Having His Say

Artistic director of the Freedom Theatre in Philadelphia and a well-known theater director nationally, Walter Dallas nevertheless is a creative Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

As the head of a prominent African American theater at a time when many culturally specific arts institutions are struggling just to survive, he has taken an aggressive approach to leadership.

Since taking over the theater in 1992, in fact, he has overseen both the professionalization and expansion of the 30-year-old institution. And while his strategies have often been unorthodox, they have also met with unprecedented success.

Yet those who work with him in the rehearsal room paint a picture of Dallas as the model of subtlety, a man who knows when to simply get out of the way of a text.

“Walter doesn’t go way out and try to make things happen that don’t happen in the play,” says actress Frances Foster, who is currently working with Dallas for the fourth time, as he directs Emily Mann’s “Having Our Say,” opening Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum.

“Some people try to get fancy with their directing, but he sticks closely to the script and tries to make the play come to life,” she continues. “I trust his judgment completely.”

So do others. Dallas was, after all, the man whom Lloyd Richards called upon to serve as his replacement when he was unable to stage the premiere of August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars” at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago last year. “One night at midnight I got a call saying, ‘Can you be in rehearsals in a week?’ ” Dallas recalls.

Similarly, that’s how Dallas, who turns 50 today, came to his current assignment. Mann, who was originally planning to restage the work she had directed on Broadway, asked Dallas to fill in for her.

“My life has just been like that all the time,” the outgoing Dallas says during a post-rehearsal conversation at the Taper. “It’s always been that kind of serendipity.”

*

Dallas, who has also written several plays, has staged a wide range of scripts at such prestigious theaters as the American Place in New York, Yale Repertory and the O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Conn. This is his first time at the helm of one of Mann’s plays, although he has worked at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., where Mann is artistic director.

The play, adapted by Mann from the book “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years” by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth, stars Foster and Lynne Thigpen as sisters who share the stories of their 100-year-plus lives with the audience.

As with the realistic dramas of August Wilson, believability is an important consideration in the staging.

“We have to create a world in which these two actresses convince us that these two sisters have really lived and known each other for 100 years,” Dallas says. “Most of us have no sense of what that’s about. They prepare a meal, and you have to sense that they’ve been doing this for 100 years.”

The appeal is an elemental one, dependent on the rapport of the actresses with the audience.

“It’s like visiting your favorite aunt,” Dallas says. “Getting to know these people as people is what pulls you in and keeps you there.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that Dallas opts for a purely hands-off approach.

“Walter is very inventive,” Foster says. “He has tremendous imagination, and he’s quite challenging. But whatever he comes up with always has to do with helping tell the story of the play.”

Says Thigpen, who is working with Dallas for the first time on this show: “Bessie has big emotional swings, like many older people do, and he’s helped me find those. He does give you room to try things. He’s not coming in and trying to put a stamp on something. In this case that’s very valid because [the script] is the actual words of people, so that’s where you have to get it from.”

*

If Dallas seems at ease with the world of the Delany women, it may be in part because he shares certain pivotal cultural experiences with the characters. Although there is an obvious generation gap, for instance, both he and they were profoundly affected by black arts movements in their respective times.

Dallas, who is single, grew up in Atlanta and majored in English at Morehouse College there. He trained as a director at the Yale School of Drama from 1968 through 1971, during the often-turbulent years when the school was headed by Robert Brustein, now the artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

“My goal was to come back to Atlanta and create a theater that had a training program,” Dallas says. But upon graduating in 1971, he found himself bitten by wanderlust instead.

“I threw everything in a U-Haul and went AWOL to California,” Dallas says. “I had a friend at Stanford who said, ‘You can stay with me.’ I got a job at UC Berkeley the next day and was there for about five years.”

While at Berkeley, Dallas founded a theater company called the Black Ensemble, a group with which he produced and directed. But he ran into a problem when he got his heart set on staging a work about Vietnam.

“I couldn’t find any interesting plays about the Vietnam War, so I decided to write a play about it myself, even though I hadn’t been there,” he says. “And I was idealistic enough to think that if you’re going to write a play, you have to go to some exotic place and write.”

So he sold his car, resigned his positions teaching theater and moved to Hawaii to write. The resulting drama, “Willie Lobo/Manchild,” was produced by San Francisco’s KQED-TV in 1974 and nominated for a local Emmy.

Dallas spent the next several years traveling in Africa and elsewhere. Eventually, he came back to his original goal, which brought him to Atlanta in 1980. The next year, however, Dallas left his hometown once again, on a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to Center Stage in Baltimore, where he directed a successful production of James Baldwin’s “Amen Corner.”

Foster was in the cast of that show.

“You’re always a little tentative the first time you work with a director,” she recalls of her first experience with Dallas. “I admired the play and was anxious to do my best. I soon learned to trust Walter.

“He has great respect for actors, which some directors don’t have,” she continues. “They think that ‘director’ means ‘dictator.’ Walter makes suggestions, and if it doesn’t work, he’ll be the first to say, ‘Forget what I said.’ ”

*

Encouraged by the favorable attention “Amen Corner” received, including from Baldwin himself, Dallas decided to give New York a try on a limited basis.

“I said, ‘There’s three things I want out of New York: an agent, a good review from the New York Times and to work with the Negro Ensemble Company,’ ” Dallas says.

While “Amen Corner” was still running in Baltimore, Dallas coaxed a number of New York theater heavyweights to go see his work. But the one person he couldn’t get to go see his play was the Negro Ensemble’s artistic director, Douglas Turner Ward.

So Dallas went to New York to see Ward instead. “I made an appointment to go up there and see him: I put on my combat boots, fatigues, black beret and cutoff Army jacket. I had my goatee like a Panther.

“He kept me waiting 30 minutes, and I was furious,” Dallas says. “Then he finally walked in the door and there he stood: in black combat boots, fatigues, cutoff Army jacket, beret and with a goatee. We looked like twins, and we just stood there, looked at each other and we laughed.”

Not surprisingly, what was supposed to be a half-hour meeting turned into a four-hour jam session, and Dallas got his gig at NEC. He opened the theater’s 1982 season with Ray Aranha’s “Fathers and Sons.”

Yet though his first off-Broadway production was a success, he had no intention of trying to see if he could parlay it into a roll.

“I did the show, got the review, and I was done,” Dallas says. “That was it. I was ready to get out of New York.”

With his preference for a steady paycheck and a non-New York address, Dallas had no trouble finding a teaching job, this time in Philadelphia. But it turned out to be a bit more than just teaching.

“I ended up putting the whole [theater] program together instead of just teaching at what’s now called the University of the Arts in Philadelphia,” he says.

Although he had heard of the Freedom Theatre, Dallas had never been there before he moved to Philadelphia in 1983.

“I was invited to direct there, and I really liked what I saw happening,” he recalls. “It was a really lively place.”

Founded 30 years ago by John Allen Jr.--at a time when many of what were to become this country’s most important black, Asian and Latino theaters were launched--Freedom Theatre was born out of the activism of the time.

“It was created during the reevaluation of the black aesthetic during the ‘60s,” Dallas says. “It was devoted to participating in the black arts movement that was strong at that time.”

During the 1970s and 1980s, the theater and its training programs grew. By the time Dallas first worked there in 1983, it had become an important fixture in Philadelphia’s black community.

Dallas continued to be involved with the theater during the latter half of the 1980s, serving on the board of directors and staging plays there. Teaching and running his training program continued to be his primary job, though.

Things took a sudden turn in 1992, however, when Allen became ill and died. Dallas was asked to take over for the founder-artistic director.

No sooner had he come on board than he realized what a big bite he’d just bitten off.

“One of the first challenges was that they were just kicking off a capital campaign,” Dallas says. “They were trying to raise $12 million. So it was, ‘Hi, congratulations, guess what? You’ve got to raise $12 million.’ ”

Amazingly enough, they pulled it off. “In 18 months, we raised $12 million,” Dallas says. “I’d never done this before, so I didn’t know what not to do.”

Through a combination of outreach efforts aimed at both the community and the alumni base, Dallas and his collaborators put out the appeal. “Our history spoke for itself,” he says. “The alumni base was very large, and people were excited about my being on board.”

He did have ambitious goals: “I wanted to professionalize the theater, and to say that we were more than a community theater in the traditional sense. We went Equity.”

He also began to look outside Philadelphia for talent as well as potential institutional collaborators.

“We were redefining ‘community’ to mean global involvement,” says Dallas, who proceeded to bring in actors from New York and to instigate joint ventures with such respected New York venues as Lincoln Center and the Minetta Lane Theatre.

More recently, Freedom has moved shows to New York, collaborated with theaters in West Africa and Russia and had prominent black artists in residence. “We’ve made a big explosion in the past three or four years,” Dallas says.

*

The key to success, Dallas says, is to “create a sense of ownership in the institution in the community.”

This can be done, for example, by calling upon the audience for suggestions--and using them.

“We have previews where, at the end of the show, we come out and talk to the audience,” he says. But it’s “not the typical kind of talk. We say, ‘Here’s a moment that we haven’t fully solved yet,’ and we get suggestions. Then we go and bring the actors out and run that scene with that suggestion. If it works, we incorporate it.”

And while the play’s staging may indeed tighten a bit, the real benefit is long-term.

“Now that person owns a little piece of that show,” Dallas says. “And he’ll come back, and bring 20 people with him to see it.”

It may sound simple, but it’s working.

“We have people now at Freedom who will only come to previews,” Dallas says. “Previews of our first two shows are already sold out, and we haven’t even cast the second show yet.”

The larger purpose, of course, hasn’t changed since Freedom was first founded.

“The mission is the same, and in 1996, the challenge is the same,” Dallas says.

“If you look at the images [of African Americans] that are being presented to our children, it’s some of the same [negative] images. Even though we may have more input into what some of those images are now, we know that if we don’t adhere to certain formats, these shows won’t make it. So what Freedom Theatre is trying to do is create positive images for black audiences onstage. It’s saying there are options.”

*

“Having Our Say,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. $31-$37. (213) 628-2772. Ends Oct. 27.