THE GAZETTE
Page B-6
Thursday, September 5, 2013 lr
Actress Debbi Morgan chats about one-woman show, ‘The Monkey on My Back’ n
Emmy Award-winner coming to Publick Playhouse BY
CARA HEDGEPETH STAFF WRITER
Best known for her role as Dr. Angie Hubbard on the ABC soap opera “All My Children,” actress Debbi Morgan is now working on her latest project, a one-woman show based on her soonto-be released personal memoir, “The Monkey on My Back.” The show, which debuted at Ashford & Simpsons Sugar Bar in New York City on July 19, reveals Morgan’s struggle with a cycle of fear and abuse affecting three generations of the women in her family. Here, she talks to A&E about her struggle to write the memoir and the return of “All My Children.” A&E: How did the concept for “The Monkey on My Back” first come about?
Morgan: It’s based on my personal memoir, which is going through editing now. Hopefully we’ll get a publishing deal by the end of the year. I started writing the book 7 to 10 years ago. I would write and then I would put it away and I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to do it or if I should do it. A&E: Why were you hesitant?
Morgan: I hadn’t really come fullcircle at that time. I ended up going to therapy and I had to do a lot of work on myself ... I wanted people to continue to think I was someone who always had it all together and I just didn’t know if I was really ready to let people know ... that just wasn’t necessarily the case. A&E: What finally convinced you to finish the book?
Morgan: I realized it was something that was going to be so cathartic for me and after going to therapy and doing a lot of work on myself, I realized that I needed to get out that last bit of residue because it was like the final release of all that toxicity.
A&E: And how did the memoir evolve into the one-woman show?
Morgan: I did a speaking engagement for this organization called Girls
gosh, you’ve been acting for years and you’re a wonderful actor, why would you be afraid?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I have a script and it’s pretend, so that’s easy. This is all about me.’ I’m not used to being on stage all alone. All of the responsibility is on me to make sure I keep the connection with the audience and keep them involved and hopefully no one’s sitting there looking at their watch, going, ‘When is this going to be over?’
“THE MONKEY ON MY BACK” WITH DEBBI MORGAN n When: 8 p.m. Saturday n Where: 5445 Landover Road, Cheverly n Tickets: $30-45 n For information: 301-277-1710, arts.pgparks.com
Inc. down in Hampton, Va., last year. And it was about bullying, which is also a part of my memoir ... At the end of the speaking engagement, this woman came up to me and ... her eyes just welled up with tears. She said, ‘I have two teenage girls and, for years, they’ve been watching their father beat me and physically abuse me and, after listening to you tonight, that’s it. I see what damage I’m doing to my girls, not just to myself but to my girls. And that’s it, I’m leaving.’ And it was at that point that I decided I also wanted to do it as a one woman show. A&E: You’ve performed the show twice now for a live audience, first at Ashford & Simpsons Sugar Bar in New York and then again at the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston Salem, N.C. What have been the biggest adjustments you’ve had to make in taking the story from the book to the stage?
Morgan: The biggest difference, being an actress, I’m very descriptive in my writing ... my writing is very lyrical and it has a flow to it. And the difference between that and doing a stage performance is that I’m not reading a piece, it’s like I’m talking to my audience members ... A lot of things that I have in the book, even though I love them, I had to change because I write in a very poetic fashion.
A&E: You’ve made a career out of playing other people, but what is it like to get up on stage and have to be yourself?
Morgan: It was very scary. The first night I was at the Sugar Bar I was terrified. And everybody was like, ‘Oh, my
A&E: Were you nervous about exposing such personal and painful details about your past?
Morgan: It was very intimidating because I reveal a lot and I really expose myself. But I remember my director said one day during rehearsal she could feel me holding back, and she said to me, ‘Debbi, if you’re going to tell this, I mean if you’re really going to tell your story, you’re going to have to stick your butt out the window and pull your pants down. Or else there’s really no point of you telling it.’
A&E: It’s been almost two years since “All My Children” went off the air, but in April, the show returned in an online format. What has it been like to go back to being Dr. Angie Hubbard?
Morgan: I felt, on a personal level — I mean, the character is so close to my heart. I’ve been afforded the opportunity to do a lot of things outside of “All My Children” and playing Angie, but it was like stepping back into an old pair of slippers. It was like it was just yesterday. It was wonderful to be able to make so many fans happy who had felt slighted you know, by the show being taken off the air ... A show like that was generational. [People] would come home and their grandmother was watching it, then their mother and then they were watching it. It was so wonderful that their outcry was finally heard and they finally got their show back.
A&E: What’s the biggest difference in shooting a show for online versus TV?
Morgan: I actually like doing this online version even more than when we were on television because it just allows us to have so much more creativity ... We have a lot more freedom. We’re
KENT BALLARD
Actress Debbi Morgan, best known for her role as Dr. Angie Hubbard on the ABC soap opera “All My Children,” will perform her one-woman show, “The Monkey on My Back,” at the Publick Playhouse this weekend. not working 52 weeks a year. I probably wouldn’t even have time to be touring and doing my show if we were still on television ... It’s kind of nice to be involved in something that is ground-
breaking and for it to be a success and for us to be a part of the first time doing this is wonderful. chedgepeth@gazette.net
AT THE MOVIES
Sofia’s choice in ‘Getaway’ BY
MICHAEL PHILLIPS CHICAGO TRIBUNE
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“Getaway” will never be mistaken for a “Fast & Furious” sequel. It’s more like “Taken … for a Ride!” Terrible but, in its squealing way, sporadically fun-terrible, it features a glowering Ethan Hawke as a former professional race car driver named Brent Magna … or Brock Magma … or Frack Slaterock … or something like that. Let’s call him Magma. Magma and his wife (Rebecca Budig, seen mostly in black-and-white, those-werethe-days flashbacks) live in
GETAWAY n 1 1/2 stars n PG-13; 94 minutes n Cast: Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Jon Voight n Directed by Courtney Solomon
Sofia, Bulgaria, allowing the producers to film in a city willing to let visitors mess up traffic for a spell. Mrs. Magma is abducted on Christmas and held in a warehouse, so that a criminal mastermind listed in the film’s credits as The Voice (Jon Voight, more or less German this time) can blackmail Hawke’s character into “a series of tasks” behind the wheel of a custom Ford Shelby GT500 Super Snake. These include a high-speed assault on a crowded ice rink and several rounds of police pursuits and evasions. Selena Gomez takes the passenger seat. In one of the weirdest character introductions in the history of any medium, her character, the least-madcap heiress around, known only as The Kid, attempts to steal back the car belonging to her. So. You
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SIMON VARSANO
Ethan Hawke as Brent Magna in Warner Bros. Pictures and Dark Castle Entertainment’s action thriller “Getaway.” have Magma, The Voice and The Kid. This movie is The Dumb. As steered with more enthusiasm than skill by “An American Haunting” director Courtney Solomon, the takeaway on “Getaway” goes this-a-way: Is there anything a filmmaker can’t do in Sofia, Bulgaria? With Los Angeles and environs suffering millions in lost revenue thanks to runaway film production, “Getaway” serves handily as Exhibit A. Certain shots and the most head-banging stunts on view suggest that you can happily murder all sorts of extras
if you film there. The action in “Getaway” is hacked up into messily edited bits, run through what are supposed to be a dozen different surveillance cameras recording the action inside and outside the death car. With Voight’s voice on the car’s GPS saying things like “Smash everything you can,” the movie makes its intentions clear. Hawke’s character spends most of the film not knowing why The Voice is making him do the things he does. Magma and The Kid trade cross-generational barbs (“Stop almost killing us!” she whines at one point) and develop a grudging mutual respect, although if you look up the word “chemistry” in the dictionary, you won’t find a picture of these two actors together. The repeated close-ups of Hawke’s foot slamming the clutch are more expressive. The movie requires little acting; it requires screeching — of tires. I will say this: It’s perversely satisfying to see the Bulgarian capital roughed up by a movie crew in this way, even by second-raters. And near the end there’s an extended shot, taken with a car-mounted camera, reminding audiences of the gut-level pleasures of high velocity. The rest of “Getaway,” which many in the audience seemed to genuinely hate based on comments on the way out, is so mechanical and derivative, not even the abducted-spouse routine can stoke the audience’s rooting interests. Still, I confess: After the screening, I drove my Honda Fit home like a maniac.