Yahoo Finance Fedna Jacquet Is Experiencing a Dual Broadway Debut, Revealing She's Pregnant: 'We're Making History'
SDStudio, Joan Marcus
Fedna Jacquet's Broadway debut is particularly special.
The actress, who opens the new Lee Daniels-produced play Ain't No Mo' on Thursday night at the Belasco Theatre, reveals exclusively to PEOPLE that she is expecting her first baby with husband Wesley Tjosvold, whom she married in May. The couple's son is due April 2.
"A dual debut!" she shares, adding that she feels "so lucky" to be performing in her first Broadway show while five-and-a-half months pregnant.
"My dreams are literally happening at the same time," she says, "which is kind of insane."
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Still, it's not exactly how Jacquet, 33, imagined starting a family.
"The fact that everything's happening at the same time is definitely not something I expected or planned. But, you know, with the pandemic and everything, you fall in love, get married, then it's like, 'Oh, we wanna have a baby,' " she explains. "I literally found out I was pregnant, and then [playwright] Jordan [E. Cooper] called me maybe two weeks later and was like, 'Guess what? We're going on Broadway.' "
Jacquet had been with the critically acclaimed play — about being Black in today's America, told through a series of vignettes — since its world premiere at Off-Broadway's Public Theater in 2019. And while she had some concerns about telling her production team that she was expecting, she didn't want the lifelong Broadway dream to pass her by.
"There were a couple of weeks where I was kind of grappling with, 'Okay, do I want to do this?' " she says of the six-person play. "There are a lot of changes in my life, [but] then I was like, 'I'm gonna do this show.' This is my favorite show."
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Jacquet is one of the handful of actresses who is making great strides in the theater industry, proving that women can be both performer and parent simultaneously.
"Pregnancy enhances a show rather than detracts from it," she insists. "It's not a stumbling block. It's actually amazing. I feel stronger."
After telling the Ain't No Mo' creative team that she's pregnant, Jacquet was embraced by her colleagues and collaborators. Tweaks were made to the five different characters she embodies throughout the evening, costumes were tailored to fit her changing body, and her cast has continuously rallied around her to ensure that she is well taken care of and, most importantly, safe on stage.
One of the only hurdles in the process thus far, she says, was embodying the character of Trisha, a troubled young mother who is grappling with whether or not she wants to have an abortion.
"Being a Black female in America, after all of the killings, she's just too afraid to birth a child into this world, and she thinks it might be better for the child to just not be born. And I knew for me and my mental health that I couldn't substitute [myself in this character] because I have those fears, you know?" she explains.
Instead, Jacquet created a new backstory for Trisha, one that is the polar opposite of her own. "At the end of the scene, I can just let her go because she's not me," she explains.
Joan Marcus
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Up until now, Jacquet has kept the baby news relatively private. Inside, she feels "jazzed" to share both her pregnancy and the play — penned by Cooper, 27, the youngest American playwright on Broadway — with family, friends and audiences.
"I just want people to know this is how it can be, you know — and how it should be," she says of being pregnant in the theater industry.
"[Ain't No Mo' is] so unlike anything that's ever been on Broadway. So every day I feel like I'm making history. And then every day my body's changing. I have to grab like a cast member's hand [to feel him] kicking," she shares. "We're making history at the same time, and it's not even overwhelming. It's just euphoric in a way, right? It's the best of both worlds."
"I feel really empowered," she adds. "Maybe I'm already getting the super-mom powers."
Ain't No Mo' opens Thursday at New York City's Belasco Theatre.
