Redemption Song

Denise gough has gone from the brink of quitting acting to becoming the toast of the theater world as the star of the acclaimed people, places & things in New York. 

- Adam Green

English theater audiences are as notoriously stingy with standing ovations as English bartenders are with ice cubes. So it was startling to see the audience at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre leap to its feet at the end of a performance of People, Places & Things last year and lose its collective mind over the show’s star, the astonishing Denise Gough, who acknowledged the reception by triumphantly pumping her fist in the air.

“It’s kind of like Rocky or Gladiator,” Gough says. “I wanted the gesture to be like a connection—that we all went through this together. And it’s about how proud I am of myself and the company—and the audience for being brave enough to sit in a theater and feel stuff, because we live in a society that is designed to numb us out. It’s so joyful to me doing that play—exhausting but joyful—and I want the audience to know that, so that when they leave they’re not worried about the actress who’s been playing that part.”

You can put your mind at ease when it comes to the 37-year-old Gough. Her fierce and fearless portrayal of an actress battling drug and alcohol addiction, first at London’s National Theatre in the fall of 2015 and then on the West End, was a revelation—one that catapulted her from relatively unknown stage actress on the brink of quitting her profession to Olivier Award–winning star. (She has since gone on to play the Valium-popping Mormon housewife Harper in Marianne Elliott’s revival of Angels in America at the National, and a self-destructive chemistry teacher in the BBC Two thriller Paula.) Now American audiences will get to experience Gough’s earthy brand of incandescence as People, Places & Things comes to Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse this month for a limited engagement.