Why Is There No Great Black Way
Reconciling the lack of variety and the absence of a united, Black Theater
I didn’t grow up going to plays.
The only plays that I knew of were school ones where I was forced to play Martin Luther King year in and year out and the only theater that I went to was the Bonfils where our Religious Science church held service.
Movies, sure. But I had no concept of the fine art of Theatre. I think, if asked, there would be a different response from many of us that grew up in the 90s and early aughts. I would imagine that a fair amount of Black men and women were exposed to plays and may have seen two or three in their life.
So what is this writing all about then?
While I normally stay within the confines of music, film, and occasionally sports, my primary interest is in the intersection between Black folk in entertainment and the business that surrounds it. Yes, it stands true that many Millennials have seen plays but many have only seen one kind — the traveling, Gospel-tinged Theatre. Very few even know of the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) or the National Black Theatre.
What they know are plays with titles like A Good Man is Hard to Find, Married But Single, and Momma Don’t. They know Tyler Perry not Tarell McCraney, David Talbert not Lynn Nottage.
And that’s fine. But why is there no balance? I know that “The Great White Way” refers to the lights and not the amount of whiteness on Broadway (although it could), but the question has to be asked: Why is there no “Black” Broadway (for lack of a better term)? Why does one form of theater excel in the Black community while the other flounders, and is it possible for there to be a coming together of both forms (of theater)? As always, I got tons of questions, an equal amount of information, and maybe no answers. But it will still be a nice ride. So sit back and enjoy.
When I say I wasn’t exposed to plays as a child, I mean it. I can go deep into my memory banks and recall the movies I saw: Car Wash, Jaws, Halloween, Friday the 13th, 48 Hours, Trading Places, are the first to come to mind. When I look at the years that some of those movies came out: 1976, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1983, I think it was less about taking us to the movies and more about not wanting to get a babysitter.
Around the time we were seeing Trading Places, there was an ad that played on KDKO so frequently that my older brother, Ade and I had our own skit version of it. That advertisement was hilarious to us. But there was nothing funny about Vy Higginsen’s breakout production. Her work would usher in a new type of play.
At least that’s how it’s spoken of. But Black folk had been putting on Theatre, and Theatre quite similar to Higginsen’s, it’s just that time, our collective short memory, and lack of control over mass media outlets, has made us think otherwise. In fact, the first Black-owned and operated Theatre was founded before what we know as Broadway even existed. That theatre was Chicago’s Pekin Theatre and it was revolutionary.
Awhile back I wrote about how our businesses don’t start with family loans but rather dodgy beginnings. That’s how it was in the 80s when Rap labels exploded in Harlem, and that’s how it was in the early 1900s when Robert Mott expanded his saloon to include a theatre.
Mott, who started out as a gambler, arrived in Chicago’s Black Belt (now known as Bronzeville) in 1890, a few decades ahead of the Great Migration. Mott was more than just a gambler though. He was a man of influence and that influence is what made the Pekin Inn a possibility, a place where even the cops would come, gamble, and have a taste.
In the late 1890s and early 1900s there were few opportunities for Black actors with a vast majority of them plotting their trade through the world of vaudeville where the Minstrel show was the most popular form (of entertainment). Sadly, this also meant that many of them had to perform in Blackface.
This is why Mott, after spending time in Paris (take a second to ruminate on that, a boat ride to France in the 30s cost $2gs, how much did it cost in the early 1900s?), after spending time in Paris and witnessing the Café chantants, the singing performances popular at the time, Mott proclaimed that he wanted to make a contribution to Black people “by providing entertainment along more cultural and uplifting lines.”
That went along with the desire of many Black Chicagoens who wanted to see better Black images. And the Pekin Theatre was born. The year was 1905. The original Pekin only sat 400, but like many stories from this period (and my parent’s youth) there was a fire and the New Pekin Theatre was expanded to 1200 seats — that’s a larger capacity than 23 of the 41 Broadway Theatres.
Something I love about history — seeing the intersection between people that I’ve always heard of with people I’m just learning about. Like most people, I know Ida B Wells for her stance against lynching, but what I didn’t know is that she was a lover of Theatre.
I didn’t know that she saw the Pekin Theatre as an opportunity to present positive imagery of Black people, and I didn’t know that Wells helped to raise the financing possible for the Theatre’s repair.
To celebrate the opening of the ‘New’ Pekin Theatre, the company put on an original musical, The Man From Bam, which Salt Lake City’s Broad Ax described as such:
The Man from Bam has played to full houses during the entire week at the new Pekin Theatre. Saturday night, at the opening, the new play was crowded to the doors and many were turned away because every seat had been sold. Broad Ax, April 7, 1906, pg 2
The Man From Bam was an original piece by Ragtime great, Joe Jordan, who was hired as Musical Director of the Theatre in 1906. It is said that Jordan, over the three years he was at the Pekin, composed music and lyrics for an original production…every two weeks.
The Pekin was described as “the only theater in the country, probably the only regular playhouse in the world, owned, managed, and conducted by colored people, presenting with a stock company of colored artists, original musical comedies, farces and plays written and composed by colored men in this city.”
But it wouldn’t be the last.
The Pekin Theatre was so popular that as Black-owned theatres popped up across the US, many of them took on the name, Pekin Theatre, as well (Cincinnati laid claim to one that has since been bulldozed — more on that another time).
One of the people inspired by the Pekin was a vaudevillian relocated from Texas to Chicago. After experiencing a night at the Black-owned theatre, he gushed, “I have never felt so proud of being a colored man. … The entertainment was a revolution and shows just what Negroes (sic) can and must do in the near future.”
That quote was from Sherman H. Dudley and he did just that — he took the revolution to DC and upped the ante.
I’ll be the first to admit it. When I think of the late 1890s and early 1900s, the last thing that comes to mind is Black folk fighting to do theatre. That’s not even a generation out of slavery. And, while small in number (according to the US Census of 1910) and relative to the population (barely 9.9 million), 1, 279 actors is still a lot more actors than I thought were plying that trade during the days after Reconstruction.
That, of course, is the number given by the Census, there got to have been hundreds (even thousands more). But if someone gave me that number before I started writing this piece, I would just assume that all of those actors were either performing minstrels or vaudeville. I certainly would have never thought about troupes like the Howard Players that were putting on plays of the “classics.” And I would have never imagined that we were writing deep, reflective pieces like Rachel, written by Angelina Weld Grimké, that dealt with lynching and Black motherhood.
So it makes sense that there would be a growing desire for us to have control over our own fate.
Sherman H. Dudley had experienced and participated in both the minstrels and vaudeville. But what he saw at the Pekin inspired him to take another course in life — Theatre Ownership and Operation.
Upon moving to DC in 1914, Dudley set out to purchase theatres. I’ve read several different accounts and there doesn’t seem to be a general consensus on the ratio of theatres owned by Dudley and the theatres that were Black operated via his association. What is agreed upon is that Dudley’s association included 20+ theatres, the first such Black owned/run circuit of its kind.
But he wasn’t alone. There were other Black-owned theatres throughout the US; Black theatres that put on Black shows, with Black stagehands, for Black audiences. And that infuriated whites. White labor unions forced some Black theatres to fire their stagehands (they weren’t and couldn’t become union) and in other drastic cases, had their talent stolen.
This is what happened to John T. Gibson:
In 1927, Duke Ellington and his band, the Washingtonians, were playing an extended gig at the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia. When Owney Madden decided he wanted Ellington back at his Cotton Club in New York City, he made a call to Philadelphia bootlegger Maxie “Boo Boo” Hoff, who in turn sent Yankee Schwartz to speak to the Standard’s manager. There, Schwartz made his offer. “Be big. Or you’ll be dead.” The next day, Ellington and his band were on the train back to New York.
John T. Gibson owned two Philly theatres, the Standard and the Dunbar (which was built by two Black bankers, EC White and Andrew Stevens), and as a result was the richest Black man in the city of Brotherly Love, road around town in his Pierce-Arrow, luxury car (the 20s version of a Rapide) that was driven by a white chauffeur, but he couldn’t stop mobsters from pilfering his talent (Shame the Honorable Elijah Muhammad wasn’t on the scene yet. When mobsters told Muhammad Ali that if he didn’t take a dive in a fight that they would break his kneecaps, Ali reported that to THEM, who responded, ‘tell them they have kneecaps too’).
Gibson’s theatres, the ones owned or ran by Dudley, were like the Pekin, they sat 1,100+ and would qualify as major Broadway theaters (as opposed to Off Broadway theatres that seat between 400 to 900).
But those theatres weren’t passed down and that legacy died with their owners. By the time the 1930s were in full swing those theatres were either movie houses or owned by whites, many of them have been razed.
It was important to mention this history because Blacks were into theatre and theatre ownership early on and their rise and growth took place either before or during the birth of what we know as Broadway today. For perspective, we’ll provide a contrast.
What some people call “conspiracy,” I would call solidarity. It’s actually funny how we differentiate what we consider dubious and what we don’t. You don’t ever see people railing about the Korean Nail Cartel or the Mexican and South American Landscaping Mafioso. But you can best believe that everyone has their own people’s best interest at heart.
Sadly, when it comes to entertainment, we often end up on the short end of that best interest stick. Yes, we’re often preyed on. Yes, we often have controlled wrestled from us — the game is rigged and this is still America, but more often than not we suffer because we fail to learn from the example of others.
Which brings me to the Shubert brothers. But you can’t talk about them without first learning about the Theatrical Syndicate…no…really, that’s what they were known as. The Theatrical Syndicate was the brainchild of six men: Charles Frohman, Al Hayman, A. L. Erlanger, Marc Klaw, Samuel F. Nirdlinger, and Frederick Zimmerman, and between them, they had a monopoly on who performed in what theatre all over the country. The mastermind of which some consider to be Frohman.
Like many of the Jewish men and women that built Broadway and later Hollywood, Frohman was the child of 1st Generation Eastern Europeans. His father, Nathan, instilled the love of Theatre in young Charles at an early age with passes to plays gifted for good behavior. Frohman is a necessary aside, by the way, and points to one of our ongoing themes.
Enthralled with Theatre, Charles was blessed to have an older brother, Gustave enter the business before him. Gustave Frohman’s role was two fold. Having won the respect of Charles Callender, Gustave promoted and managed the most popular Minstrel Traveling Troupe of it’s day, Callender’s Georgia Minstrel, an all Black troupe. Soon he sent for the excited Charles. They bounced from company to company finally landing in J.H. Haverly’s camp just in time to take over the Haverly Colored Minstrel which was eventually sold to The Frohman’s.
Interestingly enough, there was a Black promoter of the time, Barney Hicks, who is known as the first of his kind. He stole some of Haverly’s troupe away, built up his version of the show with the newly minted Georgia’s Minstrels…(yes, that’s the same group that Callender ran) and was then sold to the Frohman’s.
As Minstrel shows began to lose pull to vaudeville and circuses, the Frohman’s bankrolled their success into managing theatres. Wanting more control, Charles Frohman united with other theatre owners and booking agents and formed what became the The Syndicate. The Syndicate standardized the booking of shows and actors but they had the same approach that is attributed to Ford, “you can book any show, so long as the show is produced with Syndicate producers and actors.”
Actors that had long booked themselves and had risen to stardom as a result were immediately against the machinations of the Syndicate, as were traveling Theatre troupes, and independent Theatre owners. For over a decade the Syndicate maintained a monopoly over theatrical production. Then came the Shuberts.
The average citizen hates history. Unable to make a connection with modern times, they take the study as tales from the past — practically fiction. Meanwhile, they function in a world created by people who had their legacies in mind. They enter into buildings named after individuals, use inventions of others, study fields and work for businesses all created by men and women. History.
If you’re into Broadway, it’s inevitable for you not to come in contact with history. The Shubert Organization owns seventeen (17) Broadway Theatres, two Off-Broadway. And they don’t just own the buildings, they own the land that the Theatres are built on. That didn’t just HAPPEN. And if you seek to learn where the power of the Shubert family came from, you have to study History. It’s a living discipline that affects not just the people who seek to enter in the field of drama, but it also affects all New Yorkers.
Sam Shubert, back in 1900, was the first to set up shop in Manhattan. After building a chain of theatres upstate, Sam decided it was time to take a bite out of the Big Apple. Subleasing the Herald Square Theater put Sam in direct opposition to the Syndicate. Unlike those who came before him, Sam didn’t back down. And, up until his death in a freak train action in 1905, he fought fire with fire, acquiring theatres and going head to head with the Syndicate.
After his death, brothers J.J. and Lee took up the charge. The intense competition wore down the Syndicate and their influence slowly dwindled. This gave rise to the unmatched dominance of the Shubert family who once owned hundreds of theatres all over the world. Their main headquarters, however, was built in an area soon to be named after the newspaper of another family empire — Times Square.
It is in that area that, in 1913, the Shuberts built the Shubert and the Booth Theatres (they opened within two weeks of each other) and it is that area that Theatre critic Richard Hornby once remarked, “in New York, the desirability of a theatre is inversely proportional to its distance from Shubert Alley.” Hornby made that claim because what we know as Broadway sprung up in that area in the 1920s.
Now, one hundred and eighteen years after the arrival of Sam Shubert, the Shubert empire is separated into two entities: The Shubert Foundation and The Shubert Organization. The Foundation provides grants for the arts, the Organization still owns 17 theatres and the land beneath them.
N. R. Kleinfeld, in a July 1994, NYT article, described the Organization like this:
The Shubert Organization is considered by knowledgeable theater people to be a low-risk enterprise. Its theaters and other real estate holdings have no mortgages. With the likes of the Majestic, the Broadway and the Winter Garden, it owns most of the important theaters for musicals, the cash cows of Broadway. Even shows that never return a profit to their investors often generate handsome profits to the Shubert Organization through theater rents and other fees.
(click on that hyperlink — the one connected with the word ‘this.’ that thur is a rabbit hole fa real).
If you need perspective on what those numbers look like, Broadway revenue for the year 2016/2017 was $1.45B. That’s the amount of money generated by 41 theaters. The Shubert Organization owns almost half of them. You do the math.
This aside was necessary for one reason — to put history in perspective. The Pekin Theatre era could have lead to a chain of theatres. It didn’t. Sherman H. Dudley could have continued buying up and managing theatres, 20 is a big number. He didn’t. John T. Gibson could have grown his two theatres into an empire, He didn’t.
Those pioneers were at the grown floor of what we know as Broadway today, building theatres in the same manner that the Syndicate was formed, and also around the same time the Shubert’s were creating their empire. The same thing can be seen in automobile manufacturing, baseball, basketball, and almost every other field, but I digress.
By the time the 50s rolled around, Black folk trying to get into Theatre had no where to go.
I’ve always felt connected to our sista Ms. Lorraine Hansberry. I don’t know what it is, but from the opening scene in the film adaptation Raisin in the Sun (61), I saw in her work a kindred spirit. I wrote about how Hansberry understood the complexity of Black life before and I even used this monologue for my college senior thesis in Theatre Direction:
WALTER (Coming to her) I’m going to feel fine, Mama. I’m going to look that son-of-a-bitch in the eyes and say (He falters) and say, “All right, Mr. Lindner
(He falters even more) that’s your neighborhood out there! You got the right to keep it like you want! You got the right to have it like you want! Just write the check and the house is yours.” And and I am going to say (His voice almost breaks) “And you you people just put the money in my hand and you won’t have to live next to this bunch of stinking niggers! . . .” (He straightens up and moves away from his mother, walking around the room)And maybe maybe I’ll just get down on my black knees . . . (He does so; RUTH and BENNIE and MAMA watch him in frozen horror) “Cap- tain, Mistuh, Bossman (Groveling and grinning and wringing his hands in profoundly anguished imitation of the slow-witted movie stereotype) A-hee-hee-hee! Oh, yassuh boss! Yasssssuh! Great white (Voice breaking, he forces himself to go on) Father, just gi’ ussen de money, fo’ God’s sake, and we’s we’s ain’t gwine come out deh and dirty up yo* white folks neighborhood . . .” (He breaks down completely) And I’ll feel fine! Fine! FINE! (He gets up and goes into the bedroom)
I can’t pinpoint exactly when or what channel I saw that 1961 film on but I can say that it was one of the first accurate depictions of Black life that I had ever seen. This was either around or before She’s Gotta Have it. So at that point, Raisin in the Sun, the movie, was twenty-five years old, the play — twenty-seven. Despite that, two things were true at the time: Hansberry’s breakout work was still timely, and there were few Black plays on Broadway.
Back in 59, Hansberry was a part of a collective, Raisin, was to Black plays at the time what Le Beau Serge was to the French New Wave (which, incidentally, was taking place around the same time). A Raisin in the Sun was the play that united Douglas Turner Ward, Lonne Elder, Robert Hooks, and Lorraine Hansberry — a collective that would become known as the Negro Ensemble Company.
I won’t go into great detail about Lorraine Hansberry’s life as exemplary as it is because I would encourage you to watch the American Masters feature about her and, if at all possible to read this, but suffice it to say, her model would ultimately be the model for the NEC.
Philip Rose is more remembered for his work on Broadway than the life that provided him with the capital to enter into producing plays. Rose started in music publishing.
Enamored with Blackness, Rose frequented Black neighborhoods in his native DC as a youth. As an adult, Rose moved to New York and sang Jazz in Harlem. After an early reading of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Rose made it his mission to produce the play at all costs…and he would reap the benefits.
The problem was, aside from Lorraine Hansberry being unknown, her play wasn’t what white audiences were used to from Black folk — it was neither a comedy nor was it a musical — so Rose knew that he would have to fill the package with some star power and it just so happened that Rose was friends with the most popular Black actor of the day, Sidney Poitier. Rose set up a reading.
And not just any old reading either.
Lorraine Hansberry read all of the parts, and, unbeknownst to Poitier, she was also the author.
He was blown away.
Poitier tried to guess who the author could be — first guessing Alice Childress who was hot off an Obie win for her Off-Broadway play, Trouble in Mind, next he guessed Youngblood author John Killens, lastly he threw caution to the wind and assumed that it had to have been written by the great James Baldwin.
Those guesses were wrong of course, and Poitier was elated to find out that the woman convincingly acting out every role was also the talent behind the play. All that was left was working out the logistics. Sidney Poitier was on board.
And with Sidney Poitier on board that meant a play was happening fa sho. Thousands of Black actors tried out for the few roles (ten)— of course — there were few opportunities to play characters that resembled real life…on Broadway no less, directed by, GASP, a Black director (Lloyd Richards). Nothing like this had ever been seen before (in the end both Lonne Elder and Douglas Ward Turner ended up with parts).
Like most Broadway plays, the show was workshopped in tryout theatres in New Haven and Philly, respectively. But it was in Philly at the Walnut Street Theater where the play took off. Raisin played there for two weeks, attracting a large Black, working class audience.
Shocked that people were paying more for their play when they could have seen Sidney Poitier in his Oscar nominated role in Defiant Ones, Director Lloyd Richards decided to ask one of the women whom he saw entering the theatre why. He remembers it like this:
This woman in Philadelphia got to the window and asked for a ticket. It was, I think, $4.80. And she started into the theater and was surprised to be told she couldn’t go in until 8 o’clock. So I engaged her in conversation. I said, ‘Why are you paying $4.80 to come to this play?’ She said, ‘The word’s going around my neighborhood that there’s something here that has to do with me.’ Lloyd Richards
And it was.
Raisin spoke the language of our people and it also spoke the language of that family that we mentioned above, the Shuberts, who bought into the play, taking it to Chicago for one last trial run. This is how Jet Magazine described that:
A Raisin in the Sun, opened at Chicago’s Blackstone Theater en route to Broadway, and accomplished an almost unheard-of feat in the city — the blessings of all the critics — reputedly the toughest in the legitimate theatrical circuit. Jet Magazine, 26 Feb 1959, pg 57
Thus, A Raisin in the Sun marched triumphantly into Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre where on opening night, Wednesday, the 11th of March, 19 and 59, the cast would receive a seven-minute ovation, nine curtain calls, and wouldn’t settle down until Sidney Poitier hoisted Hansberry out of her seat and brought her on stage before the audience. James Baldwin remarked “Never before in the entire history of the American theater had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage.”
Nothing like this had ever been seen before. The accolades poured in. Awards were hurled at Hansberry and the play. Raisin was quickly sold to Columbia and adapted into a film. Hansberry was even offered a writing gig with NBC. Nothing like this had ever been seen before…and it would never be seen for Hansberry again.
It soon became clear that Hansberry’s writing was adored so long as it didn’t seem overtly political. Hollywood execs did their best to tone down any hint of race and NBC…NBC got one whiff of The Drinking Gourd, thought it was violent and divisive, and it never aired. There were even concerns about if Hansberry would write another “race” play to which she responded, “I can’t really allow the limitations of white supremacist thinking to condition my attitude toward life.”
Lorraine Hansberry suffered from cancer througout the writing and production of her next and last play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, it received lukewarm reviews, and Hansberry would pass three months after the plays opening.
I only recently found out that Zora Neal Hurston died in 1960, alone and broke.
Having grown up in the 80s and 90s, long after Alice Walker’s seminal 1975 piece, Looking for Zora, Hurston was a revered writer that we studied at Clark (hell, we even read Their Eyes Were Watching God in my very white, very Eurocentric Denver high school).
It seems hard for me to believe that she was ever obscure.
But she was.
And that seems to be common with many of our greats.
This piece has taken longer than most because at every turn I keep learning of playwrights, directors, set designers, powerhouses in Black Theatre that I have never heard of before.
While I was no Theatre major, I did take electives in the field (my desire was to be a great director of actors), and still I had never heard of people like Ed Bullins, Lofton Mitchell, or Nicole Childress.
I had no idea that like, Baseball, Theatre was once an important institution to us; that it was something that we cared deeply about — deeply enough to have ‘Annual Issues’ (as seen above) in periodicals like the Negro Digest where thousands of words were written discussing a subject that I rarely ever hear mentioned in any form of our media now.
When I think of the 60s, I think Civil Rights, Motown, British Invasion and all that. I can’t say I ever considered Theatre which, like everything else in that time period, was experienceing a revolution.
This piece could have just as easily been written about the Black Arts Movement (the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in particular) especially considering the impact that it had. But there was no through line. Despite the fact that Robert Hooks (who would go on to found The Group Theatre Workshop and ultimately the NEC) acted in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, by the time I was growing up, it would be something that I had to unsurface.
The NEC overlapped with my life.
Late one night I decided to rewatch A Soldier’s Story. The first thoughts that went through my head were memories of watching the film overseas (my older brother said we saw it in Germany).
But then, being who I am, I wanted to find out what happened to the star of the movie, Henry Rollins, tragic story. Then, being who I am, I wanted to find the origins of the screenplay. Based on a successful play, A Soldier’s Play, knew that, got it. But, being who I am, I wanted to find out who the original cast was — Denzel, right, Adolph Caesar, check, both in the movie, Samuel Jackson? Hold up.
The original staging of the play took place back in 81, 82. First time I even vaguely remembering seeing Sam Jackson was when he was one of the ‘locals’ in School Daze. That was 88. What kind of institution launched Samuel Jackson…AND Denzel?
That’s how I learned about Charles Fuller and that’s how I learned about the NEC. I got to looking into Fuller’s career and became disturbed. Knowing about him winning an Obie for Zooman and The Sign, that he won a Pulitzer, but then hearing him describe his series of plays, WE, to Lynn Nottage and the backlash that he suffered, got me thinking.
Throughout all of this, I discussed it with my brother, Ismail Latif, who just assumed that I was writing something about it. The more I read, the more convinced I became that I did indeed have to make a go of it. What made me come to that conclusion was a study of the Negro Ensemble Company and the years before its inception.
These weren’t just Black folk involved in writing plays and trying to make it, they were also linked through their politics, particularly Douglas Ward Turner and Hansberry who had extreme left leanings. This is the early 50s, we’re talking.
It was around that time (1953) that Hansberry (along with Lonne Elder) read Turner’s first full-length play, The Trial of Willie McGee, before an audience at the Hotel Teresa. It was this action that Turner estimates influenced Hansberry to move beyond journalism and poetry to playwriting.
Although Turner kept writing, it would be a little over ten years before he wrote two plays that would “change things forever.”
Capital.
That’s always the issue.
Who knows what would have happened had Robert Hooks had capital when he began teaching youth acting in his Chelsea, New York apartment. What would the Group Theatre Workshop had become? Initially, it was by Blacks and the first bit of funding was from Blacks. Hooks linked up with Al Bell and Clarence Avant (remember him) and described it like this:
I went to lunch with Al Bell and Clarence Avant (music executives). We met with them about investing in the plays. I opened the plays and started reading them. I gave them depth. The people in the restaurant were listening to me and the whole restaurant was laughing. They stopped me and asked how much I needed. I said $35,000. They said to come by tomorrow and they would write us a check. Robert Hooks
That financing would quickly be overshadowed and much like Lorraine Hansberry’s trajectory, the growth of Hooks’ endeavor would soon become solely dependent on white financing. That endeavor was the Negro Ensemble Company and the financing would come from the Ford Foundation.
Fresh off the heels of a successful performance of Douglas Ward Turner’s Happy Ending, A Day of Absence, and a commissioned New York Times piece entitled, American Theatre: For Whites Only?, W. McNeil Lowery, the man who had control of the purse strings for the Ford Foundation, was impressed.
Douglas Ward Turner recalls:
What had impressed him was that we had done something ourselves, independently. Earlier he had given seed money to a group that had never come through with a concrete proposal — which made us all the more attractive to him. Douglas Ward Turner
And just like that, $400gs was forwarded to the newly formed company ($1.1M over the next three years) and Turner, Hooks, and partner Gerry Krone (who also managed 90% of all Off-Broadway plays) got to work.
The funding, however, was a double-edged sword. While it afforded the NEC the ability to have an ensemble, teach classes, and mount plays, it also brought them under serious scrutiny.
History is a helluva thing. People love to romanticize it and their place in it but if you pull up source material (like the digest from the image above) you get to see the real, ugly, truth. And that truth is, anytime Black folk achieve any level of perceived success, we come for each other — a behavior taught to us by those who enslaved us and which stays with us like the stench of a skunk.
When I say they came for the NEC, I mean…yo…check these words:
The Negro Ensemble Company, despite its claims, is not Black Theater. It may be interesting theater; it may be good theater, but to call it Black theater would be considerably stretching the definition of Black Theater…Peter Baily, The Negro Digest, April 1968, pg 19.
Baily’s gripe was a common one — if the Negro Ensemble Company was funded by white folk, had white folk (Krone, to name one) in key positions, and put on plays that were not written by Black people, how could they call themselves Black.
Which, I mean, that’s fair. But what Hooks and Turner were doing was simply being free. Free to express themselves as they saw fit, an ability often lacking in Theatre for Black people. Not to mention, it was only the beginning.
As the Ford money dried up, the NEC began struggling, and as they continued to work, the plays focused more on the Black experience…where were those critics then?
Had it not been for the success of plays like the River Niger, Zooman and the Sign, and A Soldier’s Play, the NEC surely would have gone under. Which would have been a shame. Google the ‘Negro Ensemble Company’ and look at the Wiki page. Glance on the right hand side at ‘Notable Members.’ Damn near every Black actor from my youth is on that list. No NEC could have possibly meant, none of those great actors.
Reading about the NEC post 1981 is struggle after struggle, I’ll end this section with this bit from Crisis magazine from October 1992. The NEC, as previously mentioned, was in trouble again. This time the company needed $250,000. When the interviewer asked had the NEC disbanded, Douglas Ward Turner answered, “if we don’t raise $250,000 by the end of the year the decision will be made for us.”
Which brings me to the heart of this writing — why does it have to be this way?
Whether it was trips to Mile High Comics or New Life Church, that damn Mama I Want to Sing commercial would be playing at every Magic 1510 commercial break. I remember it so vividly because of the “Mama, I want to SI-IN-IN-ING” part. It was so annoying.
All I knew was apparently, it was a big deal. But I had no idea.
Because to say that there is no Black Theatre would be an outright lie. As I stated in the intro, all Black Theatre isn’t floundering. We have what would even be an anomaly on Broadway— we have millionaire playwrights. They write plays that exist in a world unknown to Variety or Playbill and even if there was some crossover, the audience for these plays don’t give a damn about those publications.
It’s never easy to pinpoint the origin of a thing but if we are talking about that form of Theatre, it don’t get no bigger than Mama I Want to Sing.
The proper term…or the accepted one at least, is Urban Theater. Though Henry Louis Gates traced the ‘movement’ back to the 20s — a continuance of the Chitlin Circuit — back in a 1997 New Yorker article, that term is often rejected. While I use the term myself sometimes, I would have to agree with the practitioners of these plays. The Chitlin Circuit, by and large was ran by white people…this new, Urban Theater…it’s Black as hell.
Which is why I’m starting with Mama I Want to Sing, a play that Broadway wouldn’t touch.
And rightfully so, I guess. The play is a love letter from one sister to another.
Vy Higginsen was known as several things, an advertising sales agent for Ebony, a radio personality on WBLS, but a playwright? Not really.
But Higginsen wrote a play about her older sister, Doris Troy’s travels from a girl growing up in the church, being discovered at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, and recording a hit, “Just One Look” (which, to my surprise, some people only know from a Pepsi commercial).
That’s a common story now, and it certainly was a common occurrence back in 1963 when Troy landed the Billboard 100 hit, but a play?
There’s little written about the play’s first twelve show run which premiered on Wednesday, 3 December 1980. Instead, when there’s mention of Mama I Want to Sing what’s referred to is the self-financed, 1983 run.
Unable to get any backers on Broadway, Vy Higgensen and husband Ken Wydro put up $37Gs of their own money, and rented out the 600+ seat Heckscher Theatre. Some claim the strongest point about the play was the songs…and the marketing. Higgensen applied what she learned at Ebony when she began marketing the play. “I learned the importance and the buying power of the black consumer market,” Higgensen recalled, “which to this day serves me well as a producer and marketing/advertising person.”
Higgensen built the model that many would follow. She focused her advertising to radio ads, Black, Church newspapers, word of mouth, and long before the current craze of newsletters, Higgensen and company grew a 25,000 name mailing list which they sent promotional material to several times a year.
Another part of that model that Higgensen created was the wholesome, church-based, uplifting theme. This is how Wydro described it, “There’s no violence, no sex, no beating-up and no cursing in this show, We offer an uplifting product.” Higgensen added, “Our audiences want to see a strong man and a woman who takes care of her child.”
Mama I Want to Sing was review proof. It was a must-see play that packed the theatre, defied the odds, and played for eight years. When the sequel to the play (which ran concurrently with the original) was reviewed by the New York Times’ Stephen Holden said:
It is shameless in the way it pulls heartstrings. The dialogue and line readings sometimes go completely flat. And the flashing of dimly lighted slides to illustrate scenes at the rear of a crude set that is part disk-jockey booth, part choir loft is so ineffective that one quickly stops noticing.
That had absolutely no effect on the audience. By that time, Mama… (the original) had raked in $25M already and it was the road tour that began in 85 that I’m sure we heard advertised to us as we rode up Havana to Buckingham Mall.
And the floodgates slowly began to open. The traveling gospel play was set to start its thirty year dominance among Black Theatre goers.
I think the reason I ain’t know about the lucrative world of the traveling gospel play is because I’m Muslim. To tell the truth, even if I were Christian, I still might not know.
I never been a fan of Gospel.
The extent of my Gospel knowledge is “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms (which I just learned was written by a white woman from Arkansas, Iris DeMent…who knew). Outside of that song, I know the BET Gospel record commercial with “Rough Side of the Mountain” and what not.
The only reason I knew Tyler Perry is because he EXPLODED on the scene but we’ll get back to him. Because he came later. There were several other big-as-all-get-out in the Black community playwrights before him.
The first that I could find after Higgensen is the “Godfather of Urban Theater,” Shelly Garrett (who recently returned, May Allah be Pleased with him) and, while Mama I Want to Sing was the blueprint, Garrett’s Beauty Shop was the model.
At the time, Garrett was a bit part actor (as it is described) with roles in small plays and some national commercials for Midas, KFC, and GMC. He had previously been a DJ (Shelly the Music Man) and even a police officer but Garrett desired fame.
Acting wasn’t getting it.
It was a question, “Which one of you sluts is fooling around with my husband,” that Garrett heard in a beauty salon that inspired him to write his first play. Written in long hand, Garrett churned it out in six days. Next, he cast the play quickly and set an opening in a 550 seater San Bernardino theater.
He didn’t even sell fifty tickets.
Garrett was discouraged and ready to quit but the cast told him to push on. It was his father, however, who suggested that he advertise and open up in Los Angeles. So that’s what Garrett did — he bought five, one-minute spots that aired on KLJH (102.3FM) for seventeen days (the spots had Shelly Garrett’s name mentioned seven times — that’s more than one time every ten seconds).
The radio spots garnered attention, the show sold out in twelve days, and Garrett would use that same method as he expanded the show across America.
This is how Sid Smith of the Chicago Tribune describes the promotion for Beauty Shop:
He takes out few or no print media advertisements and provides no publicity kits, nor does he make solicitations for feature stories or reviews. It is safe to say that his production, now on a national tour, can slip into town-as it did for brief engagements here in September and again in late October at the Arie Crown Theatre-without a vast portion of the white theatrical audience even becoming aware of its existence.
Smith goes on to say:
Instead, Garrett unleashes a deluge of short radio advertisements on a prominent station popular in the black community (here, he selected WGCI-AM/FM) and otherwise depends on word-of-mouth. By those means, he and Beauty Shop have been immensely successful.
Word-of-mouth was what caused the play to explode in Los Angeles after Garrett impressed Sentinel gossip columnist, Gertrude Gibson, with a $125 ($280 in 2018 dollars) bottle of Dom P. Ms. Gibson championed Garrett from that moment on and Black Los Angeles listened — they listened to the tune of enabling Beauty Shop to go from weekend performances to an entire month’s worth. And word of mouth is what proceeded Beauty Shop in every city it opened.
That traveling show would lead to two of the more popular Urban Theater practitioners and then the floodgates would open.
My family had every line of these plays memorized (or so it seemed to me).
It seemed like every time I came home to Maryland and it was a large family gathering at some point they would end up on a couch, someone would throw a copy of these plays on, and the laugher would ensue. Being a film snob, I was already shocked, “someone shot a play, burned some DVDs, and people are buying it?” Then when I watched them I became more shocked. What exactly was this?
Titles like I Can Do Bad all By Myself, Married but Single, A Good Man is Hard to Find, etc were written in Sharpie on the DVDs and in the mid aughts they were EVERYWHERE.
When one of these plays was turned into a film, shot for a mere five million and turned a $45 million profit, I had to take notice.
Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman only highlighted what most Black audiences had already known, there were was a wide array of traveling plays that were popular among us that white folk (and me) had never heard of. But Perry was hardly to first to do it.
That honor belongs to David E Talbert. After catching Beauty Shop, Talbert was bitten by the playwriting bug. That’s when the Morgan graduate penned Tellin’ it Like it Tiz. He was the first to commit his plays to DVD, the first to incorporate celebrities like Malik Yoba, Morris Chestnut, Kirk Frankilin, etc into his productions, all of which happened under the radar.
Tyler Perry is known for his breakout success and continuous string of hits at the box office but he’s hardly an anomaly. People like Pastor David Payton (RIP), Je’Caryous Johnson, etc (some, like Laterras R Whitfield, don’t even have a Wikipedia entry) all have (had) an audience — and many of them are millionaires.
Despite that, none of them own a string of theatres. Perhaps we could learn a little from across the pond.
Musicals make the world of Broadway go ‘round…West End too and at the heart of many of the most successful musicals is Sir Cameron Mackintosh.
Starting as a stagehand in his teens, Mackintosh worked his way up the theatrical ladder to become a producer, putting out a string of plays between the late 60s and the 70s. But it was Mackintosh’s production of Cats that not only brought him critical acclaim, it also became one of the longest running musicals ever.
He hasn’t looked back since, putting out whoppers like Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon. Then, in 1991, Mackintosh formed Delfont Mackintosh Theatres Limited and the company purchased and renovated its first two theatres, the Prince of Wales and Prince Edwards Theatres. The Group now owns nine of the forty West End Theatres.
Mackintosh was recently valued at £1.05bn.
But his value is greater than the revenue the theatres bring in. Mackintosh not only changed the spectrum of London, his musicals would revitalize Broadway and open the Great White Way to the corporate world of Disney and beyond (but that’s another story).
Cameron helped to create the success story of the current West End theatre. His shows have become global earners and proof to the world of the talent and imagination of which Britain is capable. He remains a genuine enthusiast — he wants the whole sector to succeed. John Kampfner
While Tyler Perry has turned his profits into the sprawling Tyler Perry Studios which includes 34th Street Films, neither he nor any of the above Producer/Playwrights have worked towards establishing an outlet for Black Theatre.
Whenever I read about how only two of August Wilson’s plays were profitable, it pains me. Considered to be one of our greats, Wilson won every award imaginable: from Pulitzers to National Humanities Medals, from Tonys to Artist of the Year. All of that. Yet he wasn’t wealthy.
It was refreshing for me to see that Vy Higgensen at the height of her success put $250,000 into Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, but that’s not something that you see or hear about very often.
I read about up-and-coming playwrights all the time — Tarell Alvin McCraney, Marcus Gardley, Dael Orlandersmith, Antoinette Nwandu — and short of McCraney (who got some notoriety with the screenplay for Moonlight, which was based on his own play), most of them are not household names…and they’re certainly not filling theatre seats with us.
Instead they depend on the largesse of philanthropist and the like in the same way that Hansberry and Fuller did.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
As we’ve illustrated above, our people had the idea of owning theatres during the time when Broadway was formed. We did it mostly out of neccesity but also because we saw that one could build wealth that way. John T Gibson was a good example.
We lacked the foresight to see what holding on to those theatres could mean for ourselves. Even when we look at the success of Shelly Garrett (and others) their plays were put on in theatres that we did not own.
So that’s the answer to the question that we posed above — why is there no great Black Way — lack of unity. There is enough wealth circling around between all of these Urban Theater producers that now, if they so desired, they could build a series of theatres in a city like Atlanta or Philadelphia, Houston or Oakland, put on their plays for part of the year and offer up residencies to playwrights like those mentioned above for the other part — they could build a Theatre scene to rival — or surpass the likes of Broadway.
All they have to do is unite.
In order for our people to have a more balanced experience when it comes to the art of Theatre, it’s incumbent upon us to take on that responsibility. There’s no guarantee that young people will continue to pursue the art of playwrighting if they know that there’s no return on investment for their hard work and time.
That will ultimately lead to only one type of Theatre and that would be a travesty to the legacy of the many who fought to build a platform for Black people to express themselves freely.
