Theaters celebrate black lives on stage

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Christopher Eisenberg, center, made his debut with the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe playing a young Michael Jackson in "The Crooners." He is featured in the show's sequel, "Soul Crooners 2" singing a variety of 1970s soul hits. DON DALY PHOTO

The Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe was invited to return to the 2015 National Black Theatre Festival with “Soul Crooners 2,” featuring, Christopher Eisenberg, center, with Michael Mendez and troupe founder Nate Jacobs. The show features 1970s soul hits. DON DALY PHOTO

Black lives matter!

The passion behind those words, borne from the shooting of an unarmed teenager a year ago, is echoed by more than 100 black theaters across the country using drama and entertainment to change minds, bring people together and create new opportunities for black artists.

Black lives matter, in essence, is an unspoken message behind every play and musical these theaters share with audiences of all races, because they are most often about black lives.

As more than 60,000 theater lovers gather in Winston-Salem, N.C., this week for the biennial National Black Theatre Festival, the meanings and histories of the dozens of shows to be presented take on greater resonance and urgency in the wake of the Charleston church shootings in June and a growing number of protest-triggering arrests and shootings of blacks by white police officers.

“This is a sick society, with black men being killed, young boys being killed, churches being burned and those nine people being killed in that church in Charleston. Racism is embedded,” says Jackie Taylor, founder and artistic director of Chicago’s Black Ensemble Theater. “We have to come to the realization that if we are not actively involved in trying to ensure that there is fairness across the board, then we are not helping.”

"You can't eradicate racism if you don't bring the racists. You have to get people to talk to each other, interact with each other, help them to understand each other." — Jackie Taylor, founder and artistic director of the Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago

Taylor founded her theater in 1976 with a simply stated mission — “to eradicate racism” — by presenting shows that would appeal to all audiences and change attitudes in the process.

The more opportunities for audiences to experience those stories, the more feelings may change among the general population, theater leaders say.

“You can’t eradicate racism if you don’t bring the racists,” Taylor says. “You have to get people to talk to each other, interact with each other, help them to understand each other.”

BLACK THEATER: TELLING OUR STORIES
Despite financial struggles, more than 100 black theaters are providing opportunities for actors and audiences in cities across the country. Read the stories, explore the map and more.
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The Black Ensemble Theater is best known for its lively musical revues about black artists and lives, including Etta James, Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson. After nearly 40 years, Taylor says her company is now “the most diverse theater in the country,” with an audience evenly split between blacks and whites.

“We found that musicals were a way to get people of different races in the theater, and once we did that, that began our process of bringing audiences of all colors and kinds into the theater,” she says.

Many African-American theaters work hard to broaden their reach, but demographics take drastic swings depending on the city. While Taylor may have reached what she calls an “uncommon” 50/50 audience split, the century-old Karamu House, in one of Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods, estimates a 98 percent black audience. That stands in stark contrast to roughly 80 percent white audiences at Sarasota’s Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, in a city in which blacks represent about 10 percent of the population.

The more diverse the audience, the more people’s attitudes may be affected by the plays.

Seeking better roles

Taylor may have had a bigger, more overriding mission in mind, but like the founders of many other black theaters, she had some practical reasons for starting Black Ensemble Theater.

She wanted acting roles she could be proud of.

After making her film debut in “Coolie High,” she was offered roles that “were all highly negative, highly violent, based on racist and ignorant information and roles that I just couldn’t do,” she said.

Similar concerns led Ricardo Khan and some theater friends to start Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, N.J., in 1978. He was tired of being offered roles as pimps, prostitutes and criminals, the kind of characters he felt limited his career and the public perception of black culture.

“That’s what people felt black people were, and I wanted to go against that notion, but there were very few opportunities to do that in existing theaters,” he said.

A scene from "The Amazing Adventures of Grace May B. Brown" by SOULOWORKS, Andrea E. Woods and Dancers, from Durham, N.C., featured at the National Black Theatre Festival. ALEC HIMWICH PHOTO

A scene from "The Amazing Adventures of Grace May B. Brown" by SOULOWORKS, Andrea E. Woods and Dancers, from Durham, N.C., featured at the National Black Theatre Festival. ALEC HIMWICH PHOTO

Likewise, Nate Jacobs started the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe in 1999 because he had trouble finding roles in the “mainstream” Sarasota theaters, except in occasional musical revues.

“Everywhere I went to work, I was asking why there was no diversity, and they would give the same answer that there were no black actors and no black audiences here in Sarasota,” Jacobs recalls.

In many ways, not much had changed since the days when actors such as Hattie McDaniel, an Oscar-winner for “Gone With the Wind,” were offered nothing but domestic roles and had to take them to have any kind of acting career.

The major nonprofit theaters across the country at the time did little to address the lives of minorities.

Years before the phrase “Black lives matter!” became so prominent, Crossroads had a mission statement that declared that “black culture and black life is relevant to everybody’s and therefore should be shared by everybody.”

“We wanted to show that there was a black life and culture and history that was positive and not all negative and from an artist’s point of view, and we wanted to do work and roles that would never have been available to us at the time in white theaters,” Khan says. “They weren’t thinking that way in the 70s.”

In Sarasota, Jacobs has shown that white audiences respond to productions created and performed by black artists. His troupe began performing his original musical revues (presented as a cheaper alternative to existing book musicals) in 2000, and the audience has followed the company as it moved from one venue to another until it had the money to purchase its own space, which it now owns debt-free.

“We have brought people together here,” he says. “The black audience is growing, and the white audience loves us” while learning more about black culture.

At the same time, he has introduced dozens of young black artists to the theater, many of whom had never seen a play or musical before auditioning for one of his shows.

Photo Gallery: Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe

For his leadership of a company that has grown more successful over its 15-year history, Jacobs will receive the producer’s award at the National Black Theatre Festival on Monday night, at a gala celebration that also will recognize Karamu’s century of operation and numerous other artists.

Conditions for actors of color have changed over the years as more nonprofit theaters have diversified their offerings and opportunities. But at the more than 100 black theaters running in cities across the country, the focus is on telling stories of black lives in ways that other venues cannot.

“No one can tell our stories better than we tell our own stories,” Chicago-based actress Tyla Abercrumbie says. “Even in these white theaters bringing in stories where there are American black characters or Latina characters, they are part of a story that is not about them necessarily.”

For the last three winters, Abercrumbie has become a popular part of the winter acting company of Sarasota’s Asolo Repertory Theatre, featured in such shows as “Good People” and “Clybourne Park.”

“I can be in ‘Good People,’ but that’s still a play written by someone white, an observer’s perspective of what this woman’s character is like,” she says.

Eileen Morris, artistic director of Houston’s Ensemble Theatre, adds that at black theaters “the stories are being told from our perspective, told with the fact that I can be a teacher, a nurse, a doctor, housewife, all those things from an African-American perspective. The world has changed, and it’s no longer in that void, no longer colored and white drinking fountains.”

It takes money

In the early years of the black theater movement, venues like Crossroads, the Negro Ensemble Company, Billie Holiday Theatre (both in New York) and Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, introduced audiences to the voices of new African-American writers, including Douglas Turner Ward, Samm-Art Williams and Ntozake Shange, and later Anna Deavere Smith and August Wilson. But aside from Wilson, arguably one of the most prominent and important American playwrights of the 20th century, few of them found widespread acclaim outside black theaters.

Today, “black writers are being offered opportunities the way they never had” at what leaders call either “mainstream” or “white” theaters, Khan says.

Lynn Nottage, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Ruined” and “Intimate Apparel,” has seen her plays premiere at such prominent playhouses as Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, Baltimore Center Stage and South Coast Rep.

“Things have changed a lot,” Khan says.

Then there is the matter of financial stability.

Cast members of "It's a Hard Knock Life: A Dance Adaptation of 'Annie' from The Pointe! Studio of Dance and Elise Jonell Performance Ensemble in Greensboro, N.C. The company performs a dance interpretation of the musical at the National Black Theatre Festival. PHOTO PROVIDED BY NBTF

Cast members of "It's a Hard Knock Life: A Dance Adaptation of 'Annie' from The Pointe! Studio of Dance and Elise Jonell Performance Ensemble in Greensboro, N.C. The company performs a dance interpretation of the musical at the National Black Theatre Festival. PHOTO PROVIDED BY NBTF

Some of the nation’s black theaters are staging quality productions and serving their local audiences, yet struggling to survive financially. All nonprofit theaters, no matter their focus, size or location, confront a never-ending battle for funding, but leaders of the black theater troupes say they face bigger challenges because they too often get overlooked for grants, and their audiences often can afford only minimal donations.

Playwright Wilson, who chronicled black life in each decade of the 1900s in 10 plays set in his native Pittsburgh, addressed concerns about the financial survival of these theaters nearly 20 years ago.

In a talk to Theater Communications Group conference in 1996 titled “The Ground on Which I Stand,” Wilson said, “Black theater in America is alive, it is vibrant, it is vital. It just isn’t funded. Black theater doesn’t share in the economics that would allow it to support its artists and supply them with meaningful avenues to develop their talent and broadcast and disseminate ideas crucial to its growth. The economics are reserved as privilege to the overwhelming abundance of institutions that preserve, promote and perpetuate white culture.”

Salaries are generally lower, and few of the theaters are able to afford performers who are members of Actors Equity Association (which sets salary and benefits levels) on any kind of regular basis. Those that can afford to pay their actors often do so through stipends.

That means actors such as Abercrumbie, who got her start in black theater companies in Chicago, now cannot afford to work at the same companies that are telling the kinds of stories she likes to be part of.

“I’m not just doing this as a hobby,” she says. “I never participated in theater just for fun. This is how I make my living, and I should be making money, maybe not substantial amounts of money, but money that shows you appreciate the services I’m providing for you and therefore we’re in business together.”

Financial struggles have resulted in many of the once-prominent theaters becoming shells of their one-time prominence. Some have closed; others have greatly curtailed their operations.

Khan left Crossroads in 1999 after the company won a Tony Award for outstanding regional theater and had grown from a company with a budget of $225,000 to $3.2 million. Not long after, it was forced to close down for a year and regroup. Today it operates on a budget of about $500,000.

A scene from "Universes Live! From the Edge," a production celebrating 20 years of Cultural odyssey in San Francisco, part of the 2015 National Black Theatre Festival. PHOTO PROVIDED BY NBTF

A scene from "Universes Live! From the Edge," a production celebrating 20 years of Cultural odyssey in San Francisco, part of the 2015 National Black Theatre Festival. PHOTO PROVIDED BY NBTF

Early on, theaters such as Penumbra were “riding on the heels of the black arts movement and black power movement,” says Lou Bellamy, the founding artistic director who is preparing to retire. “People were politically and socially active in advocating and rejuvenating things. But many of us couldn’t maintain that wave when political winds changed. We did not have that individual giving base.”

Penumbra got started in 1976 with a grant from the federal Comprehensive Employment Training Act, or CETA, a revised extension of the Works Progress Administration that was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But when those funds dried up during the Reagan administration, Penumbra and other theaters “took a terrible dive because we hadn’t had experience creating that stuff with government help. It took a while to establish ourselves with foundations and state arts boards.”

Even then, the funds weren’t always available.

“We need the communities to make an investment into the institution more than the work,” says Houston’s Morris. “National funding sources need to identify these smaller or mid-size arts organizations that are ethnic cultural entities and find ways to fund them with multi-year funding.”

Beth Turner, who has been chronicling black theater for more than 30 years through her publication Black Masks, says she started at a time when public and institutional funding for black theaters was beginning to wane.

“Little by little, even cities that had one or two black theaters were shrinking, closing the smaller ones," she says. "And even the larger ones are still struggling,” That led many of them to do what all theaters do when finances are tight — produce small-cast and one-person shows to save on costs.

Creating a community

Such shows, and others, will be on display at the National Black Theatre Festival, which Larry Leon Hamlin began in 1989 as a way to showcase productions by black theaters and bring theater leaders together to talk about common concerns.

The increasing national focus on issues of race may bring about another period of the kind of activism and social awareness that Bellamy says provided the impetus for many of the theaters in the 1970s.

But these theaters also continue to serve a crucial purpose in dealing with race, culture and heritage in ways that can actually bring people together and move toward Jackie Taylor’s mission to end racism.

“When an 80 percent white audience comes to a black play, they gain something from the experience and then go away,” Khan says. “But when they go to a black theater, devoted to black work, they not only experience the play, they also experience a different world. That’s where the richest civic dialogues can happen. It’s when worlds meet. The theater is extraordinary, one of the few places you can go and actually create a community every single night.”

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Jay Handelman

Jay Handelman is the theater and television critic for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, where he has worked since 1984. He also is President of the Foundation of the American Theatre Critics Association and a two-time past chairman of the association's executive committee. He can be reached by email or call (941) 361-4931. Follow him at @jayhandelman on Twitter. Make sure to "Like" Arts Sarasota on Facebook for news and reviews of the arts.
Last modified: August 1, 2015
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