Ruthie Ann Miles in The Seat of Our Pants.
Photo: Joan Marcus
Ruthie Ann Miles’s musical-theater career has been a study in grieving mothers. Not long after becoming one of the most exciting theater actresses in the world when she won the Best Supporting Actress in a Musical Tony for her work in The King and I, the performer left Broadway for five years. On March 16, 2018, her daughter, Abigail, 4, died after they were both hit by a car in Manhattan. Miles survived, but was expecting at the time and lost the pregnancy. She subsequently moved to Los Angeles for a TV show, where her daughter Hope was born in April 2020, until her return to the New York City stage in 2023. And while audiences, who may or may not know her personal story, have watched her grieve onstage, Miles is using these performances to process her own life.
In the years since coming back to New York, she scored a second Tony nomination for her redefining run as the Beggar Woman in 2023’s Sweeney Todd, which grounded the character’s mental-health crisis without comedy. Then she headlined City Center’s The Light in the Piazza, performing aria after aria as a mother dealing with the trauma of her daughter’s childhood injury. But her latest role as the matriarch in the Public Theater’s The Seat of Our Pants, which finished on December 7, was her crowning achievement. Her portrayal of Mrs. Antrobus, a woman mourning her murdered son across millennia, was a heart-wrenching performance that never reached for hysterics. She didn’t need them. “I know what my body does when it reaches this emotive state,” she says.
Based on Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, the surrealist musical follows one nuclear family across thousands of years and three apocalypses. Mrs. Antrobus is an archetypal mother — prim, proper, and protective of her children — and implied to be Eve herself. She’s mourning the death of her son Abel, who was killed at the hand of her other son, Cain. Her husband, meanwhile, cannot stop himself from helping other people, but hates their remaining son. After the third apocalypse (war) ends, the show’s finale comes when Mrs. Antrobus and the rest of the company chose to move forward anyway, performing a line dance to the song “Start Anew.” While the other actors onstage emote broadly, the genius of Miles’s performance is that she doesn’t contort her face at all. She’s plaintive and moves slowly, one foot at a time. “We lovingly call it ‘The Struggle Dance,’” Miles says. “Everyone is going through a struggle and then we find each other. Being able to do ‘The Struggle Dance’ is another way of letting the steam out every day.”
What was your relationship like with The Skin of Our Teeth prior to working on The Seat of Our Pants?
My undergrad was at Southern Oregon University, which is like a Shakespeare conservatory, because the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is there. As a part of my theater history learning, I had to read it and I was like, “This makes no sense. Not for me.” Then they asked me to do a workshop for this, seven or eight years ago, in one of these crank elevator buildings around Union Square. I’m thinking, This is so absurd. I like things to have very smooth edges. I don’t like super sharp U-turn corners. After the reading, I was like, “Politely, no, thank you.” Then, I got a couple of questions if I was interested through the years and said no.
Then, Leigh Silverman was attached and she asked me to read it again. I had a 48-hour trip to Korea. Forty of those hours were in the air. I went there, I came back to New York, and my daughter, my husband, and his mother had the flu, and we got caught in a snowstorm. She was like, “Ruthie, I need an answer. You’ve had it for a week or two.” I said, “I can’t think straight. I’m nursing my family back to health.” I then caught the flu myself. I told her, “Leigh, I don’t know this play. I know what I used to think about this play 30 years ago. I read the thing ten years ago, and I thought it was not my cup of tea.” But she keeps saying to me, “There’s something in here that I want you to bite into. I think you can do this.” I said, “You know what, I haven’t had time to dig into this, but I trust you and I love you, and I would walk through a fire with you.” I went in completely blind.
What was your entry point into the role?
I kept asking Leigh, “Who is this woman?” I don’t agree with anything she does. She lets her husband walk all over her and she keeps saying, “I’m going to protect the family.” They keep surviving these apocalypses, and you wonder, How? Her husband is unmoving with the biggest heart, but he’s always welcoming people into their home. So it must be the people who surround him: Mrs. Antrobus is the reason that they keep surviving.
Being a mother is very complicated. You have to put all these masks on, but you’re also a person under there somewhere. Inside, she feels like “I don’t want to go on anymore. I have reached my limit. I don’t want to see you guys, my children, anymore.” But she still helps her husband move on. I kept saying to Leigh, “I don’t understand who she is. This is not who I am. I do not agree with her. There’s a better version of ‘woman’ than this.” She was written 80 years ago, and she was very much true then. She is still very much true today. And she was true 500 years ago. But it’s a constant fight for me. I am utterly exhausted at the end of the show, and it’s more because of the internal fight than anything I’m doing onstage.
There are moments of vulnerability throughout the show. When she breaks down in the first act, she suddenly starts crying over the death of her son Abel. Why do you think she lets that emotion come in?
I still wonder about it. I told Leigh, “She’s very emotive here. If you don’t want her to be, tell me.” And she said, “No, I like it because we are seeing this woman when she doesn’t have all eyes on her.” I think it’s okay to show what she’s feeling on the inside, even if that’s not what she shows on the outside. Because this is absurd and we’re seeing it three-dimensionally, it’s okay to show these super vulnerable moments where she has a whiplash of emotions. Get away from me. I never want to see you again. Oh my gosh, my children, I’ve missed you. How have you been? Love me, hug me. You killed my son! I miss my son. As a mom myself, I’m accidentally showing how I really feel all the time. I wish I was better at masking that, but I can’t because I’m at capacity. Mrs. Antrobus is at capacity.
Are you drawing on the ability to navigate tonal shifts that you developed doing the Beggar Woman/Lucy in Sweeney Todd?
Lucy has a real psychological disorder. When it was written in the ’70s, it was a joke. However, if you look at the actual mental condition, it may look really disorienting to the audience, but it’s also very true to the person who’s in it. I am leaning on the comfortability that I gained from doing that, but it was very uncomfortable at the time. Our writer, Ethan Lipton says that you have to be comfortable with discomfort. The music is saying one thing, our words are saying another, and this human being is doing a different thing. We are not riding the same wave, and yet we are working in tandem.
I had some friends come see the show in previews. I asked, “Can you just tell me why they’re not laughing at my first song, ‘Stuff It Down Inside’?” My friend’s husband was crying. The person on the other side of him, who they were not with, was laughing hysterically. And he was in the middle being respectful to both. So, they are also learning to live in the discomfort. It has to be jarring.
You’ve experienced the loss of a child, which is something that Mrs. Antrobus is also dealing with. How does it change your performance to know that audience members might connect those two things?
I had therapy this morning, and we talked about this. One of my therapists came to see the show and I asked them, “What was that ‘Abel, Abel, my son’ moment, where I fall on the ground with grief, like for you?” And they said, “As your caregiver, I could feel what you were going through. I see that every day.” But they didn’t feel that the audience was aware of it at all. They felt they had an in that the other audience members didn’t have.
I don’t think about what the audience is or isn’t feeling in terms of watching me, as Mrs. Antrobus, grieve my son. But one thing that I did vocalize this morning was that I think it’s a privilege to watch somebody grieve. Whether it’s a real person who is grieving the thousands of things that we grieve — our parents, our children, the loss of a dream — or a character, it’s a privilege to watch and hold somebody in their grief. And it’s a particular honor to portray that onstage as somebody who also has personal … Do I want to say daily? … My grief is still very fresh. The fire is still very hot. However, I am not grieving my children as Mrs. Antrobus. I said this to our director as well. I don’t want anyone to be nervous or afraid or scared or worried for Ruthie because I do separate the two. I have this very deep well of emotion and grief that I can pull from, because it’s a part of who I am and what I’ve lived. I know what my body does when it reaches this emotive state. But I am not saying “Abel” and thinking “Abby.”
What do you hope audiences take from watching you grieve onstage?
It’s a privilege to grow older. It’s a privilege to learn. It’s a privilege to have this kind of conversation. It’s a privilege to experience pain. It’s awful. But we get to feel, and not everybody does. I am giving a gift to the audience to watch me in my pain, and I think the audience gets a gift by sitting in silence and holding my pain.
I felt very privileged watching you do the final number. The way you played it, even the fact that she was able to do the next step was like a win. There wasn’t an emotion other than focusing on doing the physical act of the dance.
That’s exactly right. The fact that we can put one step in front of the other, whether it’s the wrong move or whether it’s exactly right, is the win.
Photo: Joan Marcus
During your run in Sweeney Todd, and ahead of your time in Light in the Piazza, you told Playbill of your grief that, “Hard isn’t quite a big enough word. But maybe my characters will help me. And it’s important for me to try to untap, maybe unlock something for myself. Art is healing, and I’m trying.” Two years later, how does that hit you now?
Lucy is processing the loss of everything. She lost her daughter. She lost her husband. Then everything clicks and pieces start coming together as she’s desperately trying to think of it faster just before he kills her. What I went through every night was trying so hard to keep up and think faster. I had a therapist say, “You have to burn through the fire of grief, of pain, of confusion. You cannot ignore it. You have to let that fire burn out. That’s the way to get through it.” I got this big adrenaline rush. I got that big kick of emotion and tears and desperate snot coming out, and I needed to release some of that gas every single day.
It was my first show back after the crash. I was out in L.A. for several years, and I did a TV show and I was surrounded by lovely people, but I did not have to feel anything. Our daughter was born during that time, and I thought that if I could just put a cap on it, and take care of my daughter, that I wouldn’t give her any of that. Only then I realized that it’s a part of who I am, and so now we need to go through this together.
It’s the same with that final dance. We lovingly call it “The Struggle Dance.” Everyone is going through a struggle and then we find each other. Being able to do “The Struggle Dance” is another way of letting the steam out every day. I am Ruthie in that final dance. I’m not Ruthie through the whole play. But in the final dance I am. I let out whatever comes out. If it’s a laugh, if it’s a cry, whatever. Vocally, I’m right next to the music conductor, and I know it’s not always perfect. But they don’t give me notes on it.
The dance feels like it’s only possible because of the messiness. If it was at the end of a cleaner show it would be—
Out of place.
Have you learned to love mess a little bit more?
I have learned to love the mess. The day that we learned “The Struggle Dance,” I said to the choreographer, “Sunny, I hate this passionately and the next moment I get, I’m going to ask to be pulled from the number.” She was like, “I know. It’s okay that you hate it, but I feel like the characters all need it.”
When did you learn to love it?
I don’t think I learned to love it until we had an audience. We are only half of the puzzle. The audience is the other half, and when they come along for the journey, then it makes sense why I get the privilege to do it. I get to bring you along with me.
How do you decompress after a show?
After Sweeney, I had to shower every day. I was bloody and dirty and sweaty and there was so much snot. I tell myself, You’re going to wash the show away. She’s not coming in your dreams. You can let her rest, and when it’s time to pick her back up again, you’ll find her in the mirror. She’ll be there.
