Aubrey Plaza will soon be making her stage debut in the Off-Broadway revival of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. And in preparation for the big feat, she has turned to her “surrogate mother” who happens to be a stage icon — Patti LuPone.
The White Lotus star revealed in an interview with Vulture that not only has the American Theater Hall of Fame inductee been “whipping” her “into shape” but she’s also opened up her home. Plaza says she’s living with LuPone on the Upper West Side. They’re not strangers — the duo worked together on Marvel’s WandaVision spinoff, Agatha: Coven of Chaos.
“LuPone has since become something of a surrogate mother, making Plaza soup and doing her laundry,” the article notes.
“She insisted,” Plaza tells the outlet about LuPone doing her laundry. “She’s trying to whip me into shape.”
As she prepares for the upcoming play, Plaza says it’s the three-time Tony Award winner who has served as her guiding star.
“It’s a thing I feel like I don’t know,” says Plaza as she attempted to put into words the difference between what she feels onstage compared to on-camera. “Patti said, ‘The performance is lifted.’ It made sense to me.”
A lot of things have made more sense now that LuPone’s become the “surrogate mother.” Case in point — Plaza says she recently came down with strep throat. Bad timing, right? No, LuPone insists.
“I was like, ‘Why is this happening?’ Patti went, ‘It’s happening because you have to toughen up,'” Plaza says.
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea also stars Christopher Abbott (The House of Blue Leaves). The play follows Danny (Abbott) and Roberta (Plaza) as “two desperate people in the Bronx that have a chance meeting in a dive bar.” According to Playbill, “what follows is an encounter ‘so dangerous and so beautiful’ that it ‘redefines the meaning of love.'”
The play opens Monday at the Lucille Lortel Theatre for a 10-week engagement.
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