The Night Barack Obama Was in the Audience for The Color Purple

Some career memories come with a photograph, a review or a line on a résumé. Others live in the unusual knowledge of who was sitting in the audience.

During the Chicago engagement of Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color Purple, Barack Obama attended a performance in which I appeared as Squeak. He was not yet President of the United States. He was already a nationally recognized leader from Illinois—and the presence of someone carrying that kind of history made an already meaningful production feel even larger.

The audience changes, but the responsibility does not

A professional performer cannot save her best work for the night an important person arrives. Every audience has given its time, money and attention. The job is to serve the story with the same preparation whether the house contains a future president, a first-time theatergoer or someone who simply needed to be moved that evening.

That discipline is one of the things theater gave me: do the work fully before you know who may be listening.

The Color Purple carried its own history

The production told a story about dignity, survival, love and finding a voice after others have tried to define your worth. Those themes did not require a famous audience member to become important. But moments like this remind me that live performance creates intersections we cannot predict.

A career is made of more than credits

My role as Squeak is documented in programs, casting announcements and photographs. Yet a career is also made of private flashes of recognition: standing inside a story and realizing that the room holds more history than it did the night before.

Today I work much closer to the listener, often with only a microphone between us. The scale is different. The lesson remains: you never know exactly who will hear the work, what they will carry from it or why that particular performance may matter.