Sunday Lunch with Regina Taylor
At 45, Regina Taylor has the kind of serene beauty that makes you think she's figured out a few of life's major secrets.
Her face, still recognizable from her stint, 15 years ago now, as housekeeper Lilly Harper on the acclaimed television drama "I'll Fly Away," has a fullness to it now, and an almost-fixed expression of quiet satisfaction.
So it's hard to know, just by looking, that Taylor is busier than she has ever been. She is back on television, in the David Mamet-created series, "The Unit." And she is the playwright and director behind the Goodman Theatre's current mainstage production, "The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove," based on the life of entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker.
"There was no one like her before her," says Taylor of her subject. "She really invented herself."
Taylor's voice is soft and refined, but she has an actor's ability to make herself heard over the din of the crowd at the bustling Catch 35 restaurant on Wacker Drive. And the effect of this effortless projection is soothing, almost misleadingly so. Because, while her tone seems cool, even detached, Taylor's words make clear that she has a streak of fierceness.
'Possibility of being true'
Over an elegant lunch of seared Chilean sea bass, she describes the life of Sarah Breedlove, the woman who would come to call herself Madam C.J. Walker.
"Child of slaves," Taylor begins, "orphaned at 7, married at 15, a widow and mother at 17 . . . she was a washerwoman, making $1.50 or $2 a week and yet she had these hopes, these dreams."
Walker's life, she says, is "really the story of the American dream, the washerwoman who winds up living on an estate next to the Rockefellers."
And the play she has written, Taylor adds, is all about "following this dream, this American desire, which for so many black people is a lie."
There is no flash of anger in her eye when she says this, no discernable change in her manner. But something in our conversation has changed.
Until now, we've been chatting amiably about the play's run here in Chicago, about its quickly bonding cast and their ritual of breaking bread together at area restaurants. Taylor has mentioned her life in Southern California, where "The Unit" is filmed, and how she, a fairly committed non-driver, gets around there. She has described her late mother's Texas garden and her fondness for drinking tea.
But Taylor seems to have reached her limit on friendly actress small talk.
"A lie?" I ask, wondering where this will go.
"Yes," she says. And continues, answering my raised eyebrow, adding, "A lie always has the possibility of being true."
Dreams' role in real life
So Taylor has taken, as the centerpiece of this play, a dream Walker claimed to have, in which a mysterious African man came to her and whispered in her ear the secret ingredients for a hair growth tonic.
"Some people say it's a lie," Taylor says of Walker's tale of the genesis of her hair care empire. "But, either way, what she did with it was pretty miraculous."
Taylor, who grew up in Texas and Oklahoma -- "Mary Kay country" -- had long thought of Walker as an advertising genius but, when she started researching her, came to see her as a more complicated, and important, figure.
"She was the first dark-skinned, African-American woman to put her own image on a product," Taylor says. "She changed the world's perspective on black women."
Six more years of research followed, during which Walker "did start to come to me in my dreams," Taylor says, and the figure that emerged was a "visionary who can't see what's right in front of her."
Walker's personal relationships were troubled. She was married three times and clashed often with her strong-willed daughter. She died, Taylor says, "literally because she worked herself to death."
Taylor can sometimes seem to talk in circles. She is obsessed with the idea of "being able to name yourself," as Walker did, and with the ways in which dreams work their way into real life. She deflects questions on other subjects -- her own career, the dearth of roles for actresses in their 40s -- and returns, again and again, to the story of C.J. Walker.
Only Walker
"Where she came from, literally the mud of the Delta, she couldn't read or write," says the hyper-literate Taylor. "But she educates herself and becomes this brilliant business woman."
Though she remarks that Oprah Winfrey is clearly Walker's modern-day counterpart, Taylor is not interested in discussing that further. For her, right now, there is only Walker.
So, yes, there is the hit TV show. And the next play she's writing, and maybe a musical, as well.
But, this afternoon, after a cappuccino and a short walk, she will return to the Goodman, for another day's rehearsal, another day of channeling the woman who comes to her in her dreams. And she will keep life's major secrets to herself.
