DENISE GOUGH

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Most newcomers to New York find a city that takes some getting used to. But the Irish actress Denise Gough has jumped in headfirst, reprising her revelatory, universally celebrated, Olivier-winning role as Emma in the new play People, Places & Things at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn through next month. Playing an actress and recovering addict and alcoholic, Gough offers a performance that is alternately delicate and devastating as needed, and so emotionally and physically taxing that it is a wonder she can survive eight shows a week. The run marks her first ever trip to New York in fact, as she explains that she refused to visit for years, insisting on holding out until her work brought her across the ocean. “I never came here,” she laughs. “I swore I would do a play here and I swore it would be Off Broadway. That’s all I wanted. So now I’m thinking, ‘What else do I want?’”

The city has welcomed her passionately, and she has felt the same in return—even if her grueling schedule gives her little time to explore. “I love New York already,” she says. “Yesterday I ventured out to Manhattan and I was so energized by the city. I got on the subway all by myself and I changed platforms all by myself. I was so proud of that and I think the more that happens, the more I’ll feel like I get it.”

Now thirty-seven, Gough has been working as an actress under the radar for well over a decade, although she went a year without a job and was about to quit before finally making it to the National Theatre with People, Places & Things, which she calls “one of the best things I’ve ever read” and which she later reprised on the West End before bringing it to New York. She became one of London’s most talked-about performers thanks to her complete dedication to her role, which opens with her Emma stumbling into a rehabilitation facility drunk and high and covers the course of her inevitably fluctuating recovery. The play, written by Duncan Macmillan, offers an usually clear-eyed and honest look at addiction and rightly avoids an easy redemption. “Addiction is a life-threatening illness, but it’s the only life-threatening illness that makes people want to run away from you because your behavior is so bad,” she explains. “Addiction feeds on shame and isolation, so you behave so badly when you’re acting out that you are so ashamed of yourself that it causes you to go back to the thing that takes the shame away.”

Gough first got her hands on the script after asking her agent to call the National Theatre and ask why, after all her years in the business, she was unable to get an audition there. She immediately recognized in Emma a once-in-a-lifetime role as an actress who is nearly as dependent on performing as on the drugs and alcohol she takes. “I thought, ‘Ok, if this one doesn’t happen then I don’t think I can carry on because this is perfect for me,’” she recalls. “Nobody has ever written what it’s like to be an actress so truthfully. It was one of those things where all the stars aligned and I happened to be the kind of actress who had to go through never hearing back from people and having to be in competition with other women when I didn’t want to and making the journey from being young to getting older. I totally relate to everything she says. I cried and cried and cried all the way through that speech she makes about being an actress the first time I read it.”

She brought icing sugar to snort in her final audition and left unsure of how it was received. “I went in majorly prepared and gave it everything and then said, ‘Ok, good luck finding her, I hope you find the right person,’” she recalls. “I thought, ‘I’m not going to beg for this and I’m going to trust that if I’m meant to get it, I’ll get it.’ A couple of hours later they rang and said it was mine.”

To prepare for the role, Gough and the rest of the cast attended meetings and visited treatment centers to understand how addiction takes its toll on both the body and mind, and she credits that in-depth research with the overwhelming response the play has received from people suffering from addiction and those close to them. She keeps a card on her dressing table from a young woman who thanks her for pointing out that “addiction is a disease and not a moral failing” and recalls a powerful moment early in the show’s run when a recovering addict shouted out, “Good girl!” from the audience when Emma makes a decision to seek help. “That’s when I knew we were ok,” she recalls. “If that person who was in a treatment center at the time related so much that they felt that they wanted to shout out support to this character, then we were ok.”

Gough explains that part of the play’s appeal comes from its universal resonance, with an opioid crisis in both London and America and few people completely untouched by addiction somewhere in their lives or inner circles. “It’s everywhere and this thing is eating us all up,” she explains, “and why wouldn’t it? The world is in turmoil and I can relate to the idea of wanting to switch everything off. It seems like a nice thing to take a few pills and forget about it.”

People, Places & Things—the title refers to the possible triggers for relapse, or basically everything—does not come to a tidy conclusion, but Gough says that, having performed in New York for a few weeks now, she has discovered a new, and perhaps somewhat American, optimism in the ending. “In London, I never knew whether she was going to be ok or not, but I always feel when I leave the stage at the end of the show in New York that she’s going to be ok,” she explains. “There’s something about doing it in front of you guys that makes me think she’s going to be alright.”

It is that connection with the audience that first drew Gough to the theater as one of eleven children growing up in Ireland. “I did a school play, Annie, and I played Miss Hannigan and I remember something went really wrong on stage so I just improvised,” she recalls. “The audience laughed and I felt so easy about this thing going wrong when everyone else was panicking. I felt really good and it became clear that being on stage was when I was the least frightened in my life. It’s where everything made sense.”

She moved to London on her own at the age of fifteen bent on pursuing acting, even as she admits that she came from a culture where it never seemed like a viable possibility. “I used to walk up and down Shaftesbury Avenue picking up cigarette butts off the ground and I would be so upset,” she says. “I’d think, ‘All I want to be is an actress. How am I going to be an actress?’” A few years of hard work later, she was attending the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts on a scholarship, and she has been on her way up ever since. “Recently I walked up Shaftesbury Avenue and I looked up and there was a poster of me outside the theater and I remember just dropping to the ground and saying, ‘I don’t know how I’ve gotten away with this, but keep it coming.’”

While she considers the theater her main focus, Gough is no stranger to the screen either, and her prominence there has grown of late as well. She appeared in the Showtime series Guerrilla, about the British black power movement, with Idris Elba and Freida Pinto this spring, and plays the lover of Keira Knightley’s Colette in a film due out next year. But if the two ever come into conflict, her decision is already made, as when she turned down the lead in a series to star in the West End production of People, Places & Things. “They could not understand why I wouldn’t do the TV show,” she laughs. “It’s as if people think that I’ve only done theater in order to get to film, but that is not the truth. It’s the opposite. I will do film so that I can do theater.”

Gough is headed to a film set after her run at St. Ann’s ends in December, but she will be back in New York early in the new year to prepare for an even bigger part—her Broadway début as Harper in a revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America with Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane, and Lee Pace. “You have no idea what a privilege it is to be allowed to be part of the American national theatrical anthem,” she gushes. “It doesn’t get more American than Angels in America.” Her performance, first seen on the West End earlier this year, offers a dramatically different reading of Harper, who is agoraphobic, addicted to Valium, and married to a closeted gay man. “It went well in London, but there were people who didn’t like what I did with Harper and that may happen, so I may have my rise and my fall in New York,” she laughs. “All I can say is that what I do is try to tell my truth with her and do the best that I can.” Still, she recognizes that having already made her name in the theater community as Emma, there will be additional pressure as she is exposed to a wider audience in an incontrovertible American classic: “Tony said about her final speech that he feels that that’s the best piece of writing he’s ever done, so cheers.”

But now, she is unquestionably one of the most riveting performers currently on a New York stage, burning with vitality and life every night—and twice a day on weekends. “I cannot begin to describe to you what it feels like at different parts of People, Places & Things with an audience,” she says. “I get so filled with pride for all of us sitting in a dark room feeling things together and it just makes sense to me. Being on stage makes sense to me. It’s where I’m most comfortable.”

People, Places & Things runs through December 3 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.