How Gabby Beans Graduated From Neuroscience to Tony Awards’ Lead Actress Nominee

Every night before she goes on stage, Gabby Beans lies down in one of the aisles of the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater (LCT), where she is performing in the epic, dinosaur-featuring revival of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (to May 29).

It is Beans’ Broadway debut, and she has been deservedly nominated for a Tony Award in the lead actress in a play category for her role as maid Sabina, who regales a baffled audience—observing The Skin of Our Teeth’s brachiosaur, thousands of years, character shifts, visions of apocalypse, and theme of survival—with her own confusion and witty takedowns of the surreal tableaux and wordy disquisitions before us.

“I just lay down, and feel what it means to be in the space, and its exquisite height,” Beans told The Daily Beast. “It is gorgeous, wonderful to play that space. I lie down for 5 minutes. I want to be in the audience’s space. I want to feel the energy in the house that night. After that, I look at every section of the house and send a message to the audience who are yet to arrive. ‘I welcome you here. We’re going to be together. Whoever wants to come into this space, let us experience joy together.’ Before I go on stage I say a prayer, ‘Let me be present with whoever’s going to be here tonight. Let me be fully present and be able to really experience something together.’”

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Beans still has “not really processed” being nominated for a Tony Award, “or integrated it into my feelings about myself and my career,” she told The Daily Beast. “Mostly, it’s just really wonderful that the show [directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, LCT’s resident director] is getting acknowledged. As an actor, you’re only as good as your dancing partners, and I feel as though I have 27 of the best dancing partners there are.”

Beans, who declines to give her age, said people had forecast that she would be nominated for a Tony, but she took that to mean they thought she had been doing a good job. “I didn’t take it seriously. I think you put yourself in a dangerous place as a performer if you’re anticipating awards. The day before the announcement, I was like, ‘I’m going to sleep through, take some melatonin, make sure I sleep well, then in the morning will know either way. Then I woke up to a bunch of calls from my manager and friends, and thought, ‘OK, I guess this is happening.’”

Beans is nominated alongside LaChanze (Trouble in Mind), Ruth Negga (Macbeth), Deirdre O’Connell (Dana H.), and Mary-Louise Parker (How I Learned to Drive). Because she’s performing in The Skin of Our Teeth, Beans has not seen her fellow nominees’ productions. "Part of the reason I’m struggling to process the nomination is… Look at that list! I truly could not care less if I win or lose. Just to be on that list is insane. LaChanze, are you kidding me!”

Despite the laurel and the response of audiences, Beans doesn’t think she has nailed the role. Every time she goes on stage she thinks of a part of the play to focus on, “where the laughs are, and the rhythm of jokes necessary to this land. Comedy is wonderful because you get immediate feedback. It keeps you really honest.”

Beans trains herself into character before curtain up, going for a run and doing some articulation exercises, meaning she is absolutely ready to come on and burn up the stage from the get-go. “I have to be ahead of the audience and ahead of Sabina for it to work. I have to warm into her voice, then it feels like she’s there. It’s like getting my body ready for her.”

When Beans read the play for the first time she felt just as flummoxed as some audience members, though she knew Sabina was a juicy, wonderful part. As time went on, she recognized “the many resonances there are to this post-pandemic times, global wars, refugee crises, environmental degradation, and our actions around it. I slowly started to find my way through it. My understanding around the play has come to: the Antrobus family is a real family but also a family representative of the human race, and that this play is talking about how we somehow always seem to come through all of these disasters and apocalyptic moments.”

For Beans, the play’s third act shows that “the biggest apocalypse is what we do to each other, and the biggest threat to what it means to be alive and human and to make the world we live in, is our own egos. I hear the lines differently every night, and I experience the play wildly differently. Ultimately the play leaves me feeling optimistic, and actually the only way forward is to hope the world will get better every day we try to make it better.”

Sabina is the voice of the audience, confused as to what the hell is going on, and expressing it out loud. Beans feels “a certain level of relief when I say, ‘I hate this play and every word in it.’ There’s always a big laugh. I am able to cut through and say ‘We’re on this ride together.’ The play is confusing. It has moments of clarity and moments of being very obscure.”

Her colleague Eunice Bae has been describing The Skin of Our Teeth to friends as akin to an anthology TV show, each of the acts a different world, with the characters spiritually the same as they traverse whole centuries. Beans sees Sabina as encapsulating a kind of life cycle—even as she appears as an adult throughout, wherever in time and geography we find her. For Beans, Sabina progresses from clown-child to a kind of sexual seductress and then wise old woman.

Beans has noticed some audiences want “the most bonkers version of the show possible,” while others are listening more carefully. She loves the moments when she has those watching in her “pocket” with the comedy she oversees.

She pays special tribute to the designers and operators of the massive brachiosaur and woolly mammoth the Antrobuses keep as pets. Then there is working on Broadway’s most impressive set of the season; a recreation of the Atlantic City boardwalk, complete with full-length slide. “It’s a gift to inhabit such a rich and colorful world. No acting is required. You just feel the fun, abandon, and sinfulness of it all.”

At the performance this critic attended, many audience members were engrossed, others were baffled, and some walked out. Beans and the other actors register the varying responses at each show.

“When you make a bold statement, it’s going to be polarizing,” Beans told The Daily Beast. “It doesn’t bother me. I would prefer for us to be a really truthful, expansive show where we’re doing what we really want to do, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, instead of endeavoring to find some sort of middle legibility that dampens the truthfulness of what we are doing. Lileana is not interested in creating a piece that will hold your hand through every moment.

“It’s up to every single person how they go along for the ride. We honor every single person’s decision. The play washes over you like a dream, and whatever you take from it you take from it. We all feel so happy about what we’re doing, it doesn’t negatively affect us. I think it’s good that it’s polarizing. I like the idea of 5 people really loving what I’m doing than a thousand people going”—she puts on a “meh” tone—‘That was good.’”

“It feels beautiful, 19 of us making our Broadway debuts”

The fact that the Antrobuses are a Black family in this production is “hugely significant,” Beans told The Daily Beast. “I think it unlocks a lot of aspects of the text that would not be unlocked if there were different bodies on stage. Lileana is so visionary, asking the audience to imagine the everyman, the representative family of the human race, is a Black family. It is not lost on any of us that this is a revolutionary act in and of itself.”

She thinks of lines like Sabina noting how Mr. Antrobus’ muscles go tight every time he passes a policeman that have a “different energy” because Mr. Antrobus is Black; or at the end of the play when Sabina “talks about what everything everyone has gone through, and the dog-eat-dog rules of humanity.”

These lines take Beans back to the murder of George Floyd, and “the most recent moment that we talked about what it means to be Black in America, and how we can move forward in a nation that hasn’t really fully appreciated and acknowledged the history of chattel slavery. There’s a really deep, spiritual aspect of the show elicited by the casting choices. It feels incredibly meaningful to be part of that.”

The diverse cast is an “intentional choice” on the part of Blain-Cruz, said Beans, “to make a play about the human race she wanted to represent the diversity of experience and lived history and background of the human race. It feels beautiful. We’re a cast of 28, 19 of us making our Broadway debuts. There are so many people like myself who never expected to be on Broadway, and this show offers us this opportunity to play on this kind of scale in this kind of work. Hopefully, there will be many more opportunities in the future, and certainly this awards season there are more people of color represented than I can ever remember. To have a revival of Thornton Wilder that’s 90 percent people of color and queer people—it’s insane.”

As to whether Broadway has fundamentally embraced racial equity on and off stage, Beans said, “I’m an optimist, so my feeling is yes. I think there are always going to be peaks and valleys in how the Broadway and theater communities evolve to a more equitable and rich vision of what theater means. Art speaks to the aspirational values of a society, and it’s important that people of color are part of that aspirational part of life through art.”

It is not just about equality and representation on stage, but in institutional structures, Beans said. “For theater to remain a viable and relevant art form, it is going to have to tell stories of all sorts of people. Our show is a step towards that vision of theater being a space where we can process as a society what it means to be alive for all people.”

Of her own experiences of discrimination, Beans said, “I am a Black woman in America. That means I have faced micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions.” She noticed that some of her drama school peers secured representation without having worked, whereas Beans, who had worked, did not immediately.

“One of the strangest things,” she said, has been to hear from some white actors who feel like Black actors are getting an advantageous “leg up” in work on stage and screen. One agent said to Beans that she shouldn’t have trouble finding representation because “Black girls are in.” “It’s such an odd thing to come up against,” said Beans. “Just because there are these marginal changes, little baby steps, towards us getting fair shots at careers, we now have to experience this weird kind of reverse racism. People still haven’t fully appreciated what it means to have a Black body on stage doing certain things.”

“Driving around New York, I knew I would live here one day”

Beans’ father Michael was a military officer for 38 years, her mother Wendy a medical doctor. As a child she and her brother, also named Michael, moved with their parents every couple of years, and went to high school in Germany where her dad was stationed at the time.

“My mother loved the theater, really she’s to blame,” Beans said, laughing, “much to her chagrin—but I hope she feels a bit better about that given the Tony nomination.” The beauty of playing Sabina, Beans says, is that she feels like she’s been rehearsing for it all her life ‘because I was such a goofball when I was a little kid. My mom would call them ‘fits of glee.’ That’s what I feel I get to do in this show. Lileana gives you the space to have that childlike freedom.”

As a little girl, Beans wrote stories, and put on shows for the family. She created “huge story arcs” for her brother’s action figures. Her mother told Beans that when she was in pre-school, "I was always making up intrigues," like there being a fight at school that Beans had broken up and then delivered a little speech. Her mother would call her teachers, asking if her daughter had been getting into fights, “and they would tell her, no, I had just been sitting in the corner, watching. What I was writing was about me wanting to be part of the drama, and lying of course.”

Beans laughed. “I like to give myself a bit of grace and think it was about my insatiable need to tell stories, yeah that’s the most generous reading of that, and not that I was just a bad little kid, a maniacal megalomaniac liar of a child!” She laughed at her own extreme joke. “I think the truth is I was a great kid. I didn’t give my parents trouble. The most trouble I ever gave them was in not deciding to be a doctor.”

When she was young, her mom would call Beans “Tallulah Bashula,” a take on Tallulah Bankhead’s name, which her mom wanted to “give more flair.” This tickles Beans, as Bankhead was the first actress to play Sabina in the original production of The Skin of Our Teeth.

Aged 9 or 10, Beans came to New York for the first time, and saw The Lion King, Into the Woods, and Oklahoma! “I’m a child of the ’90s. The Lion King is a banger. The puppetry was so grand. Seeing it manifested on stage, I was so psyched I almost didn’t take a breath. Driving around New York, I just knew I would live here one day.”

Beans had an “amazing” high school drama teacher and participated in school plays, while further theater trips to London cemented her passion, like seeing Fiona Shaw perform Mother Courage. “I didn’t really know what was going on, but I knew she was an absolute force. To see an actress command a stage for three hours with that level of specificity, force, verve, and brilliance totally changed me.”

She also saw the legendary DV8 Physical Theatre perform To Be Straight With You, “which blew my mind. A lot of its text came from interviews with queer people in the U.K. about their experiences. I felt so changed and enthralled by that.” Beans defines as queer herself, saying “gender is not the determining factor of who I love.”

Seeing DV8 was “a huge moment for me personally. I don’t think I was aware of my queerness at that point. I think seeing that show planted seeds of my own awareness and self-acceptance. To know that theater can actually do that is a gift. I am so grateful to that company and those performers because it was a formative moment in my life for sure.”

Beans went to Columbia University to study neuroscience and was on track to apply for medical training, with a view to entering the field of psychological research. She also did theater studies (writing a thesis on the Suzuki method—the music curriculum and teaching philosophy—and neuroscience), performed in student theater, and became “way more focused” on that than her studies. “I thought, ‘You’re just play-acting at this lab science thing.’ But you have a familial duty. My parents had offered me so much in my life I didn’t want to disappoint them.”

In her senior year at Columbia, Beans, faced with a checklist of things she needed to do to apply to medical school, had “a moment of clarity. I could white-knuckle it through this thing, or give myself the chance at something that I felt really, really strongly about, which was acting.”

Beans successfully applied to study acting in graduate school at the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). Her mother asked why she was doing so; Beans pointed out she had encouraged the bug to bite with those early Broadway shows.

She smiles when she says she was “a closeted actor. I always knew. It was clear to me from a young age. That was my real coming-out. My parents were way more worried about my decision to go into acting than they were about my queerness.”

After LAMDA, Beans returned to America, “and I’ve been pretty much trying to make it work ever since.” The unpredictable, uneven actor’s life meant it has been hard at times to say farewell to the more secure life science may have offered.

She recalled the five jobs she was once working to keep her financial head above water: video editing, waiting tables, tutoring students for their SATs, catering work, and being the door person at a friend’s gallery. “Sometimes the stability of life in a more conventional industry is very alluring when you’re worried about your material survival. But I never had that thing of ‘Oh, did I make the wrong decision?’ I always knew it would work out. My only regret would have been if I hadn’t given acting a fair shot—and 100 percent.”

Beans still loves science, calculus, and organic chemistry and reads neuroscience journals whenever she gets the chance. “I don’t think that door is forever closed on me.”

Beans emphasizes her much-loved parents’ support of her and her acting career. “They helped me pay for grad school, which was a huge reason why I’m doing this today. I also want to acknowledge that my privilege coming from a middle-class family, and the access/lack of financial family obligation that comes from that, has afforded me the ability to pursue an acting career.”

Her family, who were due to see the show this past weekend, are “super proud” of the Tony nomination. “They’re like, ‘OK, it seems like acting is going alright,’” she said, laughing. “My dad is really into football. Every time I tell him something about acting he has to translate it into a sports analogy. When I told him I was on Broadway, he said, ‘That’s like being in the finals as a basketball player going to Madison Square Garden. When I told him about the Tony nomination he was like, ‘Oh, that’s like if you got nominated for the Heisman Trophy.’”

As for her mother, “I don’t know if she is fully convinced. She’s reached a stage of acceptance. She’s not actively trying to convince me to go back to school and get a Ph.D.” Her mother, Beans said proudly, is a “relentless, powerful woman. I respect that about her. She wouldn’t be her if it didn’t take her a lot to change her mind.”

“Right now it seems like all gravy”

When asked whether a Tony nomination changes anything for her career, Beans responded drily, “Well, I can’t think of a downside. Right now it seems like all gravy.”

Beans is single. She meditates a lot, spends time alone, loves reading, watching movies, hanging out with friends, rollerskates, and runs. She lives in Bushwick, in a rent-stabilized apartment (“They will drag this place from my dead hands”). She is “Gabby” to everyone except her mom, dad, and brother, to whom she is “Gabrielle,” although, she laughs, they have started calling her “Gabby.” “I’ve said to them, ‘Let’s not get all Hollywood on this. I’ve got to stay ‘Gabrielle’ to you all. My father did a Facebook post on ‘Gabby Beans.’” Another laugh. “That’s not on.”

She has worked with a number of actresses who have inspired her. She worries about naming any in case she forgets any, but begins with Quincy Tyler Bernstine, who she appeared alongside in Marys Seacole (Beans’ off-Broadway debut)—watching Bernstine perform was “an education in and of itself. She is a genius.”

Beans also mentions Jeanine Serralles (who Beans starred alongside in Girls at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Blain-Cruz), Carla Gugino, Celeste Arias, Miriam Silverman, Karen Kandel, Beans’ Skin of Our Teeth co-star Roslyn Ruff (“Being on stage with her every night, and witnessing her discipline, presence, and depth has been a masterclass in stage acting!”), and Blain-Cruz—The Skin of Our Teeth is the fourth show they have worked on together. “She expects you to come to the table with things. I feel like this performance could not have happened without our previous work and the level of trust we share. “I knew that with this performance people would either love or hate it. It’s kind of crazy what I’m doing.”

Another significant moment was getting dropped by one manager who had big-name clients but who wasn’t right for Beans, who wanted to “play off, off, off Broadway and get my hands dirty and work. I wasn’t going to act for validation or institutional approbation. I was going to do it because I loved it. That was a really big turning point.”

Paying the bills remains a priority, but Beans also hopes the Tony nomination helps her become able to select projects that really matter to her. She did a classical drama degree, and would love finally to play some meaty Shakespearean roles—inspired by Phyllida Lloyd’s acclaimed all-female Shakespeare productions, and Harriet Walter’s commanding lead roles in many of them.

She would love to work with playwrights including Aleshea Harris, Branden Jacobs Jenkins (who added material to The Skin of Our Teeth), Will Arbery, Will Eno, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and last year starred in her first feature film. Beans also has her own production company; the first feature she would like to make is a movie she has written, Respect for Wrestling, about a down-on-her-luck actor who decides to get into wrestling. It was inspired by an ex who suggested Beans become a wrestler if acting didn’t work out. She wouldn’t star in the movie if it was ever made, but she would write and direct it.

On Tonys night, Beans wants to wear an outfit by an up-and-coming Black designer “to hopefully leverage some of this attention towards them.” She is relishing not just the nomination, but also earning it by playing Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth. “I truly feel like this is one of the most incredible processes I’ve ever had as an actor. I feel so, so lucky to be part of this company and creative team. It’s just truly a dream come true.”

Beans has learned to take a few minutes to throw off what she calls her sharp “Sabina-energy” at the end of a performance, after meeting some friends after early performances and realizing her tone was still that of her character. “A little part of me wants to hide after a performance because I feel very exposed,” Beans said. “But the overwhelming thing is that people seem to really love Sabina, which is great.”

Will Beans miss Sabina when the show’s span ends? “Horribly, I’ll miss her so much,” Beans said with smiling affection. “Playing her has been a blessing, because it is rare you play a character who is so free. And she is.”

This echoes one of the most beautiful experiences for her of appearing in the show, when the company first assembled and Blain-Cruz played Drake’s “Started from the Bottom.”

“We all just danced and celebrated. It felt like a homecoming in a way,” Beans said. “We were not only dancing with each other, the team, and crew, but dancing with all our ancestors looking down on us, and saying, ‘Look at what our work has done that our children and descendants can dance and be joyful and enjoy that moment to represent who they are in this epic play.’ I’ll remember that moment forever for sure.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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