DRAMATIS PERSONAE | Arianda's parents, Lesia and Peter Matijcio, photographed at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York. Photography by Kyoko Hamada

BROADWAY SENSATION NINA ARIANDA'S taste for the spotlight was born when she was a preschooler living in Clifton, New Jersey, reading aloud a medley of verses to a doting Ukrainian-American audience. Her parents, Lesia and Peter Matijcio, had steeped their daughter in the customs and language of their homeland, and as she recited (in Ukrainian) an ode to Ukraine's folkloric kalyna plant—a slender-branched shrub with lustrous red berries— by the poet Taras Shevchenko, the crowd roared, and the little girl took bow after bow.

Twenty-two years later, fresh out of drama school, Arianda strode onto the New York stage in January of 2010 and took theater-going Manhattan by storm. She was 25, tall and blonde, with a distinctive Slavic self-possession, an all-American sense of purpose and a rare knack for commanding respect while clad in a garter belt and thigh-high zip-up boots. In just one audition, she won a career-making role: the title character of David Ives's provocative play Venus in Fur at the Classic Stage Company, off-Broadway. She portrayed a modern-day actress named Vanda who will stop at nothing to persuade a jaded theater director that she was born to be the lead in his play about a 19th-century dominatrix who just may be the goddess of love.

The next year, a torrent of acclaim propelled Arianda onto Broadway, where she starred in a revival of Born Yesterday as the kept woman Billie Dawn (again rocking a garter belt). And when Venus in Fur opened on the Great White Way last November, she headlined again, this time taking home a Tony for her performance. Christopher Plummer, her first childhood crush, presented her with the award. "For her, it was mind-blowing," her mother says matter-of-factly.

The Matijcios came to this country after World War II: Peter's family immigrated to Brooklyn; Lesia's to Rochester, New York. They now live in Mount Tabor, New Jersey. Lesia is an artist and teaches English as a second language; Peter is a logistics expert for the Department of Defense. They are as multifaceted and surprising as their daughter: free-spirited, sophisticated and yet curiously old world. Last June, the Matijcios were proud when friends told them that "a large part of the Ukrainian community in New York were watching the Tonys," rooting for their daughter. As we discussed Arianda's success, they retraced the peripatetic path of their lives, before and after their daughter's rise to fame.

Lesia and Peter Matijcio Photography by Kyoko Hamada

Your daughter's stage name is Nina Arianda, instead of Nina Matijcio. why is that?

Lesia: We basically decided it sounded nicer. Anyway, she just used her middle name.

Why did you choose Arianda for her middle name? Is it a family name?

Lesia: I think it reminded me of Ariadne, from Greek mythology.

And is her first name a family name?

Lesia: A long time ago, Peter and I listened to a lot of Ukrainian records. There was a singer named Nina Matviyenko in the '70s. She had this "white voice," it's called— a voice for Ukrainian folk songs. She had just a tiny little solo, but something about her voice really hit me.

STAGE AND SCREEN | Arianda's second stage performance, in Passaic, New Jersey, 1989 Courtesy Arianda Family

What roles have you liked Nina best in?

Peter: Venus in Fur is wilder than Born Yesterday, but I loved her in both. I would support anything she'd like to do that makes her happy. If you love it, you are able to marry art and business.

Does it feel odd to see your daughter on stage in sensual roles and provocative clothing?

Lesia: As long as she's on stage, I'm fine. I'd have a problem if that were how she dressed in normal life. But every character brings its own costume. Would I have preferred her first big thing be The Sound of Music? Absolutely. But she was in character in Venus in Fur all the way, and you've got to dress the part.

Peter: If you're going to do something, then you have to sink your teeth into it.

Lesia: We approached acting as if she was going into medicine: It was to be her career. When she was a little girl she played make-believe all the time. Peter would come home from work and we would have a show for him ready. She had this ugly pink dress someone had given her, and she would put that over everything and we would have a dancing session. From the beginning, that was what she loved.

After winning the 2011 Best Actress Tony for 'Venus in Fur.' Wireimage/Getty Images

How is she different in real life than on stage?

Lesia: More reserved.

Peter: Intense.

Lesia: She's more vulnerable on stage than she is in real life.

Were you nervous about her going into acting in a rough economy?

Lesia: It was hard for her, because when you're in school you become very close to people you're with. You're with them for three years and you're like family. Then you graduate and it's a dog-eat-dog world. So instead of telling her friends about her auditions, she told me. When she went to the audition for Venus in Fur, she thought it sounded a little trashy but she told me the script was great. And the same day of the audition, she called and said, "I got the job."

Peter: She said it a little louder than that. [They laugh.]

What does she call you? Mom and Dad, or maybe Mama and Papa?

On her first trip to the New York Metropolitan Opera, in 1990. Courtesy Arianda Family

Lesia: I'm Mama.

Peter: I'm Tato.

What would you say she gets from both of you?

Peter: I like to think it's my humor.

Lesia: Nina packs just like Peter does. She takes the time, she gets together all the little bags and pots.

Peter: Organization. She can compartmentalize.

Lesia: If you have an elephant and you have to put it in the trunk of a car, Peter will do it.

And what does she get from you, Lesia?

Peter: Beauty.

Do either of you have family who were in the theater? Has she inherited this gift?

Lesia: Peter's mother dabbled in theater; my father worked for Prosvita [a Ukrainian cultural enlightenment group] when he was young. He would go into villages and have them build libraries and organize choirs.

In Woody Allen's 2011 film 'Midnight in Paris' Gravier Productions/The Kobal Collection

How did you and Peter meet, and when?

Lesia: The diocese of the St. George Ukrainian Catholic church had properties in Narrowsburg, New York.

Peter: They had bungalows, as a summer retreat for parishioners. We had a bungalow, and Lesia came to visit a friend.

Lesia: My very good girlfriend had a place by the lake, and Peter, he was there, just back from the army.

Peter: It was 1966, in July.

Lesia: We got married in 1970, we were very young, and we went to Europe for our honeymoon. I had spent my last year of college at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and loved it. We tried to find work in Europe so we could stay there. While we were traveling through Rome, I picked up this little American paper.

Peter: It was the Herald Tribune, and there was an interview for a job selling Florida properties to U.S. citizens in Europe. So I went to the interview and got the job to sell real estate in America to U.S. civilians in Europe.

The three of you left New Jersey in 1997, when Nina was in high school, and moved back to Europe.

Peter: An opportunity came up for me, for a position in Europe as a temporary logistician with the Department of Defense. I worked in acquisitions, helping soldiers protect their lives in tense situations. We were in Schwetzingen, near Heidelberg, Germany.

Was that move hard for Nina, as a teenager?

Lesia: She loved Europe. There's something about Europe that's easy for her. She went to the American school there. She was in many productions, and if she wasn't in a production she assisted. When she was 16, she took a summer course at RADA [The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] in London, and when she graduated from high school, she went back to New York. We didn't come back until 2004.

Do you worry that all this fame and attention will change her?

Lesia: I just hope she keeps her perspective. She was thrown into the media after Venus in Fur. You stand back and you're in awe. When you're in it, just performing, it's your everyday life. When you come home, you wash your hands and let the day go down the drain. There's work and then there's home.

Peter: I'm sure she'll keep a balance. She's making sure that she takes time to come home for sanctuary and put her feet up and relax. You have to find a place where you are yourself.

What role has Nina not performed that you would most like to see her in?

Lesia: I think she'd be great at The Taming of the Shrew. She probably would do a hell of a job. I'm saying, let it happen!