'Family' connections: How Phylicia Rashad found Paul Oakley Stovall and is directing a show set in Hyde Park
When Phylicia Rashad was cast as a replacement Violet Weston in Anna D. Shapiro's Broadway production of Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," the Broadway gossip boards were abuzz with the notion of casting an African-American actress, best known for playing Clair Huxtable on "The Cosby Show," in a play that seemed to be very specifically about a dysfunctional white family, interlopers on the prairie. To some, it was…