A Black Hole on the San Diego Theater Scene : Everybody Loses When Actors Can’t Find Roles

Where can you go these days to see gifted black San Diego actors perform?

Los Angeles. New York. Minneapolis.

Increasingly, the answer is anywhere but San Diego.

That is distressing for both aspiring black actors who need a stage to practice on and for the black director in town, Floyd Gaffney, who has been trying to put together a professional black theater company in San Diego for 18 years.

“Maybe we can catch people on the way up,” Gaffney said. “You go out and, if you’re lucky, you’ll get someone talented who’s moving through, like Hassan El-Amin, but soon he’ll be gone again.”

It is a Catch-22 in which nobody wins. Without professional black theater artists, there can be no resident black theater company. Without a black theater company, there is no source of income that will allow professional black artists to make a living here.

In the absence of theater about the black experience, black audiences--who are still not in the theatergoing habit--don’t show up. Without black audiences coming to mainstream theaters, theater companies will not see such programming as in their interest when planning a season schedule.

Although leading theaters such as the Old Globe Theatre and the La Jolla Playhouse may feature black actors in August Wilson plays (at the Globe) or original works like “Shout Up a Morning” (at the Playhouse), their shows are usually cast from New York or Los Angeles.

In the case of the Wilson plays, the casts come intact from the Yale Repertory Theatre. As one observer who sympathized with the practice of casting elsewhere confided, “I couldn’t find the quality of black actors I would need to cast in town.”

The closest thing San Diego has to a black theater troupe is the Southeast Community Theatre, which produced “Williams and Walker,” which just closed at the Lyceum Space on Sunday, and plans to present “Black Nativity,” a gospel Christmas play at the Educational Cultural Complex in November.

The Southeast Community Theatre is the place where Cleavon Little, a Southeast San Diego native, and Whoopi Goldberg performed in their years here. But the status of the Southeast Community Theater, which, after 25 years, has yet to find a home or scrape together enough money for more than two plays a season, symbolizes the precarious nature of black theater in San Diego as a whole.

The homelessness of the Southeast Community Theatre is a sore spot for the black theater community.

Another painful subject is the collapse of the Southern California Black Repertory Theatre, which flourished in the late 1970s under a variety of names including the Wing and a Prayer Repertory Company and the Rainbow Repertory Company. The short-lived company collapsed not long after two of its founders, actors James Avery and John Wesley, left to pursue their careers in San Francisco and then Los Angeles, where they continue to work in television and film.

When that organization went, black actors had to again leave San Diego if they wanted to find work as professionals.

El-Amin, born and raised in Southeast San Diego, remembers looking up to Avery and Wesley as role models. El-Amin just finished playing the legendary Bert Williams in the poignant Southeast Community Theatre production of “Williams and Walker,” which Avery and Wesley returned home to see.

It was a part that hit close to home for El-Amin, Avery, Wesley and the scores of black artists who attended, but never managed to fill, the 200-seat space. Opening night brought fewer than 10 people into the theater; by the end of the four-week run, about 100-150 were in attendance.

Williams was a turn-of-the-century black vaudevillian who managed to break the color barrier at the Ziegfeld Follies, but only by agreeing to put black greasepaint on his face and chalk up his eyes and lips a glaring white. That is how the audiences expected blacks to look, whether they were being played by white or black performers.

Williams longed to play Hamlet but was limited to the stereotypical roles epitomized by the blackface make-up.

El-Amin, who will leave San Diego in September to pursue his master’s degree in classical acting at the University of Delaware, would also like to play Hamlet someday, but he realizes that it is unlikely that a black actor in America would be offered such a part.

“As far as the limitations of the parts you can do as black actors, things haven’t changed a lot,” El-Amin said.

“The situations are similar. I’m going to

school to become a classically trained actor, even though I know my ability to do these classical parts is limited. I understand the obstacles before me, but I want to be trained, I want to be prepared. And hopefully, a change will come about.” Most of those who stick around San Diego waiting for the changes are those anchored here by other jobs or their family.

Equity actress Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson is cultural affairs director for the Education Cultural Center (ECC) and vice chairwoman of the San Diego Commission of Art and Culture.

Actress Veronica Henson-Phillips, who most recently played the maid in the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre production of “The Little Foxes,” is a native Southeast San Diegan who stays here because of her family. She gets most of her work in Los Angeles.

Actress Anasa Briggs-Graves has been limiting her acting to her television show on KPBS-TV.

Thompson is now playing a part that calls for a black actress, the nurse in the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre production of “The Day Room.” It is her second play in three years here, a fact she blames on the lack of roles for black actors in San Diego.

“I came here in the latter part of 1983, was in one play at the (now-defunct) Fiesta Dinner Theatre and produced a play by Athol Fugard at Southeast,” Thompson said. “I understudied at the Old Globe and didn’t do another play until the job at the Gaslamp came up. Am I frustrated? You better believe it.”

For Bonnie Ward, assistant managing director of the Southeast Community Theatre (not to be confused with Bonnie Ward, the co-artistic director of Starlight Musical Theatre), “Williams and Walker” is sadly analogous to the black theater experience today.

“It’s a painful period, and yet it is like what life is like in America for the African-American today. There isn’t much space for the artists to perform because the parts are limited. There isn’t much space for the new playwrights who have yet to be, and the old playwrights who have work yet to be discovered. We have put in a lot of hard work, blood, sweat and tears, and we have not yet scratched the surface.”

Ward’s efforts right now are concentrated on finding the Southeast a permanent home, or at least an office to call its own. Avery and Wesley, close friends who now live in Los Angeles, find steady work in movies and television. Wesley--who changed his name from John Huston to John Wesley so as not to be confused with the late director of the same name--just finished a miniseries called “A Family of Spies” and a film, “Spooner,” starring Robert Urich. Avery has performed in “Fletch,” “8 Million Ways to Die,” “L.A. Law,” “St. Elsewhere” and “Beauty and the Beast.”

When Avery and Wesley came back to town to see “Williams and Walker,” they said it was like looking back in time at themselves. The co-stars of the show, El Amin and Damon Bryant, evidently agreed. They told Avery and Wesley after the show that they had been inspired to work in the theater because of seeing their work at Southeast and at the Southern California Black Repertory Company. That, according to Avery, made him feel that “There is a God.”

“That’s essentially what our whole thing was, to let people know that there are arts in the community, and that they are for everyone. That was part of our dream and I hope it happens again.”

But it looks as if it will take fresh blood to do it because most of those who leave, don’t come back.

“You can’t pay the rent if you can’t work at your profession, and, if you’re not white, you can’t find the work in San Diego,” Wesley said. “I’d love to come home to my community and be a part of helping those youngsters who don’t have the opportunity to get into mainstream. I’ve been trying to come to San Diego since 1985. I auditioned for the Globe and the Gaslamp and the Playhouse, but I can’t come back just to carry a spear.”

Most black artists who remain have other jobs that pay the rent. Wesley describes his mentor, director Gaffney, a professor of contemporary black art at UC San Diego, as the force that keeps what black theater there is breathing in San Diego.

Gaffney is the one theaters such as the San Diego Repertory Theatre call on when they produce “The Colored Museum.” Gaffney is the man the Southeast Community Theatre relies upon to direct its shows. And Gaffney is the man who nurtured talent such as Wesley, Avery, El-Amin, Briggs-Graves and Henson-Phillips.

Part of that nurturing involves getting work for black actors.

“Most of the time a black actor works in San Diego is if there’s a specific part for a black actor--which is unfortunate--or if Dr. Gaffney is directing a show,” El-Amin said.

And part of it involves helping actors find a reason to pursue that work--despite the inevitable rejections.

“Dr. Gaffney made me love acting,” Wesley said. “He was able to see qualities that I didn’t even know I had and convinced me that I had potential and would have a future in this business. He taught me values. There is no black theater outside of Dr. Gaffney--not a physical or a mental space. I’ll love him forever for this.”

But, as Gaffney himself is the first to admit, he is getting tired after years of trying to develop black theater in San Diego. He just turned 59, and he has abandoned his original goal of founding a black theater company in favor of getting a black and multi-ethnic theater off the ground, possibly with Latino directors Jorge Huerta and William Virchis and progressive white director Steve Pearson, who is known for his San Diego Public Theatre.

“I get frustrated because, every time you get actors who are trained at the professional level, they leave town because there’s no opportunity here. Then you start again. It makes it very difficult to build a company,” Gaffney said.

“The biggest frustration though is not having a technical staff that would allow you to come in and function as a director and not have to do everything else as you do in a community theater. I’m used to it, but I’m getting old for that.”

Three professionally trained black actresses who remain in town express similar frustrations.

Henson-Phillips said she remains only because her family lives here, but she still thinks about moving to Los Angeles, where she gets most of her acting jobs. Thompson stays because of her job at the Educational Cultural Complex. And Briggs-Graves is a senior producer at KPBS-TV with her own television show.

All three, however, are working for change. Briggs-Graves and Thompson believe there is a black and/or multi-ethnic theater in San Diego’s future and they are trying to make it happen. Henson-Phillips is working with script development at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre, where she is assisting managing director, Kit Goldman, with Goldman’s dream of producing “The Debutante,” a retelling of the Pygmalion myth in black turn-of-the-century Philadelphia, as a starring vehicle for Cleavon Little.

Goldman’s commitment to “The Debutante” project, the Old Globe Theatre’s success with playwright Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and “The Piano Lesson,” the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s success with “The Colored Museum,” the La Jolla Playhouse’s ongoing commitment to portraying the black experience in works like “Shout Up a Morning” and “Big River” and Starlight Musical Theatre’s inclusion of “Dreamgirls” on the season schedule suggest to some that the times, they are a’changing.

But Rufus DeWitt, managing director and one of the co-founders of the Southeast Community Theatre, cautiously contents himself with more modest indications of change.

He points to the fact that theaters are now sending out audition notices to his organization asking for actors--not just black actors.

“I think there is a change in the way they are opening the door to auditioners,” DeWitt said. “I don’t know if it’s just lip service, but it is a change.”

Goldman credits the flyaway success of the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilson and his exposure at the Old Globe as an impetus to address the black experience.

“Wilson’s helping to create a broad audience for plays that deal with black culture or history or subject matter. It’s making it fashionable,” Goldman said.

Thomas Hall, the Old Globe’s managing director, said his theater has told Wilson that the Globe is interested in producing whatever he writes. Next year, the Globe hopes to have the new Wilson play on its boards, making that Wilson’s third production here in three years.

“It’s a challenge to do theater here,” Briggs-Graves said. “But most things that are worth having come with a challenge. If local theaters are wise, they’ll see we have lot of middle class people who are thirsting for theater, music, jazz and art.

“The best thing for us to do is to seize the opportunity when it arrives. I hope that will be soon.”

El-Amin, for example, has no illusions about opportunities in San Diego. He has had more work in Minneapolis and New York than he has been offered in San Diego.

When he completes his master’s degree in three years, it is still his dream to come home and assume the artistic leadership of the Southeast Community Theatre.

“There are still talented people here yet to be discovered. I think they should have an artistic director who makes sure there is an ongoing season. I want to get my professional training and pursue my career, but this is my home. These are my roots. And I want to give something back.”

Meanwhile, the struggle for black playwrights, actors and directors to find a place in the San Diego sun continues. Who will produce the August Wilsons before they become August Wilson? Who will present the James Earl Joneses before they become James Earl Jones?

The Southeast Community Theatre is preparing for its 25th anniversary celebration in August by asking its alumni who left the city to come back and show solidarity with the organization.