Q&A: Michelle Azar brings Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life, career to stage in ‘All Things Equal’
If she wasn’t a real person, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life would read like a fictional story. A tale of a woman who experienced the death of her older sister at a young age and the death of her mother the day before she graduated high school.
The tale of a woman who worked twice as hard as everyone in the room, excelled in her studies at Cornell University, married and became a mother, then continued to be a standout student as one of just nine women at Harvard Law School and, later, Columbia Law School, taking notes for both herself and her husband after he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
The tale of a woman who broke glass ceiling after glass ceiling while working in academia before being appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals and, later, the Supreme Court, where she would have a storied 27-year tenure.
With Bader Ginsburg, the list of highlights and accomplishments really goes on and on, so it’s difficult to summarize them, though Tony Award-winning playwright Rupert Holmes has managed to do just that in his play “All Things Equal: The Life and Trials of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” which comes to the First Interstate Center for the Arts on Saturday.
Starring Michelle Azar and directed by Laley Lippard, “All Things Equal” takes audiences through the life, career and passions of the “Notorious RBG,” as she came to be known, a nickname Azar said Bader Ginsburg thought was delightful.
Spokesman-Review: Have you worked on a one-woman show before?
Michelle Azar: This is my third solo show. It’s like nobody wants me to talk on stage with people … I was not so daunted by being on stage alone for 90 minutes. That being said, every time I’m away from it for a day, I do get nervous. Even talking too much about it, I have to remind myself I’m not alone. I’m deeply channeled, not to be too groovy about it, I spend a lot of time with Ruth during the day in all different ways. And I sit with her beforehand and ask what she wants to show me tonight, or what I can reveal for the both of us.
Our beautiful, genius writer Rupert Holmes wrote it in such a way that I am constantly talking to Marty, my husband, to my students, my classmates … so it’s all very, very clear that, me as the actor, I have somebody on stage with me. There’s plenty of different voiceovers too.
S-R: I love that you spend so much time with her, and she’s still part of it. You’re still learning about the show then, it’s still new to you.
Azar: People always ask me, ‘What is one of your favorite lines?’ And just last night, I was thinking, my new favorite line is said some time toward the end of the play, where we’re addressing some of the things that perhaps she would have done differently in hindsight. And she says, ‘You know, I am still learning on the job. And there was a saying around my old neighborhood, ‘Learn from your mistakes and you’ll have a lifelong education.’ ” Not every show goes perfectly, and not every word comes out my mouth the way I’d like it to, but I’m learning on the job, and what I’m learning truly is that it’s so little about me, as Michelle. It is so much bigger. And again, not to be groovy about it, but it’s for a very different reason than, let’s say, doing a nice TV show or doing something that is also very rewarding. This situates differently in terms of its intention.
S-R: I saw this mentioned in another interview, but I feel like a lot of people are only familiar with Ruth’s life and accomplishments as an older woman. What was it like getting to know a younger Ruth through your research?
Azar: I spent the entire first week in tears. It was so interesting. I found myself, first of all, astounded by the amount of loss, right? Her mother, her sister. Her sister died when she was 6 and (Ruth) was 14 months old. I can only imagine living in that shadow. Then knowing that she was really aware of Anne Frank and being raised in this simultaneous backdrop of Jews being deeply unwelcome and murdered because they were Jewish. I can’t imagine starting her career at Harvard with their 4-year-old daughter. When my kid was 4, I was barely getting out of pajamas. Then she’s told her husband has testicular cancer. … How did she maintain a smile on her face? How did she learn how to survive on two hours of sleep?
… And the other thing that I really found enlightening, this embodiment of Felicity Jones in “On the Basis of Sex.” I was hesitant to watch it, but I needed something to give me permission to physicalize her in a way that wasn’t only the chemotherapy-ridden, older woman on the Court. She was vital and filled with physical life and that was written by her own nephew, so I figure, ‘All right, that works for me. He knew her well.” She was sexual and silly and deeply amused by Marty and deeply vibrant.
A good friend of mine came to see the show Saturday night and said the same sort of ‘Wait, you made her so likable. I’d only known this austere” and I was like ‘Not only do I know she was likable from what I could glean from all these movies and stuff, but everybody that speaks about her, for the most part, people say she remembered names, and she looked you in the eye.’ And her humility. She walks into the opera by herself, and the whole sea parts for her, and she says, ‘No, thank you. But sit down, everybody, let’s be here for the drama on stage, not for the drama of me.’
S-R: You’ve been performing this show since 2022. Have you noticed changes in how audiences are receptive to the show based on what’s happening politically?
Azar: The first thing that really jumps to mind was when Trump won this second term, and there had been all the stuff with Biden stepping down. It makes me tear up. There’s an area where I say all the people that helped me get appointed, and one of them was, ‘Then-Gov. Joe Biden said I was one of the real joys of his 10 years as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.’ And when I said his name during those few months, it would be full-on applause. We had to stop because people wanted, I don’t know, to say thank you, to remember him, to show some defiance of the current administration. Who knows all their reasons.
Last week was our first show since September and I wondered how that would land, and it was quiet. Nobody needed to do anything after saying ‘Biden.’ Nobody needed to do anything after saying ‘Trump’ either. I say, ‘I assumed Donald Trump would lose by a wide margin.’ The thing that really was audibly shocking and deeply emotional for me, I say, ‘It seems the Supreme Court has managed to keep its head above the tides of politics’ when I’m talking about Roe vs. Wade being overturned, and that’s very painful, so the first night in beautiful, beautiful Omaha, Nebraska, they were like [groans], audibly like that. And I waited until we all regrouped. And then Saturday night in San Francisco, who knows why, but I felt like we did the same thing, but this time I felt maybe they were angry at me. It was very, very, very interesting …
I asked Rupert because people had asked me, ‘Will this show be changing every so often?’ And he said, ‘No, we’re not going to update the show in terms of politics, in terms of what’s happening in the world. As though we would know what she would say.’ We can’t and we shouldn’t but what we can do is let the context speak for itself. That ‘Whoa, what is happening?’ or I hope it makes some child in the audience stand up to themselves later and say, ‘What in the world am I going to do?’ and start a new club at school.
S-R: You’ve spent so much time with the show, with Ruth’s words, with Rupert’s words, as well. How long does it take for you to get back to being Michelle at the end of a show?
Azar: Right in the beginning, it took quite a bit of time. I remember, after that first month, building her physically so much. It was very, very important to me as actor, as a yoga teacher, as a mover, as a person who usually works inside out for a character, I really wanted to understand her outside in. I got back to Los Angeles and the morning after, broke my toe.
I’m limping around and my then-senior in high school daughter, we go out for dinner thinking we were going to reacclimate and I’m slow moving, I’m slow talking. I’m faltering over my words, and my daughter was very alarmed. She’s like ‘Are you going to bring her home every time? I need to know what to expect.’
It took several months, really, to want to let her go, decide to let her go, trust that I can go back and forth. I decided to trust that I have it in my body enough that I can find her pretty quickly and let Michelle come back pretty quickly. Sometimes I don’t want to! If Ruth is the better part of ourselves, I’d like to stay with her as long as possible.