Adrienne C. Moore, who plays Gio in Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt, delights audiences nightly. She owes her capacity for comedy not only to quick timing and deadpan delivery but to her adept understanding at what makes something funny. “Behind every joke,” Moore told me, “is a bit of truth. You have to excavate that truth, which in the case of Gio involves the use of humor to mask a lot of pain.”
Hall summarizes Gio as “a police officer, in the midst of a fierce divorce,” and someone who “doesn’t hold anything in, except her vulnerability.” That vulnerability, according to Moore, derives primarily from Gio’s volatile relationship with her late mother. “Our parents are supposed to be our first line of defense. Gio didn’t have that, which has made it hard for her to navigate the world. She hasn’t had the right resources to deal with the traumas she’s experienced.”
Gio launched herself into the world at a young age. “From 15, she wanted to go to the mainland” -- the play is set on a coastal-Georgia island -- “and have fun,” Moore said. “Like many black women, her biological maturity isn’t necessarily the same as her emotional maturity. She’s 15 going on 30. As a young teenager, she looked older, yet at home she was still making dolls.”
Discussing the play’s family dynamics eased Moore and I into chat about her own upbringing. “I have a twin, and a brother who’s two years older,” she said. Growing up in Nashville and Atlanta, Moore had exposure to “plays and piano lessons because of my mother and basketball and golf because of my father.” As with many performers, the combination of arts and athletics forged an effective template for the instabilities of the actor’s life. “I’m especially grateful to my dad,” Moore said, “for teaching me the importance of resilience and determination.”
The Blood Quilt affords Moore both a complex role and the opportunity to fulfill a dream. “For a long time,” Moore said, “I’ve wanted to work professionally in New York with Crystal Dickinson,” who portrays one of her three sisters. Why? After undergrad at Northwestern, Moore had returned to Atlanta and made tentative forays into theater. She met Dickinson while doing an evening called Women and War. “Crystal took me under her wing,” Moore recalled. “At one point, I got laid off from my day job and I was a mess. I found myself crying about my life and future on Crystal’s couch at Spelman College, where she was teaching. She encouraged me to pursue my love of acting.”
Moore moved to New York, got her MFA at the New School, and has amassed a sterling list of credits, including indelible work on Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black” and on the most recent Clint Eastwood movie, Juror #2. “He’s known as a one-take director,” Moore said, “which is such a different experience from theater, where you have the challenge and luxury of doing it again and again.”
If actors can be divided roughly into those who like the repetitiveness of theater and those who hate it, Moore is in the former camp. “I try never to do Gio the same every night,” she said. “She may be primarily the product of Katori’s wonderful script, but she’s also the product of where I am on a given day. They say you should leave your own life at the door when you arrive at the theater every night, and that’s important. But it’s not always possible, not entirely.”
Brendan Lemon is a freelance journalist in New York.
