With her most recent Tony Award nomination, for her role in Adrienne Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders, Audra McDonald reached yet another career milestone.

The six-time Tony Award winner already holds the record for most competitive wins by an actor but has now tied the record for most nominated individual performer, with 10 nominations. This puts her in the same category as Chita Rivera and Julie Harris.

McDonald is the only person to win awards in all four Tony acting categories.

She says this nomination comes as an “incredible honor,” because of the recognition it gives to Kennedy, a revered playwright who made her Broadway debut with the play at the age of 91.

In the play, which ran on Broadway from November through January, McDonald played writer Suzanne Alexander, who returns to Ohio State University to give a lecture on the violence in her writing.

As she speaks, Alexander slips back into the college-aged version of herself and relives the racism and related violent incidents that happened to her while she was on campus.

Some elements of the narrative are similar to the personal history of Kennedy, who McDonald collaborated with frequently throughout the run.

The Tony nomination also came as McDonald was in the midst of a workshop, for a production which she said she could not yet name. The Ragtime and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill star says the timing could not have been better.

“It was nice to get the nomination on a day when I was back in the rehearsal room for the first time in a few months, kind of starting on another exploration, and that excites me,” McDonald said.

McDonald spoke with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month about honoring Kennedy through the work, why she chose to play dual roles and what more Broadway can do to support works by underrepresented artists.

How much were you able to speak with Adrienne Kennedy about this role?

Quite a bit. I was on the phone with her at least once a week, if not more. She was very giving of her time and willing to discuss any and everything. So it was amazing to be able to just literally go to the mind itself. And because the piece is semi-autobiographical, to be able to literally understand exactly what she was feeling in certain moments that are autobiographical. You don’t usually get that opportunity, not only with the playwright, but when the playwright is the person who experienced a lot of what went down. That’s really unusual. So that was an incredible, incredible gift.

Director Kenny Leon and I felt that responsibility. I don’t want to call it a burden. We just wanted to do right by her. At the end of every rehearsal, Kenny would say “This has been Adrienne Kennedy’s, Ohio State Murders.

 He would speak her name at the end of every rehearsal every single day just to keep all of us focused on what was most important, and serving the piece and serving her and making sure that this moment was everything it could be. She so deserved it.

Dual responsibility of opening the newly renamed James Earl Jones Theatre on Broadway?

That was overwhelming, as well. We felt the history of that moment. And again, in some ways, as well as feeling the responsibility of doing well, it kind of took the pressure off of it being about any one particular performer or director. We knew it was a part of history. And so we just wanted to serve that. In some ways, it was bigger than us.

This play, and your character in particular, dealt with some very heavy material

That was my attempt to try and leave it at the theater every night. But I think it was only after the show closed that I realized that I wasn’t necessarily leaving it at the theater. It took a minute for me to recover. But at the time, I thought “Oh yeah, I’m leaving this as a theater, and I’m going about my life.” But there were absolutely residual effects of living that out on a nightly basis that I felt physically and emotionally after the show was over and it took about a month-and-a-half to shed all of that.