{"id":229869,"date":"2026-05-13T12:33:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T12:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/229869\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T12:33:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T12:33:11","slug":"how-an-unmade-cup-of-tea-a-pair-of-glasses-and-a-small-miracle-led-aya-cash-to-a-broadway-debut-and-a-tony-nomination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/229869\/","title":{"rendered":"How an Unmade Cup of Tea, a Pair of Glasses, and a Small Miracle Led Aya Cash to a Broadway Debut and a Tony Nomination"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"aya\"<\/a>Aya Cash in Mark Rosenblatt\u2019s Giant, directed by Nicholas Hytner
(\u00a9 Johan Persson)<\/p>\n

There was a cup of tea that never got made in Aya Cash\u2019s kitchen. She was reading a script and was so engrossed that she ran to find her husband. She needed him to read Mark Rosenblatt\u2019s play Giant<\/a>, and she just instinctively knew it was worth uprooting her life for. \u201cMy whole body was hot after I read it,\u201d she says, remembering that fateful afternoon.<\/p>\n

Giant\u2014Rosenblatt\u2019s play about children\u2019s author Roald Dahl and the public revelation of his antisemitism\u2014ended up providing Cash with several firsts: a West End debut, a Broadway debut after two decades of treading the boards in NYC, and now a Tony nomination. The journey required a small miracle, a white lie, and a pair of glasses she didn\u2019t want to admit she needed.<\/p>\n

Cash had been a fixture of New York theater for 20 years when Giant came along. She got her Equity card doing Bruce Norris\u2019s dark comedy The Pain and the Itch at Playwrights Horizons in 2006, and like most fledgling actors, bounced around the nonprofit circuit: a Lucy Thurber play at Rattlestick, two Ethan Coens at the Atlantic, pitstops at MCC and MTC and Ars Nova. In 2014, she got cast in the TV show You\u2019re the Worst, and years later in Prime Video\u2019s The Boys, playing the Nazi antagonist to a group of superheroes (she\u2019s the star of its spinoff, Vought Rising, which premieres in 2027).<\/p>\n

But Broadway never beckoned, and Cash had made a kind of peace with that. \u201cWhen we\u2019re young and starting out, of course you have these markers in your head of what success is supposed to look like,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd if you don\u2019t let those go, you will be a miserable human. In some ways, at some point, I sort of went, \u2018Maybe Broadway isn\u2019t for me, and that\u2019s OK.\u2019 I\u2019ve had a beautiful, incredible career.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"pain1\"<\/a>Aya Cash and Reg Rogers in the 2006 Playwrights Horizons production of The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris
(\u00a9 Joan Marcus)<\/p>\n

What intrigued her about Giant and the role of Jessie Stone\u2014a representative from Dahl\u2019s American publisher who\u2019s come to urge him to apologize for negative remarks he made in print about Israel\u2014was the fact that it never collapses into polemic. \u201cWhen I finished reading, I didn\u2019t know the playwright\u2019s exact politics,\u201d Cash says. \u201cI had no idea if the playwright and I agreed on anything, but what was so exciting was to see [the presentation of] conversations that are mostly distilled into headlines and reasons not to speak to each other. I wanted to be somebody who invites people into this conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

She embarrassed herself during the audition. \u201cIt had been a long time since I\u2019d auditioned for a play,\u201d she says. \u201cI hate auditioning, to be honest. I find it so scary and stressful under the best circumstances.\u201d And when she got in the room, to her surprise she couldn\u2019t read the script. She had gotten glasses during Covid, but, she says, \u201cI didn\u2019t think it was that bad. I had it mostly memorized, but I had to look down at the page and kept being like, \u2018I have no clue what this line is supposed to be. Thank God for [casting director] Daniel Swee, who I\u2019ve auditioned for, for over 20 years, who was like, \u2018Let\u2019s put the glasses on and try again.\u2019\u201d She landed the part.<\/p>\n

Cash had only seven days of rehearsal before the show began performances at the Harold Pinter Theatre last summer. To prepare, she watched an archival video on mute so she could write down her blocking. Certain moments of Nicholas Hytner\u2019s production had to stay the same because the rest of the cast was already set; other things shifted because of her height. At 6-foot-4, Lithgow towers over 5-foot-2 Cash, and, she says dryly, part of the reason she was hired was to make him seem even taller.<\/p>\n

Costume designer Bob Crowley found Cash a bright red dress in a linen blend, a fabric that wrinkles the moment you put it on. \u201cThere\u2019s no way to make it look crisp,\u201d Cash explains, which lines up with the backstory of her character, who is on vacation in the UK without an outfit for a work meeting. \u201cShe comes in and she\u2019s trying, but she\u2019s a little off and a little garish in this world. You\u2019ve spent 15 minutes watching these Brits being very clever and bantery, and then Jessie comes in and it\u2019s just wrong in a certain way. That dress is an immediate rip in the fabric of this world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Aya<\/a>Aya Cash gets a talking to from John Lithgow in the play Giant, on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre
(\u00a9 Joan Marcus)<\/p>\n

It was obvious that Giant was heading for Broadway after its West End run ended last summer, and Cash knew from the beginning that her Vought Rising schedule made it impossible for her to follow the show back home in the fall. She chose to keep that info to herself. \u201cI just didn\u2019t tell them I wasn\u2019t available for the Broadway portion because it was not real yet anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

She privately mourned the idea of a New York victory lap, celebrated the fact that she got to do the show at all, and was absolutely thrilled when Lithgow\u2019s shooting dates for HBO\u2019s Harry Potter series ended up meaning that a New York transfer of Giant couldn\u2019t happen until now. \u201cAll of a sudden, our schedules lined up within weeks of it being OK,\u201d she says. \u201cThere was a lot of maneuvering, and they were incredibly supportive, so they all went to bat for me to make sure I could get out and have at least a few days of rehearsal.\u201d That\u2019s a real miracle in a fickle business.<\/p>\n

Her Tony nomination, for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play, was not something she anticipated. She thought she was past the ego part, but maybe not. \u201cI am now a changed person,\u201d she jokes. \u201cI would like to be called \u2018Tony nominee Aya Cash\u2019 for the rest of my career. Finally, some sort of honorific!\u201d More than anything else, though, it fills her with pride. Early in her career, she was simply trying not to have a survival job. Even a bad play that got bad reviews meant, \u201cI\u2019m not waitressing, so I\u2019m still doing great.\u201d<\/p>\n

The recognition is especially meaningful, given that New York\u2019s stages are where her career began. \u201cThere is a certain amount of outsider-ness that one feels if you go into the arts. There is a feeling of wanting to connect, and the lack of connection is painful. We make art to try to connect and feel within a community.\u201d With this nomination, she says, \u201cI felt a profound acceptance from the community that I come from\u2014New York theater\u2014and that feels very special.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"[L<\/a>Aya Cash, John Lithgow, Elliott Levey, and Rachael Stirling in Giant
(\u00a9 Joan Marcus)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aya Cash in Mark Rosenblatt\u2019s Giant, directed by Nicholas Hytner (\u00a9 Johan Persson) There was a cup of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-229869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}