Lips Together, Teeth Apart's Celia Keenan-Bolger on Balancing Being of Service and Giving Herself a Break

Celia Keenan-Bolger is known for being a social justice warrior almost as much as she is revered as a performer. We checked in with the To Kill a Mockingbird Tony winner as she prepared to take on the role of Sally Truman in the Broadway.com live broadcast of Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart benefiting Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS' COVID-19 Emergency Assistance Fund to find out how she’s holding up during this crisis.

Keenan-Bolger said she is honored to participate in McNally’s play alongside Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Zachary Quinto and Ari Graynor. She appeared on Broadway with Ferguson in the original cast of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and with Quinto in the 2013 revival of The Glass Menagerie. She worked with Graynor at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab and has collaborated with director Trip Cullman, who is helming the reading, on multiple productions. “That original [Lips Together] cast!” she exclaimed about the stars (Nathan Lane, Christine Baranski, Swoosie Kurtz and Anthony Heald) of the 1991 off-Broadway premiere of the play. “No one will ever be better than those four original actors, but maybe people will be more forgiving in the middle of a global pandemic."

Lips Together, Teeth Apart deals with issues of fear and mortality as two straight couples spend a weekend on Fire Island in a house one of the women inherited from her gay brother, who has died of AIDS complications. “This not only honors Terrence [who died of complications from coronoavirus on March 24], but it also has a strange parallel to this time we’re living in,” Keenan-Bolger said. “It’s about a plague and people’s relationship to it. It’s also about class and ignorance and how that frames how we process these big moments. I was really sad about Terrence [passing away].I thought his speech was one of the highlights of the Tony Awards last year. This feels like a way we can give back and honor him.”

Hunkered down upstate with her husband, Tony-nominated actor John Ellison Conlee, and their nearly five-year-old son, Keenan-Bolger also welcomed the chance to perform again—albeit from afar. “I have not been particularly creatively engaged [during quarantine], and I thought this would scratch that itch,” she said. “We all feel so hungry for that connection right now.”

Never one to sit still when others are in need, Keenan-Bolger has also been doing good during the coronavirus crisis. “My mantra has been that I have to take care of myself first. I have to take care of my family second, and then if there’s any bandwidth left, I have to try to be of service,” she noted. A recent example of Keenan-Bolger’s service is a meal train for healthcare workers at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, which she organized with friends Victoria Myers and Gideon Glick, her Mockingbird co-star. “There are so many hospitals that are overwhelmed and underserved,” Keenan-Bolger said. “Sometimes you have to look inside yourself and say, ‘What can I do?’ Sometimes that means money, and sometimes it means energy." She added, "The Broadway community’s ability to step up never ceases to amaze me. It’s so moving and not at all surprising; that’s just how our industry operates.”

So, how has Keenan-Bolger been taking care of herself during this challenging time? She now has a nightly date to check in with her siblings Andrew and Maggie, which has been “helpful and meaningful.” She is also giving herself a break, and recommends the same for others. “I feel like the biggest thing that I’ve tried to remove from my vocabulary is ‘should,’” she said. “Some days I’m better at that than others; it’s a practice. I heard someone say, ‘Right now is not a time for self-improvement—right now is a time to return to ourselves.’ That is beautiful and also so hard. We need to take care of ourselves.”