“World peace,” the actress Karen Pittman mentioned, putting one penny beneath a stone fox. “And my peace.”
This was on a misty Sunday simply after New 12 months’s and Ms. Pittman had paused on the Brooklyn Botanic Backyard’s Japanese Hill-and-Pond Backyard to set some intentions for the brand new 12 months, leaving pennies alongside the cash and oranges provided by different guests.
The backyard stands close to her condominium in Prospect Heights. When she returned from Los Angeles, the place “The Morning Present,” on AppleTV+, is filmed, to Brooklyn for HBO Max’s “And Simply Like That,” she rented it for this actual motive.
Most weekday mornings, after Ms. Pittman sees her two youngsters off to highschool, she slips into the backyard to decompress from the stresses of life and work. “I used to have the ability to meditate,” she mentioned. “Now it’s simply too nerve-racking making an attempt to determine the right way to meditate in a pandemic.” So she sits within the backyard as an alternative. “It simply instantly replenishes,” she mentioned.
That Sunday she had discovered a brand new area for replenishment. The shrine, hidden amongst conifers, is devoted to Inari, the Shinto spirit who blesses the harvest. For Ms. Pittman, who declined to offer her age, the harvest of the previous few years has been plentiful.
After lead roles on Broadway (“Disgraced”) and off (“Pipeline”), she has graduated to main roles on tv: as Mia Jordan, an overextended producer on “The Morning Present,” and as Nya Wallace, a Columbia legislation professor contending with infertility on “And Simply Like That.”
Nya is one in all 4 new characters devised, it appears, to right the overwhelming whiteness of “Intercourse and the Metropolis,” the predecessor of “And Simply Like That.” The present’s creators had promised that Nya — together with Che (Sara Ramirez), Seema (Sarita Choudhury) and Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) — would be part of Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte as principal characters.
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Within the early episodes, Nya’s scenes largely abetted Miranda’s journey towards self-actualization. However later episodes have provided Ms. Pittman extra substantial materials and even a intercourse scene of her personal. “I don’t really feel like I want 10 episodes to inform a terrific story about my character,” she mentioned. “I’m rather more within the ensemble work.”
Whether or not the function is massive or small, casting administrators usually don’t rent Ms. Pittman for frivolous or light-weight components. She nearly all the time will get solid as hyper-competent skilled girls with messy interior lives.
“That’s actually been my life expertise,” she mentioned. As a girl who juggles co-parenting together with her former husband with a profitable profession, she will relate. “I carry that deeper, resonant emotional life to the characters that I play,” she mentioned. “This factor of getting all of it, like, it truly doesn’t work.”
On that morning, nevertheless, Ms. Pittman gave the impression to be giving it a attempt. The backyard was dressed for winter — naked branches, untenanted beds, patches of filth. However Ms. Pittman had dressed for spring in a lilac Altuzzara coat and spindly gold heels with eye shadow to match, mixing meditation with glamour. (Sensibly, she switched to flats after posing for a number of pictures.)
After getting into the backyard, she made her method by the cherry esplanade, the place she stopped to go with a toddler on her brilliant blue boots. She then headed to the water backyard, passing an set up for the backyard’s winter lightscape, which she had visited together with her youngsters on Christmas Eve.
“It was all very festive,” she mentioned. “There was mulled wine and sizzling chocolate. We have been in the midst of that surge. And other people have been making an attempt to avoid one another. But it surely was very Christmas-y.”
And simply previous the youngsters’s backyard, she lingered to admire some winterberries, which appeared scarlet and orange towards the grey sky, and a Norwegian spruce that gave the impression to be extending a department to her. “A tree that comes out and provides you a hug,” she mentioned.
Did she want a hug? Final 12 months had been tough, she mentioned. Capturing “The Morning Present” in the midst of the pandemic had meant fixed testing and frequent stoppages. (She and a few colleagues had taken to calling it “The Subsequent Morning Present.”)
“There have been days the place I used to be like, undoubtedly going to catch this factor immediately. Positively,” she mentioned. And the turbulent emotional life her character Mia, a producer who had a consensual relationship with the disgraced former host performed by Steve Carrell, hadn’t helped.
“My character went by a lot,” she mentioned.
A toddler in a stroller appeared dazzled by Ms. Pittman. The kid stared at her, then provided her a rock, which she kindly let the kid preserve. Previous the lily pads and the magnolias and the hill of daffodils, all resting for winter, she paused on the Shakespeare Backyard, which incorporates each botanical talked about in Shakespeare’s performs.
Reverse some lemon balm, she recited a line of Cleopatra’s — “The poison is as candy as balm, as mushy as air” — which she remembered from her classical coaching within the graduate appearing program at New York College. Sneakers apart, she regarded each inch the queen.
Ending her stroll on the Hill-and-Pond Backyard, she admired the koi rippling slightly below the pond’s nonetheless floor. Regardless that she didn’t have additional pennies, she set another New 12 months’s intention for herself.
“I really like ensemble work, however I want to steer a narrative,” she mentioned. “Energy is with the ability to inform the story you wish to inform. That’s actual energy. I’m prepared.”
