Tala Ashe (CFA’06) is nominated for a Tony Award in the Best Featured Actress in a Play category for her performance in English, by Sanaz Toossi. Scott Zielinski (CFA’87) is nominated for Best Lighting Design of a Musical for Floyd Collins, produced by Lincoln Center Theater. Tala Ashe photo by Joan Marcus. Scott Zielinski photo courtesy of Zielinski

Theatre

These Two BU Alums Could Take Home a Tony Award

Actor Tala Ashe and lighting designer Scott Zielinski are first-time nominees

Early last month, Scott Zielinski was nearly 3,000 miles away from his home in New York City, standing before “one of the most beautiful waterfalls I’ve ever seen, in Iceland,” he says, when his Apple Watch started pinging with messages of congratulations. It seems he had been nominated for a Tony Award—his first—for Best Lighting Design in a Musical for Floyd Collins. His wife turned to him and said, “It’s about time.”

Since graduating from BU, Zielinski (CFA’87) has moved effortlessly among designing lighting for theater, opera, and dance. He’s worked in regional theater and on and off-Broadway, earning an Obie Award and a Drama Desk Award. This season alone, he designed the lighting for two of Broadway’s most acclaimed productions: Floyd Collins, a musical based on the true story of a cave explorer pinned in a Kentucky cave in 1925, an incident that made national headlines, and the musical Redwood, about a grief-stricken woman who travels from New York to a redwood forest in search of comfort.

Also nominated for her first Tony Award is Tala Ashe (CFA’06). She is vying for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in English, the Pulitzer Prize–winning drama by Sanaz Toossi about four Iranian adults preparing to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language. The play asks audiences to consider what one gives up by learning another language. Ashe’s character, Elham, is a strong-willed aspiring medical student who must pass the test to move abroad and advance her career, but who wrestles with her fears that mastering English could compromise her Iranian identity. 

“She’s a complicated, unapologetic force of nature,” says Ashe, who was born in Tehran and whose family immigrated to the United States when she was a baby.

Both Zielinski and Ashe say they’re honored to be nominated for Broadway’s highest accolade. Neither had yet written an acceptance speech when BU Today spoke with them, but both planned to have a speech in hand Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall when the Tony Awards ceremony airs live on CBS and streams on Paramount +, starting at 8 pm. 

Long ties to Floyd Collins

Zielinski fell in love with lighting as a high school sophomore in Ralston, Nebr., a suburb of Omaha. The school had an ambitious theater program, mounting six shows a season in addition to hosting a summer theater program. At BU’s College of Fine Arts, he pursued a degree in lighting design, which required him to also take classes in scenic and costume design. It was at CFA, he says, that “I started to have a well-rounded sense of design.”

As a work-study student, he helped to build shows at the BU Theatre, now the Huntington Theatre, home of the Huntington Theatre Company. (At the time, the company was overseen by BU.) “Our classes were in the basement at the Boston University Theatre,” he says. “So every day, to get to my classes, I’d have to walk through the Huntington scene shop and go downstairs and have my classes. It was a fantastic environment to be in, really being in a working theater.” 

Zielinski has been involved with Floyd Collins since its inception. The musical, with book by director Tina Landau and music and lyrics by composer Adam Guettel, premiered in Philadelphia in 1994. That was the first time Zielinski had worked with Landau (who also wrote and directed Redwoods); two years later they collaborated on the original off-Broadway production. The current production opened in late April.

Scenes from the Lincoln Center Theater production of Floyd Collins. In designing the lighting for the musical, Zielinski says he strove to create something that would help the scenic design feel spacious and expansive. Photos by Joan Marcus

The initial productions were staged in very small theaters. The challenge then, Zielinski recalls, was “how do I make the light help the scenic design feel spacious and expansive [on such a small stage]. For the Broadway show, running at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, he confronted the challenge of how to provide points of focus on the theater’s large thrust stage. 

The New York Times review of the show credited its designers: “Lincoln Center Theater’s vast and airy Broadway stage becomes an exalted evocation of the enormous cavern that Floyd discovers,” Laura Collins-Hughes writes.

As one of the creatives on a show, Zielinski says he approaches each project by trying to understand the director he’s working with. “They’re all different,” he says, “and at the end of the day, my job is to be able to help them facilitate what is ultimately their vision. It starts with trying to understand who they are, where they’re coming from, and how they think visually—how they think in all ways.” From there, he studies the script and then starts to map out a design that responds to what the scenic designer is doing. 

For Floyd Collins, Zielinski says his design is rooted in the area where the cave accident occurred—a field in Kentucky in early winter where the weather was often cold and rainy. “It’s very sort of monochromatic and yet romantic…and then it’s also filled—which is a big part of Tina’s vision for the design—with moments of silhouette against the sky,” he says.

Nominated with Zielinski for the Tony lighting design is Ray Sun, who oversaw the projections for the show. The two collaborated closely throughout the project, especially to create and illuminate the skies that appear throughout. 

Asked if he has an acceptance speech prepared should he win, Zielinski laughs and says that he will by Sunday, but that he’ll have to keep it short: winners have only 90 seconds to 2 minutes, starting from the moment their name is announced, to reach the stage, receive their award, and make their remarks.

Now 60, the lighting designer says that winning a Tony would be “an amazing thing for me.”

A love of reading inspires a passion for acting 

Like Zielinski, Ashe discovered a love of theater while attending high school. Hers was in Powell, Ohio, just outside of Columbus.

“I had an incredible literature and drama teacher who introduced me to Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, and other greats,” Ashe says. “I had always been an avid reader, but these plays opened up a different dimension of interiority that I was being asked to step into. It felt equal parts intriguing and challenging.” She credits the School of Theatre with providing the rigor and technical skill required to be a good actor. 

In the nearly 20 years since she graduated from BU (she later trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts), Ashe has come to enjoy working in television, but her first love remains theater. She originally played Elham in the Atlantic Theater Company’s off-Broadway premiere of English in 2022 and she says was excited to return to the part three years later. 

“Time allowed the play and this part to feel deeper and more subtle,” she says. “We were more of a true ensemble as a cast and the play benefited from that.” 

Ashe has drawn on her experience as an Iranian American to portray Elham, she says. She recalls growing up with parents and a community of Iranians who had accents. “I witnessed how much they would be treated as ‘lesser than’ when they opened their mouths,” she says. “I was very much able to draw on this from a place of rage and empathy.” 

The show, which finished its run in March, marked Ashe’s Broadway debut (she’s best known for her role as Zari Tomas in the TV series Legends of Tomorrow). She says she’s still coming to terms with the Tony nomination. “I’m so proud of English and my work in it, but it was a very strong season with incredible performances,” she says. “So it’s especially an honor—despite our show being closed for months—to be part of the Tony conversation.”

Ashe acknowledges that it was hard to let go of the character when the play finished its run. “[Elham] is pursuing a goal for herself that she deeply wants for her own future, but achieving it will take her away from her homeland and the people she loves,” Ashe says. “It’s a truly bittersweet journey… I love her so much and I’ve never had the privilege of playing such a complex and nuanced character.” 

Playing the role off and on for the past three years has been an emotional journey for Ashe as well: “I feel less apologetic for being myself.” 

She takes pride in the fact that English made it to Broadway at all. “Telling a story with characters and actors you don’t often see on Broadway stages is a great miracle,” she says. “I hope it encourages more diverse and rich storytelling and roles.”

The 78th Tony Awards ceremony is Sunday, June 8, at Radio City Music Hall in New York City; it will be broadcast live on CBS and available to stream on Paramount+.