Daphne Rubin-Vega Comes Home
Long before Daphne Rubin-Vega became a Broadway star—in 1996, at age twenty-six, when she débuted the role of Mimi in “Rent”—she felt at home in the theatre district. For a time, as a kid, “I lived here, next to the Actors Studio,” she said recently, in front of a town house on West Forty-fourth Street. She’s currently working two blocks away, starring as Mr. Zero in the New Group’s revival of Elmer Rice’s expressionist satire “The Adding Machine.” Rubin-Vega is five feet two and trim, with swooping dark hair, and she wore a wool jacket and pin-striped pants. Born in Panama, she emigrated with her mother, a nurse, in the seventies. In New York, her mother married a magazine editor and they moved into his apartment, on that building’s garden level. Her parents were creative—she played Chopin on the piano; he wrote science fiction—and observant. “I remember my mother coming home and going, ‘Hey, so-and-so is out there,’ ” Rubin-Vega said, referring to actors. Her mother collected autographs for young Daphne. “I had a ‘Humpty Dumpty’ book with signatures from Ben Gazzara”—a member of the Actors Studio—“and Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda, because they shot ‘Klute’ across the courtyard,” she said.
“Honestly, I remember walking out of this place—there was a yearning,” she went on, looking up and down the street. “That’s why I had to come back.” She recalled that feeling: the fantasy of seeing a legendary actor, “and the fact that these buildings look like churches.” She gestured toward the Gothic Revival New Dramatists building (“DEDICATED TO THE PLAYWRIGHT”), a few doors down. “There was something very spiritual about it. I used to listen to ‘The Me Nobody Knows’ with Irene Cara, probably the first year I got here. I remember thinking, Oh, my God. I recognized myself somewhere.” A savvy bohemian neighbor gave her a copy of Backstage, where she saw an audition for “children’s theatre”—“The Princess and the Pea.” “So, after school, I went to where this audition was—I was a latchkey kid—by myself. The woman was, like, ‘What are you doing here? How old are you?’ And I said, ‘Nine years old.’ And she said, ‘Come back in another nine years.’ It was devastating.” Rubin-Vega gazed toward the under-stairs entrance to her former apartment. “I feel like sitting on the stoop until I get kicked out,” she said. Eventually, she headed to Amy’s Bread, on Ninth Avenue, for a café warmup before showtime.
“The Adding Machine,” from 1923, is about Mr. Zero, a repressed number cruncher who gets replaced by an adding machine. He kills his boss (Michael Cyril Creighton), impassively accepts prison and execution, and fails to find happiness even in the Elysian Fields; he’s also a bigot who shuns its “mixed” and pleasure-seeking crowd. Rubin-Vega plays Zero with muted calm and quicksilver rage; he can look stunted, stunned, then lash out, floridly. “I try to lose myself in this character, at least physically,” she said. “Particularly for Zero, I need to leave that wiggle room of Daphne.” She hasn’t played a man before. “But, in my teens, I had this comedy-sketchy character named Dick Manly. He was so ratchet. The ego!” Zero’s swagger is a descendant of Dick’s. “Zero really has permission to say the things he says because he knows that somebody in there gets him,” she said. “And that’s the permission that I give myself, as a brown woman—to speak those words and, like, bite into them.” His language doesn’t faze her. “I grew up in New York. My teachers used to talk like that!” she said, laughing. “They were, like, ‘Do you think you’re better than me?’ ”
The New Group’s new home is at the Theatre at St. Clement’s—a church building, like those on her old block. “Just coming off the run of ‘Twelfth Night,’ ”—Shakespeare in the Park, last summer—“it’s hard not to absorb the fact that theatre and democracy were born at the same time in Greek civilization,” she said. “And that theatre was mandatory in order for people to be urged to make up their own minds. I’ve always thought of the theatre as a sacred place.”
At the café, she’d taken her coat off, revealing a butterfly brooch. “This was my mom’s,” she said. Her mother died when she was ten, not long after they left Hell’s Kitchen. Rubin-Vega doesn’t often talk about the autographed “Humpty Dumpty” book, she said, “because it’s so long ago that I didn’t even know that this was what I wanted, you know? It was, like, my mom—because I lost her—this sounds freaky, but I often think that, like, this is beyond my own will. Like, I’ve been buoyed, the wind is at my back.” She looked at the time; it was almost six. “Oh! Time to go and turn into a man.” At the Theatre at St. Clement’s, she signed some autographs and went inside. ♦