DOWNTOWN — Actress Phylicia Rashad dismissed continuing charges of racism in the Academy Awards Monday as all but insignificant to an artist's work while addressing a fundraiser for Steppenwolf Theatre Downtown.
Asked about last year's #OscarsSoWhite protests on Twitter and the increased number of nominations this year for movies featuring minorities like "Moonlight," "Fences," "Hidden Figures" and "Lion," Rashad said matter-of-factly, "Theater was around a long time before the Oscars."
Rashad pointed out that many people widely acknowledged to be great actors had never won an Academy Award. At the same time, neither did she grant the Oscars any progress, real or imagined, this year.
"What is it you really want?" Rashad said. "Oh, it's wonderful to be celebrated."
She emphasized, however, that she felt "privileged" to work in theater, television and film, "but I can't spend too much time agonizing over politics in or out of the arts. And I can't spend too much time agonizing over Oscars, because the truth of the matter is that there are so many wonderful artists, great artists, whose names and faces we don't even know."
Rashad said all artists should feel privileged to work in their fields, regardless of recognition or awards — a pointed statement coming from the first African-American to win a Tony Award for best actress in a 2004 revival of "A Raisin in the Sun."
Rashad was applauded by the approximately 250 people attending the "Steppenwolf Salutes Women in the Arts" fundraiser at a Monday luncheon at the Radisson Blue Aqua Hotel, 221 N. Columbus Drive. The audience included several Steppenwolf actresses, as well as Chicago first lady Amy Rule.
Acting as host, Steppenwolf Artistic Director Anna Shapiro attempted to draw Rashad out by asking if she were conscious of how graceful, gracious and poised she always seems.
"You do choose to be the way you are," Rashad said, adding that it also came naturally to her. It is better not to be aloof and "to really engage with people," she said. "What's the harm in it?"
Rashad added, "Even when somebody's a real son of a bitch, they think they're right," a remark that elicited slow but rising laughter from the audience. "That's something to consider," she said. "They think they're right."
That was about as political as Rashad got. The former star of "The Cosby Show" also made no comment on the court cases pending against Bill Cosby.
Instead, Rashad most charmed the audience, largely made up of women, with a story Shapiro knew to ask about, but not in the detail Rashad soon revealed.
Rashad told of how her mother in Houston, Texas, could have been a concert pianist, but never got the chance to pursue that. Instead, she raised her children with an emphasis on the arts.
As a result, Rashad said, she was a comfortable performer even as a child, and was selected to read an introduction at a music festival at the age of 11, a time when otherwise she felt awkward and unlovely. Yet she so excelled at rehearsals for the fest, she was suddenly named to be the master of ceremonies for the entire production.
She was so schooled in what to say, she added, she didn't even use the script she had in her hands when the festival started and the spotlight shined on her. People said afterward how beautiful her diction and her whole demeanor had been.
Rashad said she remembered thinking, "When I grow up I'm going to be an actress. I'll play in the light and be beautiful all the time."
Asked by Shapiro how she'd handled any of the usual actor's setbacks in her career, Rashad told of how she lost a part in one play she'd been cast in, only to get hired by another production in which she played the understudy on multiple roles, which greatly improved her craft.
"You can't always see how it's all working out," she said, "but that doesn't mean it's not all working out."
