“Today was so magical,” said Tracee Ellis Ross. “I feel agitated.”
It was a sweltering afternoon at Pitti's Bar in Greenwich Village this month, and Ms. Ross had just finished her first dress rehearsal on stage for the play “Every Brilliant Thing.”
In the one-man interactive Broadway show, a narrator compiles a list of treats (ice cream, hammocks, “nice old people who aren't weird or smell funny”) to prove to his depressed mother that life is worth living.
The show, which has been nominated for a Tony, is Ms. Ross's Broadway debut. She succeeded Mariska Hargitay and Daniel Radcliffe and is the latest performer to direct the play at the Hudson Theatre. Ms. Ross's first show was on Tuesday and the show will end on August 9.
“It's perfectly me,” Ross, 53, said. “It's about something real and important and told through the lens of pure joy.”
Known for her starring roles in the television series “Girlfriends” and “black-ish,” Ms. Ross said it had been a dream for her to be on Broadway. Instead of throwing a birthday party to celebrate her 40th birthday, she rented stages in New York City and Los Angeles and invited her friends to watch her perform a one-woman show. She started by taking off her dress and standing in her bra and underwear.
“I haven't tried to do Broadway,” he said. “My goal is to do great things and make material that makes my heart light up.”
To perform in “Every Brilliant Thing,” Ross rented an apartment in Lower Manhattan for three months. She has lived in Los Angeles since 1999, but considers herself a New Yorker.
As a child, Ms. Ross was enrolled by her mother, Diana Ross, at Dalton School on the Upper East Side for eight years and at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx for three years. After graduating from Brown University, Ms. Ross worked in Manhattan as a fashion editor at Mirabella and New York Magazine.
“Then I jumped off the cliff and became an actress,” she said.
Variety's executive television editor, Michael Schneider, said that if Ms. Ross's only acting credit were “Girlfriends,” it would be enough to cement her status in Hollywood. “But then came 'black-ish,' which made her one of the best actresses on television and gave her many more opportunities, from hosting a night at the Democratic National Convention to her new stint on Broadway,” he said.
On her way to Bar Pitti, Ms Ross bumped into the owner, Giovanni Tognozzi, and gave him a hug.
“That makes me very happy that he is here,” Ms. Ross said. “I used to come here three times a week with my best friend Samira. It was our kitchen, and when I turned 23 I took over the whole place.”
Samira is Samira Nasr, the editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar. Ms. Ross and Ms. Nasr remain close friends.
“When I first got here, my friends had dinner and I thought I was having dinner for Samira because she just had a birthday,” he said. “They said, 'No, Tracee. This is your welcome dinner.' I said, guys. I'm not here. I'm only here until September.”
To adapt to her new home, Ms. Ross recreated the aspects of home life that are most important to her.
One of those things is doing laundry.
After greeting actress Famke Janssen, and before actress Minka Kelly approached the Pitti Bar table to say hello, Ms Ross checked her phone for a photo of her clothes drying neatly on a rack.
“I mean, the joy,” Ross said enthusiastically after finding the image.
Before arriving at the restaurant, Ross had gone to a market dressed in a vintage Chanel jumpsuit to buy ingredients for a pasta recipe that included butter, grated Parmesan cheese and lemon.
“I can't keep enough food in my body right now,” he said. “They've spent eight hours a day on stage, working and on their feet. Taking notes. All cylinders are firing. There's also not enough time to sit down and calm down to eat.”
“Every Brilliant Thing,” written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, is a 40-page script that takes Ms. Ross about 80 minutes to perform.
Macmillan said Ross approached the play in a unique way. “She's finding moments in this play that she's never seen before,” he said. “For this play to work, the audience needs to really care about the protagonist and want him to succeed. Tracee doesn't have to work hard to win us over: she has such an innate warmth and openness that we are on her side from the beginning.”
Mrs. Ross didn't memorize the script. Instead, he spent weeks discovering the “shape of each scene” and used his imagination to create a biography and memories of his character.
“If I get a word wrong,” he said, “I know what I'm trying to say and I can always fill it in because I know what the experience was.”
The process, Ms. Ross said, was like “swallowing a whale. It was my job to digest the whale and mama bird to hand it to the public so they could grab it.”
To prepare for 40 shows in five weeks, Ms. Ross is taking care of herself both physically and emotionally.
That means not reading books.
“They require my imagination, and my imagination is already working,” he said.
But watching TV is fine. “They are giving it to me,” he said.
Basketball games are good too. Ms. Ross watched the Knicks during the NBA Finals with friends from a box at Madison Square Garden.
“I never went to a Knicks game and didn't sit on the floor,” he said. “We can all roll our eyes at that. I'm rolling my eyes at that. But the boxes at MSG are so amazing. I almost loved it more because I could see and feel everything.”
The day before previews for the show opened, Ms. Ross got a facial at Crystal Greene Studio on the Upper East Side.
“I'm using my face vehicle more than normal,” he said. “I make sure I take care of it. It's my daily bread.”
Before lying on the table to receive her treatment, she seemed calm and relaxed, not like someone who was hours away from making her Broadway debut. But before the session began, Ms. Ross explained that she felt “very comfortable being afraid.”
“My mom told me a long time ago that anxiety and excitement are the same thing, just with a different label,” Ms. Ross said. “As I've gotten older, I say it a little differently: Fear and anxiety are the same thing. Only one is breathing and the other isn't.”
