DETROIT 67 is Comin' Uptown....FINALLY!

The play “Detroit ‘67” by two-time NAACP Image Award recipient, Dominique Morisseau will begin its highly anticipated Harlem run at the National Black Theatre on Saturday, March 23.
                                                
Detroit ’67,” which was developed through the Public Theatre’s Emerging Writers Group, a co-production with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and the National Black Theatre, will play the Public through March 17, prior to transferring to the CTH March 23 – April 14.
                                
Set in 1967 in Detroit, where Motown music is getting the party started, the play follows Chelle and her brother Lank, who are making ends meet by turning their basement into an after-hours joint. Always at odds, they fight over the future of the family trade. But when a mysterious white woman finds her way into their care and string of raids increases police brutality around the city, the siblings become divided over much more than business. Suddenly, they find themselves caught in the middle of the ’67 riots.
                                                                                

DETROIT '67...it blew me away!

by Erich McMillan-McCall

 

The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan, that began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police ...raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, on the corner of 12th (today Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount streets on the city's Near West Side. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in United States history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit's 1943 race riot. Sounds like an unlikely scenario to use as backdrop for a play about family but in Dominique Morriseau's DETROIT '67 family is most certainly the tie that binds.

DETROIT '67 is a spellbindingly perfect theatrical event arising from a powerful combined effect of a unique set of circumstances: superb acting, extraordinary direction and a mesmerizingly powerful play! Humor, ferocity and keen feeling are abound in all three. There is not a weak link. Rarely do we see such strong vivid portrayals of African Americans with an undeniably deeply-rooted familial bond, on stage, screen or television, especially today.

Tolstoy tells us, "All happy families are alike, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So is the case with the Poindexter family and their friends in Detroit in 1967--they are truly unhappy and happy in their own way. This family is fiercely funny and bitingly sad. DETROIT '67 is a turbocharged family drama about survival in the extreme circumstances of racial discord and riots in Detroit in 1967. What a combination! It will blow you away! It is sensationally entertaining! This is theater that will keep you hooked with shocks, surprises, delights, with a heart moving core. It is a must see American theater game changer.

I am so thrilled and proud that this American story is coming to the National Black Theater in Harlem! Dominique Morisseau is letting her 1VOICE be heard and the pen is her sword. How will your 1VOICE be heard?  I hope it will be heard buying a ticket(s) to this must see Harlem theatrical event!

Erich McMillan-McCall
Founder/Executive Director of Project1VOICE, Inc
www.project1voice.org
erich@project1voice.org

 

 

The Show Schedule
March 23 through April 14

 

@ The National Black Theatre – 2033 Fifth Avenue at 125^th Street in Harlem. Performance will take place Tuesday through Sunday at 7:30pm, with matinees on Saturday at 1 pm. Tickets are $25 for adjusts and $20 for students and seniors may be purchased online at www.classicaltheatreofharlem.org or by calling 866-811-4111.

LOOK UPON OUR LOWLINESS
Be sure to check out Harrison David Rivers' LOOK UPON OUR LOWLINESS beginning April 4th at the Harlem School of the Arts produced by the Movement Theatre Company in association with Radical Evolution beginning April 4 for more information and tickets go to http://www.themovementtheatrecompany.org/07/home.html#!lowliness/c9hq

Upcoming Project1VOICE Events

The 3rd Annual 1VOICE! 1PLAY! 1DAY!  presents a benefit stage reading of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama A SOLDIER's PLAY by Charles Fuller at partcipating Project1VOICE network theaters simultaneously on June 17, 2013.  This year we are international!

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the events of  the 1963 American Civil Rights Movement, Project1VOICE in association with over 50 international venues will present simultaneous staged readings of  FOUR LITTLE GIRLS: Birmingham 1963 by Christina Ham. This unprecedented international event will take place on Sunday September 15, 2013, the 50th anniversary of the fatal bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama that killed four unoffending Sunday School pupils:  Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carol Robertson and Cynthia Wesley.  www.project1voice.org

AUNT ESTHER'S CHILDREN: A century on stage by August Wilson

This essay, which serves as the preface to King Hedley II (TCG Books), was written in the spring of 2000, before the playwright had begun the final two plays in his 20th-century cycle. It first appeared in the New York Times (April 23, 2000).


In 1975 I wrote a short story titled "The Greatest Blues Singer in the World." As it turned out, the text of the story was very short. I began, "The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning." That seemed to communicate the idea with more clarity than I could hope to gain by adding to it, so I stopped and typed "The End."

I had conceived a much longer story that spoke to the social context of the artist and how one's private ocean is inextricably linked to the tributary streams that gave rise to, and occasioned, the impulse to song.

Before one can become an artist one must first be. It is being in all facets, its many definitions, that endows the artist with an immutable sense of himself that is necessary for the accomplishment of his task. Simply put, art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired.

Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I am an African American. The tributary streams of culture, history and experience have provided me with the materials out of which I make my art. As an African-American playwright, I have many forebears who have pioneered and hacked out of the underbrush an aesthetic that embraced and elevated the cultural values of black Americans to a level equal to those of their European counterparts.

Out of their experiences, the sacred and the profane, was made a record of their traverse and the many points of epiphany and redemption. They have hallowed the ground and provided a tradition gained by will and daring. I count it a privilege to stand at the edge of the art, with the gift of their triumphs and failures, as well as the playwrights down through the ages who found within the turbulent history of human thought and action an ennobling conduct worthy of art. The culture of black America, forged in the cotton fields of the South and tested by the hard pavements of the industrial North, has been the ladder by which we have climbed into the New World. The field of manners and rituals of social intercourse—the music, speech, rhythms, eating habits, religious beliefs, gestures, notions of common sense, attitudes toward sex, concepts of beauty and justice, and the responses to pleasure and pain—have enabled us to survive the loss of our political will and the disruption of our history. The culture's moral codes and sanction of conduct offer clear instructions as to the value of community, and make clear that the preservation and promotion, the propagation and rehearsal of the value of one's ancestors is the surest way to a full and productive life.

The cycle of plays I have been writing since 1979 is my attempt to represent that culture in dramatic art. From the beginning, I decided not to write about historical events or the pathologies of the black community. The details of our struggle to survive and prosper, in what has been a difficult and sometimes bitter relationship with a system of laws and practices that deny us access to the tools necessary for productive and industrious life, are available to any serious student of history or sociology.

Instead, I wanted to present the unique particulars of black American culture as the transformation of impulse and sensibility into codes of conduct and response, into cultural rituals that defined and celebrated ourselves as men and women of high purpose. I wanted to place this culture on stage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves.

From Joe Turner's Come and Gone  (which is set in 1911) to King Hedley II (set in 1985), the cycle covers almost 80 years of American history. The plays are peopled with characters whose ancestors have been in the United States since the early 17th century.

They were brought across an ocean, chained in the hulls of 350-ton vessels. In the southern part of the United States, they were made to labor in the vast agricultural plantations. They made do without surnames and lived in dirt-floor cabins. They labored without pay. They were bought and sold and traded for money and gold and diamonds and molasses and horses and cows. They were fed the barest of subsistence diets. When they tried to escape, they were tracked down by dogs and men on horseback. They existed as an appendage to the body of society. They had no moral personality and no moral status in civic or church law.

After 200-odd years, as a political expediency, they were granted freedom from being the property of other men. During the next hundred years they were disenfranchised, their houses were burned, they were hung from trees, forced into separate and inferior houses, schools and public facilities. They were granted status in law and denied it in practice.

Yet the characters in the plays still place their faith in America's willingness to live up to the meaning of her creed so as not to make a mockery of her ideals. It is this belief in America's honor that allows them to pursue the American Dream even as it remains elusive. The conflicts with the larger society are cultural conflicts. Conflicts over ways of being and doing things. The characters are all continually negotiating for a position, the high ground of the battlefield, from where they might best shout an affirmation of the value and worth of their being in the face of a many-million-voice chorus that seeks to deafen and obliterate it.

They shout, they argue, they wrestle with love, honor, duty, betrayal; they have loud voices and big hearts; they demand justice, they love, they laugh, they cry, they murder, and they embrace life with zest and vigor. Despite the fact that the material conditions of their lives are meager. Despite the fact that they have no relationship with banking capital and their communities lack the twin pillars of commerce and industry. Despite the fact that their relationship to the larger society is one of servitude and marked neglect. In all the plays, the characters remain pointed toward the future, their pockets lined with fresh hope and an abiding faith in their own abilities and their own heroics.

From Herald Loomis's vision of the bones rising out of the Atlantic Ocean (the largest unmarked graveyard in the world) in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, to the pantheon of vengeful gods ("The Ghosts of the Yellow Dog") in The Piano Lesson, to Aunt Ester, the then 349-year-old conjure woman who first surfaced in Two Trains Running—the metaphysical presence of a spirit world has become increasingly important to my work. It is the world that the characters turn to when they are most in need.

Aunt Ester has emerged for me as the most significant persona of the cycle. The characters, after all, are her children. The wisdom and tradition she embodies are valuable tools for the reconstruction of their personality and for dealing with a society in which the contradictions, over the decades, have grown more fierce, and for exposing all the places it is lacking in virtue.

Theatre, as a powerful conveyer of human values, has often led us through the impossible landscape of American class, regional and racial conflicts, providing fresh insights and fragile but enduring bridges of fruitful dialogue. It has provided us with a mirror that forces us to face personal truths and enables us to discover within ourselves an indomitable spirit that recognizes, sometimes across wide social barriers, those common concerns that make possible genuine cultural fusion.

With the completion of my latest play, King Hedley II, I have only the "bookends," the first and last decades of the twentieth century, remaining. As I approach the cycle's end, I find myself a different person than when I started. The experience of writing plays has altered me in ways I cannot yet fully articulate.

As with any journey, the only real question is: "Is the port worthy of the cruise?" The answer is a resounding "Yes." I often remark that I am a struggling playwright. I'm struggling to get the next play on the page. Eight down and counting. The struggle continues.

June 17, 2013  Project1VOICE presents the 3rd Annual 1VOICE! 1PLAY! 1DAY! with Charles Fuller's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama A SOLDIER's PLAY

September 15, 2013 Project1VOICE in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the events of 1963 presents FOUR LITTLE GIRLS:  Birmingham 1963 by Christina Ham
at over 50 venues around the world simultaneously in 1DAY!

DETROIT '67...it blew me AWAY!

 The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan, that began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police ...raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, on the corner of 12th (today Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount streets on the city's Near West Side. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in United States history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit's 1943 race riot. Sounds like an unlikely scenario to use as backdrop for a play about family but in Dominique Morriseau's DETROIT '67 family is most certainly the tie that binds.

Last nights performance at the Public of DETROIT '67 was a spellbindingly perfect theatrical event arising from a powerful combined effect of a unique set of circumstances: superb acting, extraordinary direction and a mesmerizingly powerful play! Humor, ferocity and keen feeling are abound in all three. There was not a weak link. Rarely do we see such strong vivid portrayals of African Americans with an undeniably deeply-rooted familial bond, on stage, screen or television, especially today.


Tolstoy told us, "All happy families are alike, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So is the case with the Poindexter family and their friends in Detroit in 1967--they are truly unhappy and happy in their own way. This family is fiercely funny and bitingly sad. DETROIT '67 is a turbocharged family drama about survival in the extreme circumstances of racial discord and riots in Detroit in 1967. What a combination! It will blow you away! It is sensationally entertaining! This is theater that will keep you hooked with shocks, surprises, delights with a heart moving core. It is a must see American theater game changer.

I am so thrilled and proud that this American story is coming to the National Black Theater in Harlem!  Dominique Morisseau is letting her 1VOICE be heard and the pen is her sword. How will your 1VOICE be heard?

Erich McMillan-McCall
Founder/CEO/Executive Director of Project1VOICE, Inc
www.project1voice.org
erich@project1voice.org


3rd Annual 1VOICE! 1PLAY! 1DAY!  6/17/13  A SOLDIER's PLAY by Charles Fuller
1st Annual Project Young Voice  4 LITTLE GIRLS: Birmingham 1963 by Christina Ham 9/15/13
SAVE THE DATES!



http://www.classicaltheatreofharlem.org/buy.html

KNOCK ME A KISS at Crossroads is a KNOCK OUT!

by Erich McMillan-McCall
Founder/Executive Director of Project1VOICE, INC



Neither snow, nor rain, nor hear, nor gloom of night stays keeps this avid theater goer from the observance of theater. Okay I admit I am not a postal worker but I thought the postal creed was an extremely apropos intro considering it took me and my good buddy Michael Dinwiddie, a playwright and newly elected President of the Black Theater Network, almost 3 hours to get to the Crossroads Theatre Company's production of KNOCK ME A KISS thanks to Frankenstorm Sandy. But I must say it was worth every last glorious minute--coming and going!

 

Since last year I have been hearing constant murmurs about how great KNOCK ME A KISS was. I missed last year's production at New Federal but I was not missing this one, Frankenstorm or not.

KNOCK ME A KISS is a family drama with complexed characters laced with laughter written by Charles Smith. It is directed by Chuck Smith, who I met at the performance along with Crossroads producing Artistic Director Marshall Jones. Mr Smith directed both the original 2000 production in Chicago and last year's Woodie King Jr's New Federal Theatre production. This production comes with last year's New Federal cast completely in tow. KNOCK ME A KISS is a romanticized retelling of the marriage between Yolande Dubois, the daughter of civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois, and poet Countee Cullen during the Harlem Renaissance.

DuBois, concerned more with pedigree than love, orchestrates the match for his daughter unaware that Cullen is gay. Yolande, who has an infantile notion of romance, rejects a proposal from jazz-band conductor Jimmy Lunceford, whom she loves, in part to cement her position in society. Of course, the truth inevitably comes out.

Erin Cherry as Yolande is wonderfully engaging as the repressed, young, naive, hopelessly romantic, daddy's girl socialite transforming from innocence to maturity. Andre De Shields plays the iconic Dubois with well manicured pedigreed  perfection.  He brings the appropriate blend of Fisk and Harvard University regal refinement to Dubois--who identified himself as both "American and black" heeding to neither assimilate nor separate but to be proud, enduring the hyphenation.   Marie Thomas as Dubois' mentally ill equally repressed wife, intensifies the drama. Sean Phillips as Countee Cullen is well cast as the "perfect" spouse, chosen by Dubois, for his daughter to keep the "race pure." While the wrong side of the track characters of Leonora and Jimmy played by Morocco Omari and Gillian Glassco, respectively, erupt with smouldering uninhibited exuberance and sexiness which adds another level of tension to this grossly restrained "talented tenth." Hurry and see this KNOCK OUT before it closes on Sunday!  THE TRAINS ARE RUNNING NOW SO THE COMMUTE IS MUCH SHORTER!

Black theaters like The Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick New Jersey tell American stories like no others--who and what are we without them!  They are destinations most definitely worth experiencing.

Knock Me a Kiss
Where: Crossroads Theatre Company, 7 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick.
When: October 31, November 1, 2, 3 at 8 p.m.; November 3 and 4 at 3 p.m.
How much: $50-$65, call (732) 545-8100 or visit crossroadstheatrecompany.org

Please if you have not take already, we invite you to take the opportunity to check out our website www.project1voice.org and also to like us on facebook at Project1VOICE. Thank you and  I hope to see you in the theater!

ICED OUT SHACKLED & CHAINED is off the chain!

by Erich McMillan-McCall
Founder/Executive Director of Project1VOICE, INC


You know what I like most about what we do at Project1VOICE?  It gives me an extraordinary opportunity to see  more theater now, than I have  over the course of  my twenty five year love affair with NYC!  I love the theater there is no doubt about that but I do have an unquenchable thirst for Black theater in particular.  I hunger for  both Black play classics and new works. There's nothing like them.  They tell our stories like no others.  They are gems that should continue to shine brightly and  with all of our help they can and will.

 
And with that said, on Saturday night, October 27, after a nine hour day at work. I went to the NATIONAL BLACK THEATER in Harlem USA and saw the  opening night performance of  ICED OUT Shackled & Chained:  Still Looking for the North Star.   What a delectable not to  be missed theatrical treat!  My longtime friend, and fabulous actress by the way, Inga Ballard called and told me she had tickets. And I am so glad she did.  I have no idea how this luscious jewel slipped my roving theatrical eye. The play, written by Khisa T. Spence and Mo Beasley is brilliantly crafted under the  remarkably clever direction of Jeffrery V. Thompson, who himself is also an  equally brilliant actor and singer. 

ICED OUT Shackled & Chained: Still Looking for the North Star frames the  dramatic parallels between slavery and the Jim Crow era with modern day oppression and contemporary impacts of slavery.  ICED OUT dispels  many of the existing stereotypes perpetuated by our history through exploration of root causes of illiteracy, poverty and racism, much  in the vain of George C.  Wolfe's impeccably resplendent THE COLORED MUSEUM.  This play's  extraordinary cast of two, features the always stellar Stephanie Berry and  Biance LaVerne Jones, who I recently saw perform in the Harlem 9's 48Hour Project  and BODIES  at the New BlackFest.   They morph into about 20 characters between them with the greatest of ease. These two master camillions were both engaging but Miss Berry was a particular standout for me.  Whether she was playing an acute schizophrenic who robs banks, a young boy coming of age in the inner city or a young girl who is repeatedly gang raped for days, she performs with such daring, grace and dexterity.  She reminded me of  one of those visually stunning acrobats in Cirque Du Soliel. What an absolute joy to behold her work on any stage!

Diane Harvey's choreography and Chris Cummerbatch's set design add another layer of intrigue to this scrumptious mix. What a pleasure to see it all unfold!  In this play, which is a series of intricately woven vignettes, Kisha T Spence and Mo Beasly, the writers of ICED OUT, have fashioned a play that not only entertains but  also educates.  It challenges us to look closely at the world we live in today with our eyes really wide open.  It dares to ask us to ponder if things really have changed or have they just taken on a new form?  I had a great time and I highly recommend this stellar theatrical journey now playing at the National Black Theater in Harlem USA through November 18!
 
If you would like to know more about Project1VOICE and our mission, please visit our website at www.project1voice.org.  We also invite you  to  like us on Facebook at Project1VOICE if you have not already and please pass this information on to anyone you think would like to know us. Our first annual star studded fundraising gala, Project1VOICE HONORS, is  Monday, February 25th, 2013 at Kumble Theater SAVE THE DATE


ICE OUT SHACKLED & CHAINED: Still Looking for the North Star
October 27-November 18, 2012
National Black Theatre

2031 5th Ave at 125 ST
Harlem, NY
212-722-3800
Take the ABCD123456 Trains to 125th Street
www.nationalblacktheatre.org
www.smartix.com

 

Go see Black theater, a destination always worth experiencing!
 

THE THEATER MIRROR, New England's LIVE Theater Guide

| MARQUEE | USHER | SEATS | INTERMISSION | CURTAIN |

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"What Happened in Boston, Willie"

Reviews of Current Productions

note: entire contents copyright 2012 by Barbara Lewis

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"The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity"

Reviewed by Barbara Lewis

It’s definitely a crowd pleaser. The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety, which opened the last week of July at the Calderwood Pavilion in the Boston Center for the Arts under the banner of Company One, which is quickly becoming one of the most exciting theatrical outfits in town, knows how to emotionally connect with an audience. The stage is a boxing ring and the wrestlers are barely clad with their oiled muscles rippling and dancing. The humor is broad and incisive. Kristoffer Diaz, the Obie-winning playwright, knows the narrative world of televised wrestling, and he brings its quick jab thrills to the stage. Shawn LaCount, the director, brings it all together inside the red ropes with racy verve. And all the actors (Ricardo Engermann (as Mace); Chris Leon (as Chad); Peter Brown (as Olson); Jake Athyal (as Vigneshwar Paduar) and Mike Webb (as Billy Heartland) are a delight to hear and watch.
An underdog tells the story. Macedonio Guerra, a last name that means war, was born Puerto Rican and poor in the South Bronx. As a boy, he fell hard for wrestling, which he thought of as an art form. So Mace – notice that almost everything here is reduced to the short byte and the quick read -- grew up to live his dream, but not on the winning side. He is the jobber, making lesser talents shine like stars.

Then he sees a chance to push through, which comes in the guise of a facile ball-playing South Asian from Brooklyn who uses crotch grabbing as verbal spice, runs after any girl he sees, and gets billed by the thin, driven, suit-wearing, money-hungry wrestling manager as a brown fundamentalist Paki Muslim terrorist. So all the boxers, save one, aka Billy Heartland & Old Glory, are incarnations of black or brown, and Olson, the money man who calls all the shots, is white, probably of Scandinavian heritage. Such is the way of the democratic world where winners and losers are the biggest story in town, stirring to fever pitch good red American blood, all mixed together, each rising or falling to its right level.

Chad Deity, the star, is black but his days are numbered even while the gold belt circling his waist as he makes his pectorals dance is big and flashy. His story is old. Which of the up-and-coming brown guys will replace him, nudge him out of the way, pin him to the mat, and take over his championship glory? The whole set-up is metaphoric of the power dynamic in America heavy with suited money-men, unclad gladiators, and eager crowds in the seats demanding to be sated with circus and bread.

Oh yes, there are raisins in this mix, plump raisins that were once grapes picked by Mexicans. Chad, which is also the name of a very poor central African country where the Sahara is located, is very much a new-age immigrant American saga of the arena, with anyone and everyone emerging into the public eye to vie and pummel for favor. By shortening the name of the play to Chad, I am following the reduction game that is prevalent in the world of pitting arms and backs against the odds and the floor and seeing who survives to fight another day. It’s a virtual parade of nations entering the mouths and minds of these characters who regularly reference Mexicans, Dominicans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Indians, not the native kind, Filipinos, and others. I wonder if Diaz ever read the Battle Royale scene in Ellison’s novel, The Invisible Man, which posits that America’s main entertainment is watching two men of dark complexions fight for the titillation of the fairer than fair onlookers, with the viewing of this contest staged for their delectation and thus confirming their superiority and privilege.

The payoff is that at least one, in due time, will be utterly vanquished, and both are diminished in the process. Are we regurgitating that old saga for a new generation, with a somewhat more piquant sauce? And doesn’t it all, in the long run, go back to the Romans who found the pulp of their essence vitiated by a surfeit of gaming.

Rather than being accused of over thinking the healthy, ever engaging pulse and throb of the competitive urge, that builds muscle, let me elaborate on my beginning. This is well-written, well-acted, extremely well-directed fare that keeps you on the edge of your seat and stirs your mind too. We are looking at ourselves looking at a reflection of ourselves and what could be more stimulating and fulfilling than that? Kristoffer Diaz, the playwright, is a clever one to watch. And the Company One brand thrills once again.

"The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity" (27 July - 25 August)

COMPANY ONE

@ Boston Center for The Arts, 539 Tremont Street, BOSTON MA

1(617)933-8600

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THE THEATER MIRROR, New England's LIVE Theater Guide

| MARQUEE | USHER | SEATS | INTERMISSION | CURTAIN |



Breaking Through the Bottleneck: Theater Makers in teh Black Community Change Dynamics in Boston by Akiba Abaka

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SELECT CATEGORY Ideas, Practices, Bright Spots Podcasts #NEWPLAY TV New Play Map Happenings and Announcements City Series Regular Columns

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• Ideas, Practices, Bright Spots
• Podcasts
• #NEWPLAY TV
• New Play Map
• Happenings and Announcements
• City Series
• Regular Columns

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Breaking Through the Bottleneck: Theater Makers in the Black Community Congregate to Change Dynamics in Boston by Akiba Abaka

July 25, 2012 | BY Akiba Abaka

On Tuesday, July 17, eighteen theater makers in Boston’s black community gathered at the Calderwood Pavilion to reverse the energies expelling them to the edges. They gathered to change the landscape of audiences who experience their work, to change how they communicate with each other, to change their lack of presence in the field, and most importantly to change themselves.

The significance of the eighteen people in the room was magnanimous even if this number may be considered small by some measure. Everyone in attendance had self-selected to be there—followed an inspiration, a frustration, a need for more work, more stages, more audience, more youth, more scholars, more funding, more support, more community—essentially a need for each other.

As the door to the Arts Resource Room in the Calderwood Pavilion opened, I was greeted by an all-star cast of Boston’s black theater makers:

• John Adekoje (Filmmaker/Playwright/Educator)
• Jessica Chance (Actor)
• David Curtis (Actor/Musician & Filmmaker)
• Lydia Diamond (Playwright/Professor, Boston University)
• Kirsten Greenidge (Playwright)
• Maria Hendricks (Actor/Activist)
• Obehi Janice (Actor/Producer/Playwright & Solo Performer, Fufu + Oreos)
• Sonya Smith Joyner (Actor)
• Allyssa Jones (Acting Senior Program Director for the Arts, Boston Public Schools)
• Terrence Kidd (Playwright/Co-Founder, Proscenium Playwrights, Lesley University)
• Barbara Lewis (Director, Trotter Institute at UMass Boston & Co-Founder, Boston Black Theater Collective)
• Monica White Ndounou (Scholar/Director, Tufts University)
• Mwalim Peters (Playwright/Director/Storyteller/Professor, UMass Dartmouth)
• Lisa Simmons (Founder, Roxbury Film Festival and Co-Founder Boston Black Theater Collective)
• Phyllis Smith (AEA Stage Manager/Associate Production Manager, Boston Center for the Arts)
• Beverly Morgan Welsh (Executive Director, Museum of African American History)
• Summer Williams (Director/Co-founder, Company One)

Anyone who knows the history of diversity in Boston knows that a bottleneck effect exists that causes change to take place at a very slow pace. For black artists in the theater community this effect is asphyxiating. The diversity of the meeting attendees signified a profound need for theater makers in Boston’s black community to come together across discipline, aesthetics, and organizational affiliations. Moreover, it reminded us that though sometimes dormant, Boston has a very vibrant community of black theater artists—some at the national forefront of our field.

The truth is that we have tried to come together many times over the years. Like a good old faithful automobile the engine would start and stop, start and stop, but perhaps the catalyst for this motor starting up again was the 2012 TCG Conference which was held here in Boston.

The theme of the conference was Model the Movement, yet as I looked around, I realized that the people who are synonymous with one of the most significant movements in United States history, the Civil Rights Movement, were without a model or a movement in Boston. It made me nervous to acknowledge this thought, then anxious, then nervous again. What does it mean? We, the children of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement, the sons and daughters of the Harlem Renaissance, were without a unified voice in a city with a rich history tied to the American Revolution. It made me wonder, where are we? I purposely avoided all the open conversations about race and diversity at the conference because I was ashamed that my city, the host city, didn’t have a model to share.

Enter the Latinos, our cousins. They too had the same questions, needs, and desires for unity—for a network, and they did something about it. They organized. In New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami. I was thinking it’s a shame that so many of my colleagues in the black community were not able to attend the conference. So I approached Dr. Barbara Lewis, Executive Director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the study of black culture at the University of Massachusetts Boston about organizing a meeting where those of us black theater artists who attended the conference could share and discuss what we learned and experienced. The meeting would also serve as a focus group for theater makers in the black community to devise a way of developing a similar network as our Latino cousins.

So, here I will try and recap what we experienced in our meeting. Truthfully, I don’t know what “we” experienced. The meeting was rather short—only one hour and forty-five minutes—to pick the brains of eighteen individuals who represented 222 plus years of experience gathered together in a room of only 750 square feet. But if hope is conciliation for dreaming, then we experienced hope. The gathering reflected the commitment of everyone in the room who gave up attending a meeting, a rehearsal, writing a grant proposal, a move, a child, a husband, a wife to be there. Everyone chose to break away from the life that keeps us all overly engaged and disconnected—to connect and acknowledge that we need to revisit the tribe. The call was wide and loud. Everyone was invited, which we felt was important—to model a movement that is inclusive of all.

So what did we accomplish in that small space, small time, under the weight of our collectively huge accumulated experience? We found we need to come back. We understood that we composed an immensely powerful syndicate that could start a movement not just for blacks, but for all people of color historically marginalized, misrepresented and underrepresented in the theater. Was it a planetary alignment that got us all in the room together?

Perhaps this remarkable gathering was a result of the recent reading of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner staged by Barbara Lewis at the African Meeting House, the oldest black church in the country and part of the Museum of African American History. A part of PROJECT 1 VOICE, a national initiative to preserve black theater and culture, the reading featured prominent players from Boston’s public and private sectors. In participating in the PROJECT 1 VOICE reading, Lewis had done something quite unusual and revolutionary in Boston’s black arts scene—she had invited the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker to come out and play. A special quality of this evening was that all the theater makers were sitting in the audience—Lydia Diamond, Benny Ambush, among others—and they all came out changed. So changed in fact, that at this meeting Diamond remarked that the reading had instilled sense of community she had never before seen in Boston.

So where do we go from here? How do we come back together? There was a call at the meeting to come back not just for another meeting but instead to take action now—and to do it well and do it often. We could start with a monthly staged reading series, taking turns to present a play, a film, or a project being developed at our institutions or individually, and work as one producing team to educate and build the audience. The key to achieving success would be consistency—something that Boston has notoriously lacked in its feast or famine landscape of black theater.

So check in on us—“hold us to it” as Harmond Wilks of August Wilson’s Radio Golf would say. Coming to Boston? Send an email to bostonblacktheatercollective@gmail.com to find out when the next reading will be. I am optimistic, that this time is the right time. The best is yet to come!