Interview with Rita Costanzi
October 28, 2024 - New York MetroHarp Social Media Manager, Violetta Maria Norrie sat down with celebrated harpist Rita Costanzi to discuss her life and the process behind her upcoming one-woman show “Woman on a Ledge”. Woman on a Ledge will have its World Premiere on November 7 at Theater for the New City and run November 7 – 24, 2024.
Could you tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in New York?
I was born and raised in Rochester, New York. My father was a prominent violist and professor at Eastman School of Music. I was raised in a very musical family and many great artists of that time came through our home. I was a student of Eileen Malone then I went off to Paris on a grant to finish my study. I got married, ended up in Canada, and then won the Principal job in the Vancouver Symphony and the CBC Vancouver Radio Orchestra. I raised two children and had a somewhat international career happening from Vancouver as a soloist and teacher. My now former husband wanted to come to New York very badly and work on Broadway as a violinist. He came in 2005 and I joined him here after our son finished school in 2007. So, I have lived here for 17 years. New York is the theater capital of the world and I wasn’t sure after the marriage ended in 2013, I wasn’t sure, as that was the catalyst for bringing me here, but I landed in Hal Prince’s office and worked with his associate on a script. I really believed that I was meant to be here for this theater work that I am doing - which is a hybrid of solo classical harp and a script which is the story of my life.
How did you come up with Woman on a Ledge and what was the impetus to start creating this show?
I was doing another show written by a friend of mine in Canada, a Canadian playwright, called A Score to Settle. That was kind of a farce - it was fun, also the story of my life, but a very imagined version. When I landed in Hal Prince’s office to study with and be directed by his associate Arthur Masella, he loved that script, and he and his wife had said to me you belong off-Broadway. Coming from Vancouver, I would have thought that was a big stretch - but he loved my work and he thought the script was fabulous and that it would work. He could not get any producers to back it. Then I was introduced to a gentleman named Hershey Felder, who was a pianist, an actor, a producer, a writer, and he was going to produce. He does one man-composer shows, he is famous for his shows about Beethoven and Chopin where he impersonates these composers. What I was doing was absolutely aligned with his formula - what he had creatively been producing all these years. Many, many people were going to him to produce their one-person shows. He suddenly called a meeting and said he could not produce that script. He said, Rita, this script does not maximize you as a harpist - it does not maximize you as an actor and I’m going to write something for you that I can produce, so, send me the story of your life. As I was grieving my divorce and going through this really dark period of my life, my soul window opened and suddenly these vignettes started pouring through to answer Hershey’s request. It became a memoir which I am now in the process of self publishing. So this script, Woman on a Ledge, is by Hershey Felder, but it is based on my writing of my memoir and it was something that he felt he could produce. Only, COVID came, and took away everybody's dream including mine. He went off to Italy to do livestreams and I was here to do my Kansas premiere and we kind of parted ways. We had some artistic differences, but it was basically COVID. So, I am self-producing this run at Theater for the New City. I am somehow manifesting all that is needed. This theater is known for doing new works and unusual works and I think God has a plan. I’m with a wonderful director for the first time - see I have been alone on this script because with Hershey things ended. My director is Lissa Moira and she’s fabulous. She is bringing me up a huge notch so that the acting and the harp playing are more on the same level now.
Rita Costanzi in “Woman on a Ledge”
How have you been training for the acting? How has it felt expanding from a musician to an actor as well?
In 1996 in Vancouver, I met this playwright - a real honest to God playwright. Because of my repressed childhood, being the daughter of a famous person is not easy and being a musical daughter of a famous musician is not easy, I intuited that I needed to do some delayering - some acting. But I never intended to be public with this, this was going to be private and this was going to allow me to access everything that was so repressed and so covered up. Well the playwright decided otherwise. He put in a proposal to the Playwright Seedling Project. Where they would choose 8 little scripts, give each actor 15 minutes, $400 for props, and a theater and tech for the evening. 200 applications were received and 8 were chosen. His application was chosen. It was called Harp and Solo. It was film noir - I was dressed as Bogart as a man in disguise and it was all about - he’s brilliant, it was about delayering it was everything I wanted to do, only I had to do it. I was in the first rehearsal cowering in the corner, I was so terrified and he worked with me. When I came to New York, to Artie Masella I said who do you want me to study acting with? The fist came down on the corporate desk and he got really mad and he looked at me and he says - NOBODY, you get better by doing it. They thought I was a natural and they didn’t want me to get ruined - some people can get ruined if they’re a natural if they’re with the wrong teacher or whatever. So, I’ve never had any official training, but through working with these directors my natural ability has been helped enormously.
In acting in and creating this show, what have you learned about yourself as a person, as a musician, and as an artist?
Well, I am not hiding my age. I am turning 70 in the week I open, which was very auspicious. I don’t know if you know the author Gail Sheet who wrote the famous book Passages and a sequel called Pathfinder, but she traces the biographies of famous leaders like Churchill, Sadat, and I would include Nelson Mandela. They each had a period of 10 - 15 years where they were a recluse. They're political fortunes they thought had ended and they withdrew and had this profound period of introspection, inner work, quietude. Then history called them out in the most extraordinary ways and they performed their greatest deeds as leaders and politicians. I mean Nelson Mandela who is to me one of the greatest examples, 27 years in prison, where he did this. It’s like being in the cocoon and doing the metamorphosis. The death and the dying and becoming - doing the death and introspection. This is what I have had for 11 years. Working on this script, which is the story of my life, I have been seeing and witnessing the transformation from that little old-fashioned shy italian girl, “Daughter-of” who was terrified to speak, who couldn’t speak her truth, who co-depended like you wouldn’t believe. Now to stand in my Goddess period, in my Goddess age, as my own authority. To stand on stage with emotional authenticity after traveling this entire journey of dependency, and then divorce, and feeling so frightened, and helpless, and being On the Ledge financially and slowly bit by bit growing in wisdom and strength and creating this new life to the point where I am making off-Broadway history. It really is astounding to see.
How has the harp playing been feeling in your show? Has that changed a lot since you have been doing all of this work? Logistically, how does speaking and playing feel?
Let’s go back to 1996, when I first started the acting, when I went back to the harp to just be the harpist again, it was extraordinary- the change in the playing. Because when you are acting it is your voice - and your body is your instrument. Then when I went back to the harp, the power I had, the strength I had in the playing was so new. That is when I recommended to all my college aged students and beyond that they must take at least one semester of drama. Not to become actors, but to really expand the harp playing in every possible way and the authority now as a musician. Of course it’s many extra hours of work. I memorize the text, I memorize the music, and then I have to put them together. I have to line up the words and have the music really express what I am saying in the moment. So, it’s a difficult thing to put into words, but it has been many years. This script came to me in June of 2018 and I have been working on it ever since. For 6 years of work and a lot of it was done under lockdown alone. Hershey had moved back to Italy - there was no contact. In a way that was so good because I had to dig and find it all myself. There was no outer authority to tell me what to do. And so it was a very fruitful, important, time alone with it.
Rita Costanzi in “Woman on a Ledge”
When people come to your show what do you want them to leave with? What do you want to share with them and what do you want them to take away?
Well the show is not only about this incredible love affair with a man, but the other partner is the harp and about the incredible love affair of the artist, the true artist, and their instrument. How when everything falls apart with the man, her only refuge, her only solution is this instrument that she has been intimate with since she was a small child. I would hope it would be an inspiration for other young artists, musicians, students, not only of the harp, but of other instruments and I wish and hope that they will get back in touch with their own soul-life and why they are doing what they’re doing. Why they are practicing and why they are playing.
Is there anything else you would like to say to the MetroHarp community and your audience members?
I think I was trained as a child, being the daughter of the famous musician I was, trained to be the “Classical Harp Soloist”. The other thing I would love the young people to know is sometimes it may take a whole lifetime for a dream to come true, but don’t give up. Never ever give up. The three P’s. Perseverance, Patience, Persistence. If I were to list to you the number of challenges, defeats, delays, betrayals, rejections that I have had, and still, to reach this point it is only because I didn’t give up. I fell many times, but I had promised my best friend when she was dying of cancer years ago - she said “keep bouncing back”. Those words haunt me, they stay with me - I keep bouncing back, no matter what. Now I stand in this moment of just the dream coming true and I’m turning 70, it’s kind of quantum. It’s really huge for me.
