Audra McDonald got her start in theater as a way to manage her hyperactivity without medication, the Broadway star says.
Theater was meant “to be therapy for me,” McDonald, 54, told host Michael Schulman during an appearance on The New Yorker Radio Hour on Dec. 9.
“I was hyperactive child who was having a lot of problems in school, not socializing well, considered very overdramatic, and … not functioning well,” McDonald, who is currently starring in Broadway’s Gypsy, said of her childhood in Fresno, Calif.
“You know, and they were told, ‘Let’s try Ritalin.’ This was 1976, ‘77. ‘Let’s try Ritalin.’ “
The stimulant medication was first approved as a treatment for Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in 1955, Verywell Health explains, adding that in 1975 there was an “anti-Ritalin movement.”
“My parents thought, ‘No. We don’t want — I’m not judging anybody who does do it and my parents weren’t either — they just said, ‘We don’t think that’s right for our girl,’ “ McDonald explained. “But they knew that I liked to sing. And they had gone to see a show at this dinner theater and said, ‘Why don’t you go and audition for that?’ And that lit me up.”
McDonald had previously thanked her parents “for disobeying the doctor’s orders and not medicating their hyperactive girl and finding out what she was into instead, and pushing her into the theatre” during the acceptance speech for her record-breaking sixth Tony Award win — for Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill in 2014 — Playbill reports.
After receiving backlash to those comments, McDonald clarified in an open letter to Time, saying, “I myself have benefited from psychotropic drugs to help combat depression in my youth,” and that she does not “denounce the use of medication for ADHD or any other psychological disorder.”
“Ritalin was still a relatively new drug being prescribed for hyperactive children, my mother and late father were struggling with their very sensitive, overdramatic, hyperactive 8-year-old daughter, who was having serious issues in school,” she explained, adding that had her parents not opted to put her in a theater troupe to combat her hyperactivity, “I have no doubt that while my life might have been a fantastic one, it would not have been one in the theater.”
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