The leading mother-daughter duo of Carrie: The Musical, Barbara Walsh (Margaret) and Emily Zickler (Carrie), navigate a twisted shared past and conflicting desires in Studio’s 2nd Stage production of the musical based on Stephen King’s first published novel. Walsh and Zickler spoke with Artistic Apprentice Nathan Norcross about the challenges of bringing these characters and their relationship to life on the stage.
NN: Have you portrayed a mother/daughter relationship onstage before? How does the unique relationship in Carrie differ from your previous experiences in this realm?
BW: The mother/daughter relationships I've experienced on stage are vastly different from the Margaret/Carrie dynamic. I played a mother dealing with her daughter's eating disorder in the musical Normal for Transport Group in NY. I played Mrs. Baskin in the musical Big on Broadway. I guess the link between those two and Margaret would be that all mothers are trying to save their children, but Margaret (because she's a religious fanatic) goes about it in much more extreme ways. Mother/daughter stories are endless and fascinating to explore.
EZ: I have been in a mother/daughter relationship on stage before, but for the most part my experience has been in performances with my contemporaries who were playing roles older than their type. Playing opposite someone "age appropriate" is a new, welcome experience. This specific mother/daughter relationship is very unique, however. The daughters that I've portrayed before had much healthier relationships with their mother. The interactions between Margaret and Carrie are loaded with a lot of emotional baggage that sometimes gets unpacked in some pretty crazy ways.
NN: Were there personal experiences you were able to draw from in exploring the psychology of these characters and how their past informs their relationship with each other?
EZ: I think the most useful experiences I have been able to draw from in order to explore Carrie's psychology were those from my middle school and high school days. It's been a little while since I was in high school, but there are definitely some memories that stick with me. I did okay in high school—I was certainly never abused in the ways that Carrie is tormented on stage—but feeling like an outsider is not unfamiliar to me. There are so many new emotions that the adolescent brain has to process while still trying to function on an everyday level. I can recall how confusing and painful that can be. Those are the memories that I don't necessarily want to revisit, but that have been fruitful for developing my understanding of Carrie.
BW: I don't have any fanaticism in my history to draw from. I was raised Catholic (though lapsed now for a long time), so I can see if someone were nuts (e.g. Margaret), I can see how they'd use their religion to find answers or cover up the fact that she just can't let her daughter go. She's deeply out of touch and I surmise there's abuse in her background somewhere, though it's not really explored in Carrie (book or musical or movie). I think Carrie needs Margaret and vice versa, but it's dysfunctional, which only leads to a bad outcome!
NN: What was the most challenging part of working on your role? What was the most rewarding?
BW: The most challenging aspect is to really commit to what's horrible about Margaret, but find whatever threads of humanity are there. I enjoy any character that changes, and the role reversal of Carrie having the power over her mother at end of the first act and into the second act is very interesting and opens up more colors of vulnerability as Margaret tries to find her bearings. Besides some fantastic tunes to sing, it's most rewarding to sing with Emily, who studied with my voice teacher of 30 years, Margaret Riddleberger. So at the end of our duet in the first act, we hold the same note and, well, it's pretty awesome!
EZ: The most challenging part of this role was definitely allowing myself to go to the dark places - the sadness, the rage, the helplessness that Carrie feels. No one wants to feel those things, but I knew that in order for this play to work I would have to go there. It was integral for us to establish the physical and emotional safety in the room so that I my scene partners and I could do whatever we needed to do as our characters to tell the story—that way we knew at the end of the day that we were all still playing make believe! As tough as the work has been, these performances really are a blast and it's great to take the audience on a wild ride every night.