“She was such a trailblazer,” says Carmen Cusack of Clare Booth Luce. The Tony-nominated actress (“Bright Star”) played the multifaceted author and politician in the musical “Flying Over Sunset.” The one of a kind show explores the surprising ways in which Luce (along with Cary Grant and Aldous Huxley) experimented with LSD as a form of therapy. “I couldn’t believe I had never heard of her,” reveals Cusack, “she was doing it all. She was navigating the political climate when there were no other women in that situation.” By exploring Luce’s highs and lows on stage, she developed a deep appreciation for this “fascinating” woman. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
The opportunity to take on this role happened at precisely the right moment. While visiting her father in Seattle, Cusack opened her inbox to discover an unexpected email from James Lapine. The Broadway legend pitched Cusack on the workshop of this new musical at Lincoln Center Theater, with acid trips at the core of the story. “My Dad did acid back in the day,” she Cusack says with a laugh, so she was able to get a direct account of what it would feel like to experiment with the drug. “I thought, I have to take this because the timing is too unique.”
The musical contains many moments where Cusack had to sing through the experience of an acid trip. The actress reveals that the key to nailing those moments was to simply stay present. “I try not to think too hard about it,” she explains, “I try to just have fun with it.” Since the songs tap into the “wave” that a person would experience on the drug, there was space to play both the sublime and scary moments, all in one number. “I kind of just embraced the light and dark,” reveals Cusack.
Luce contained plenty of darkness inside her in the form of extreme grief. She lost both her mother and daughter in a short timespan and Cusack believes that experimenting with LSD was her attempt to get past it and move on.
Her journey through grief culminates in the eleven o’clock number “How?” in which Cusack stands alone on a bare stage to deliver an emotional ballad. “I thought: yes, thank you gods of theater!” exclaims Cusack when she arrived at that number. “It’s the biggest question that we all have,” she explains, referring to the existential questions in the lyrics. How do we carry on after loss? What is waiting for us in the future? “When something hits you in such a devastating way, you question what you’re doing here. You question everything,” explains the actress. She admits that given the universality of those feelings, it was easy for her to tap into the heart of that song. “It just hits you right then and there.”
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