba says she doesn't want her work to be limited to one form. "I want also to just, I don't know, I want to make sure that I'm telling and seeing stories that are missing. That's always been very important to me. To make room for those before, beside and behind me in any way that I can. To do what I know I can do versus what people think I can do. That's what I want."

Clyde's is presented by Second Stage. It is running at the Hayes Theater until January 19.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus