Dramatically Different

“If you want to get a message out, nothing travels faster than word of mouth.”

--Sermon, from gospel play

“Your Arms Too Short to Box With God”

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It is a clear, warm night in the Crenshaw district, and a steady stream of cars is being waved into parking lots at the rear of a handsome row of shops on Degnan Street. Out of these cars emerges a crowd--voluble, folksy, glamorous and familiar, in sequined gowns, in feathered hats, in suits and shawls and matching pumps; there are even some little kids in tow. But what stands out most is that the crowd is almost entirely African American.

They are here to see “Jezebel,” an original musical by two revered local composers--Joe Westmoreland and Charles May--although few outside their number have ever heard of Westmoreland or May. And they are here to support an institution, the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, which is sponsoring this event in Leimert Park at Marla Gibbs’ Vision Theatre Complex. This nearly sold-out event has been publicized almost entirely by word of mouth. It represents a local window onto a national phenomenon.

While established leaders in the world of theater nationally are struggling to figure out how to get more blacks into the mix of mostly white, mostly older audiences, blacks who had rarely, if ever, been inside a theater to see a play have been filling 2,000- and 3,000-seat arenas--not to hear rap, rhythm and blues, gospel or pop (although each of these elements can be part of the expectation) but to see dramas and musical theater.

“Jezebel” was lauded by critics when it appeared last month, but its popularity hardly depended upon the establishment endorsement. Part of a populist art form that speaks a language that hits its target audience with broad, formulaic story lines, strong moral messages and, often, a gospel-music through line, the play represents one of the stellar moments in a world of theater being created for and by blacks. This world takes many forms, some of it with high aspirations, others purely commercial and lowbrow. But it is a world of black theater where new work is being produced and patronized, in Los Angeles and in major cities across the nation.

“ ‘Beauty Shop’ was the first of these plays that I ever heard about,” says New York-based producer Ashton Springer, whose long list of Broadway credits includes “Eubie” and the 1970 Pulitzer Prize-winning “No Place to Be Somebody.” In 1987 Springer attended a performance of “Beauty Shop”--which had originated in Los Angeles the year before--with New York-based theater owner-producer Woodie King. “It was at the Beacon Theater, a 2,800-seat theater in New York, and 2,799 of those seats were packed with black people, 95% of whom I would say had never been to a live theater show before.

“ ‘Beauty Shop’ was grossing $600,000 a week,” Springer says, a figure roughly equivalent to the top grosses on Broadway for shows like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight Express,” which had higher ticket prices and 1,000 fewer seats.

When a gospel version of the form, titled “Fake Friends,” launched its national tour in March in Oakland’s Paramount Theater, Bay Area resident Daniel Harris was there. Harris, an automobile salesman who saw the play with a group of his white and Asian colleagues, recalls the evening this way: “We all loved it. The Paramount holds about 1,500 people, and it was about 90% full--and 99.9% black. And nothing in the world looks better than a theater full of really well-dressed black people.” “Fake Friends,” written and produced by the movement’s current box-office king, Michael Matthews, is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles in the fall.

Los Angeles playwright Marcia Leslie too has observed the phenomenon:

“An actor friend of mine was in ‘Beauty Shop.’ No matter what you think about the play, and I hate it, it proved that black folks will go to the theater. In Philadelphia they had to add an 11 p.m. show, and it sold out--in the snow.”

This genre has been viewed as a monolith and labeled with obnoxious and witty sobriquets. “Popeye-coon-barbecue-theater,” L.A. writer-director Cliff Roquemore calls it. Henry Louis Gates Jr. became the author of the golden diss when he labeled it “chitlin theater” in a comprehensive New Yorker feature in February. And Grammy-nominated composer Joe Westmoreland dismisses the body of work as “plays that tell stories about pimps and prostitutes and joke about the lives of black people.”

But despite the blanket terms, there are many varieties of theater emanating from the black community. Among them are the vaudeville revue, the preachment, the gospel-blues song play and the light musical comedy-drama.

These shows bring together three variations of amateurs: amateur audiences, promoters and dramatists. What most distinguishes the field from other so-called nonprofessional theater is its insularity. There are no classics mixed among the repertory, just a continual appetite for new works.

These productions share focus, marketing and publicity that begin and end in the black community. They are characterized by bare-bones (nonunion) productions and low ticket prices ($15 to $35). They are not publicized in major newspapers and do not concern themselves with the tastes of mainstream audiences. They all employ the “talking drum.” That is, they reach their audiences through mediums of sound: word of mouth, black radio, black churches, pool halls and barber shops within the black community.

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R&B; diva Millie Jackson, who headlined in her recent touring show “It Ain’t Over--The Sequel,” is a typical example of an inexperienced dramatist who found success in this world.

“My partner, Douglas Knyght-Smith, and I went to see one of the gospel plays, ‘God’s Trying to Tell Ya Something,’ in Atlanta,” she says. “At the end of the show, I said to him, ‘I enjoyed the show, but did you figure out what God was trying to tell ya?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that we can go home and write one just as good as this one.’ ” Thirty days later, Jackson began a record-breaking 43-city tour with “Young Man, Older Woman,” a play based on one of her albums. “That 30 days included a trip to Nassau, writing the play over a weekend, losing the script on the plane and rewriting it,” Jackson said.

“I was doing a small play called ‘Earth Angel’ back in ‘86,” recalls Shelly Garrett, writer and producer of “Beauty Shop,” the play that first represented the form’s limitations and promise. “I was playing Dootsie Williams, the Compton millionaire whose company had produced the song. He also wrote the play. It was supposed to be comedy, but I just thought it was horrible--the structure, everything. I knew nothing about writing, but I’d been a television actor for a while, and I knew what was good or not.

“One day the guy says to me, ‘Look, if you think you can do better, do it. ‘Cause you’re out of my show.’ He kicked me out. For a week I sat around distraught. Then I sat down and wrote ‘Beauty Shop.’ I wrote the first draft in six days.”

Why this style of entertainment has come into being, and flourished, is a matter of speculation.

“I think this theater understands its target audience and is marketed toward them,” says writer-director David E. Talbert, whose trio of successful touring shows includes last year’s sensation “He Say . . . She Say . . . But What Does God Say?”

“I went to August Wilson’s play ‘The Piano Lesson’ in San Francisco, and there were only about four blacks in there,” he says. “Now, here is a black man who wrote this play, but the themes and the story line and the marketing of it doesn’t appeal to inner-city blacks. In hard times, entertainment always thrives. We’re dealing with an audience that has limited entertainment outlets; they are church audiences to a large extent. These plays have a moral base, and they have a positive message.”

“I try to relate to the majority of people,” Michael Matthews says. “Everyone isn’t a doctor in the black community. Not all of us are avid theatergoers; we weren’t trained up on Shakespeare and Macbeth and everything. What we can relate to is what we live.”

Each story told, whether vulgar or sublime, is almost wholly lacking in racial bitterness and conflict; accordingly, whites aren’t depicted, mentioned, blamed or missed. Most of the works manage to be entertaining while remaining completely devoid of dramaturgical dimension or craft.

For “Beauty Shop,” “there was no set,” veteran Broadway producer Springer says. “They had black drapes on which they had put some safety pins and hung posters that you normally see in a beauty shop. And they had four or five beauty shop chairs. That was the set.” Woodie King remembers it as “a play that never ended--it had no structure.”

Ron Milner, whose well-shaped, theatrically vibrant vernacular plays “What the Wine-Sellers Buy” (1974) and “Don’t Get God Started” (1986) prefigure the current populist trend, has even harsher words for the form: “There will be a coon moment, followed up by a great love ballad. Then there will be a preachment, and then there’s a ridiculous scene where there are machine guns firing and the actors are allowed to go as broad as they like. There are some professionals involved, but they usually are performers, actors or singers.”

Marketing of these productions relies heavily on African American networking.

“We asked each member of our church to give us 50 names of their friends,” says “Jezebel” composer Westmoreland. “We call it marketing to a friendly audience, and it’s worked for us. First AME has 9,000 to 11,000 members, and about half will turn in their listof 50.”

Marvin Wright-Bey, general manager and artistic director of the 474-seat West Angeles Christian Arts Center, just down the road on Crenshaw Boulevard, has the potential to draw equally impressive crowds.

“Our pastor, Bishop Charles E. Blake, presides over 126 churches,” Wright-Bey says. “But just to give you some of the numbers that are out there in the black community, that 126 represents just the Church of God in Christ. When you start talking about Baptist, Episcopalian and Methodist churches where potential audiences attend, the numbers are astronomical.”

The phenomenal crowds are the payoff of relentless word-of-mouth campaigns. The results achieved by these grass-roots, labor-intensive promotions are impressive, whether the word is received in the churches or on the streets. In fact, there is also a highly organized promotional machinery behind these efforts that often, ironically, is managed by white promoters.

Wright-Bey sees it as an issue of economics: “The deal is that black promoters, for the most part, don’t have the cash flow to really produce on the level that white promoters are producing.”

Yet there have also been some formidable African American players in the field of promotions, notably concert producers like Barry Hankerson of Los Angeles and Quentin Perry of Detroit, who have dabbled in the theatrical world, and Al Wash of ALW Entertainment in Dallas, who is consistently producing shows with the efficiency and muscle of the white promoters.

Writer Jerry Jones had the misfortune of bringing his play “Food Stamps” into the Wilshire-Ebell during Wash’s “He Say . . . She Say . . .” promotional blitzkrieg in August.

“We were in direct competition with them,” Jones says, “and they postponed their play another week to ride us off the air. We didn’t know that they played dirty pool out there.”

Kevin Fleming, program director for black-oriented radio station KACE-FM, views Wash in a different light: “Al Wash understands our people and does not take them for granted. He has the ability and he has the style that says, ‘I’m going to come into the market and you’re going to hear this message so many times, you’re going to feel like you’ve missed something if you don’t come to this play.’ And that works with everything.”

Millie Jackson, whose first theatrical effort, “Young Man, Older Woman,” had been moribund until Wash got behind it, says: “When it comes to promoting black plays, Al is top of the line.” Rena Wasserman, general manager of the Wiltern Theatre--a primary venue for this work, along with the Wilshire-Ebell--says Wash was “the first person who was on the same page as I am about promoting something: how it looks, how it runs, whether you start on time and whether you treat the patron with kindness and respect or whether you don’t care. He cares. He makes a decision and he sticks with it.”

At first, the promoters and plays that revolutionized these hands-on marketing techniques offered consumers a wide range of dramaturgical qualities and styles. Plot lines were ribald-profane (“One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show”) and religious-sacred (“The Gospel Truth”). The humor was both Dionysian-vulgar (“Beauty Shop”) and Apollonian-righteous (“Diary of Black Men”). The philosophical objective was both Aristotelian-imaginative (“Don’t Get God Started”) and Platonic-inspirational (“Precious Lord [The Untold Story of Gospel Music]”). The aesthetic goal was to entertain (“Young Man, Older Woman”) and instruct (“Your Arms Too Short to Box With God”). Increasingly, the scope of these plays has narrowed.

“Ten years ago you could take out a straight comedy--no music was required,” playwright David Talbert says. “But now that gospel musicals have started going across the country, you can’t do a play without music.”

Laments Shelly Garrett: “I never thought of doing a musical or having stars in my shows. It’s gotten to the point now where people expect both.” Garrett is currently mounting his first musical, “What Kind of Love is This?” starring R&B; singer Jeffrey Osborne.

What is most troubling to some blacks who have had success in the mainstream theater world is that there is little or no continuity between this new vernacular form and the arts and traditions that preceded it.

“This is the fascinating part,” Springer says. “When we used to say ‘black theater’ back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we were talking about Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Richard Wesley. August Wilson-quality stuff, OK? It might have been angry, but it was real theater. Now what has happened since the arrival of these new plays is there is no differentiating between ‘No Place to Be Somebody’ and ‘Beauty Shop.’ ”

Says noted playwright Milner: “A lot of these people have no understanding that there is a tradition before them that they are following. They’re just looking at the moment. We could blame Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes was the first to bring gospel to the theater--he and Vinnette Carroll. And they set that idea on fire. They showed everybody how powerful this music is.”

“Langston was a fraternity brother of my father’s,” recalls playwright-director Carroll, who now lives in Florida and operates a 200-seat theater in Fort Lauderdale. “He was interested in gospel music and so was I. He had an idea for what he called ‘song plays’ that involved weaving a story around gospel music.”

In 1962 Carroll helped Hughes develop the first gospel play, “Black Nativity,” which she directed. It told the story of the birth of Christ; it was not so much a play as a gospel recording come to life.

“If we were depicting Mary singing to her baby,” Carroll says, “I would say to [composer Alex Bradford], ‘Now, what would a mother sing if she was cradling her child out on the veranda?’ And Alex would come up with something.”

By the time Carroll had developed her own gospel play, “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” in 1976, a transformation had taken place in the audiences. Whereas before audiences had been 90% white, now they were more of a mix of blacks and whites.

“ ‘Black Nativity made a huge difference, really, in the psyche of black folk,” Carroll says. “After the success of ‘Nativity,’ I think they began to feel that it was OK, the churches even more so. Their own little drama groups emerged out of that.”

(“Precious Lord [The Untold Story of Gospel Music],” currently at the West Angeles Christian Arts Center through next Sunday, is in the tradition of the Hughes-Carroll song play.)

Yet while audiences flock to the traveling circuit shows like the gospel morality play “Why Daddy? Why?”--despite the fact that it was ignored by critics during its L.A. run at the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre in February--home-based theaters sit undercapitalized, ignored and empty.

“It’s so hard to get any serious plays done, to get anything that’s not a musical to run for a long time,” Carroll says. “Serious plays, where we’re not singing and dancing all the time and where we’re not all drug addicts and sleeping with everybody in the world. We should be able to fill our theater every night, and we can’t. There is no audience.”

Says Woodie King: “If I am an organization that operates year-round, I’m not interested in one play. I’m interested in training young people in acting, directing and the crafts and doing five or six plays a year. So therefore, if my theater seats 300 people and my ticket price is $15 or $20, I don’t have the money to market my plays the way these chitlin plays can.”

Actor Bobby Ellerby speculated on a novel solution for getting something back from the black theater circuit: “If we traveled right behind Shelly Garrett and did everything he did and caught the same audiences, they would be more educated by the time they got out of the second show.” In fact, that is a formula that former partners Roquemore (whose secular play “Jezebel”--a different version from Westmoreland’s and May’s--is currently being mounted) and legendary Motown songwriter Mickey Stevenson (“Dancing in the Streets”) employed with “The Gospel Truth.”

Roquemore and Stevenson successfully adapted the form with the Broadway-quality musical “The Gospel Truth” (1988), which featured Jennifer Holliday, among other stars.

“We would play the same cities [“Beauty Shop II,” Garrett’s sequel] played,” Roquemore recalls. “And we did the same business because audiences had got their lips wet. And our commercials were just like theirs. But when we got in town, we gave our people their money’s worth. It was a story and it was about people and it was black and it wasn’t coonish.”

When asked if he is not capitalizing on a form he abhors, Roquemore states flatly: “Yes. I’m a capitalist. No question about it. But I’m a clean capitalist.”

It is ironic that gospel theater has been balkanized within the black community, since its roots, although strictly African American, were also nurtured and enriched by white American and European artists and audiences. Carroll describes how “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God” was, in fact, “commissioned by Italian Gian Carlo Menotti because the Italians had loved ‘Black Nativity’ so much when it toured Europe.” White composer Bob Telson and librettist Lee Breuer recognized the dramatic and narrative potency of gospel theater in their 1983 homage to the form “Gospel at Colonus,” which won Tony, Obie and Grammy awards.

Since the beginning of the movement, some quality dramatists have been drawn into the form, uplifting the standards of the productions and further obscuring the line between “chitlin theater,” song plays and straight theater. Costume designer Tuesday Conner, whose painterly visual style has enlivened productions at the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles and Lincoln Center in New York, is currently the designer for Michael Matthews and developed costumes for “Beauty Shop.”

Writer-producers like Matthews are aware of their limitations.

“I wasn’t trained as a writer; it’s just a love of mine,” he says. “I’m hoping that the Lord will bless my talent to improve. But I never considered myself a great writer. I’ve always considered myself a great songwriter that has good stories with my songs.”

Springer says the stakes are getting higher as audiences become more sophisticated: “Five years ago these guys could put any kind of schlock together and go out there, and they had a damn good chance of making big bucks. Now this audience that had never been to a show before is becoming more sophisticated and knowledgeable.”

Milner sees potential for higher standards coming from the audiences as well: “I’m taking the optimistic view. They’re bringing up this new audience, and now I’m getting stopped in the streets by some of these people who didn’t even know about theater before, and they’re saying, ‘When are you going to bring up some of your plays? I’m tired of this mess.’ ”

“This is a new form of black entertainment that’s out here,” promoter Wash says. “There have been black shows that crossed over into the white market like ‘Raisin,’ ‘Dreamgirls,’ ‘Five Guys Named Moe’ and pieces like that. I’ve promoted them all but can’t seem to make them work for this audience.

“But these gospel-type shows are not X-rated. You can bring the family. That’s what I like about them. And I still get out there, ride the bus, put out my fliers, go to the churches, talk to pastors. And once I know what it takes to make a show work, I bring in my people and say, ‘OK, fellas, this is what we need to do.’ ”

“Their marketing is absolutely fabulous,” King says. “If I could raise, say, $50,000 and pay one of these promoters to come in and work for our organization and show us how to market this--that’s what a nonprofit organization can learn from these guys.”

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* “Precious Lord (The Untold Story of Gospel Music),” West Angeles Christian Arts Center, 3020 Crenshaw Blvd. Through next Sunday. $27.50. (213) 733-8707.