Oprah Winfrey's Broadway acting dream is on the express track

CHICAGO - Oprah Winfrey has long said she would love to return to acting. And as her iconic talk show approaches its final episode, Winfrey clearly is moving quickly to turn her dream of appearing on Broadway into reality.

"I have a stack of plays in my bag right now that I am reading," Winfrey said with great enthusiasm and determination last week as part of a frank and wide-ranging interview on her Chicago past and professional future.

"And just this past weekend, I was in New York meeting with producers.

"We were just talking about what would be the best route to take. But yes, this is really going to happen. . . . Life is too short.

"I think," Winfrey said, "that an ensemble production is the way I should go."

Winfrey was very nearly already acting on Broadway. Kenny Leon, director of the high-profile Broadway revivals of "Fences" and "A Raisin in the Sun," came to Winfrey about two years ago and said he wanted her to be in "Fences." Talks, Winfrey said, progressed to an advanced and serious stage.

"I had always wanted to do 'Fences,' " Winfrey said.

"I went through the idea of trying to take my show to New York, shoot a show during the daytime and appear on Broadway at night. But I couldn't do it. And finally, Kenny said he couldn't wait any longer."

So that didn't work out. But once "The Oprah Winfrey Show" has wrapped, Winfrey will have a lot more freedom.

Winfrey's previous foray on Broadway involved producer Scott Sanders, who secured her cooperation - as a fellow producer, not an actor - on a musical version of "The Color Purple" on Broadway (Gary Griffin was the show's director).

Sanders also co-produced a 2010 show at the Radio City Music Hall staged in honor of the 10th anniversary of Winfrey's O Magazine.

It traced her life and career as part of her "Live Your Best Life" weekend. That 90-minute show was directed by George C. Wolfe, the Broadway director of "Angels in America," director of the HBO film "Lackawanna Blues" and author of the play "The Colored Museum."

Winfrey said she was talking with several Broadway producers and directors, and she is anxious not to taint those conversations.

All of those producers and directors, it goes without saying, are delighted to be having such a chat.

In December, news broke that she was in talks to star in an HBO Films adaptation of "Ruined," the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lynn Nottage play about the traumatic lives of young women in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. The main character is Mama Nadi, a Mother Courage-like pragmatist who runs a brothel but also protects and tends to the young women in her charge and whose mantra is "survival is the only art I recognize."

"Ruined," which premiered in 2008 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and moved to the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2009, has never appeared on Broadway, leaving some Broadway producers wondering if Winfrey could be persuaded to play that role live, before filming it for HBO. "Ruined" certainly reflects Winfrey's interest in Africa and her taste for a weighty, ensemble-driven piece.

But Winfrey said she has not decided what she is going to do, or with whom she is going to do it. She also has an affinity for August Wilson, but that bag of scripts (and the stack on her desk) contains a variety of pieces.

There is little doubt, though, that she is Broadway-bound. Fast. No dream deferred.

"I want to wrap this up as it should be wrapped up," she said of her incomparably influential daytime show, which is counting down its last handful of episodes after 25 years on the air.

" 'Let's land this plane,' I keep saying . . . And then it's time to do something for fun . . . This next phase of my life should be pure delight."