Focus on the Future of Black Theater

Playwright August Wilson and several colleagues brought their campaign to reinvigorate African American theater to Los Angeles on Friday evening in a town hall-style discussion at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

The event remained somewhat sedate as long as the panelists described the launching of their efforts in a conference at Dartmouth College earlier this year. But the emotional temperature rose as members of the L.A. theatrical community spoke from the floor.

L. Kenneth Richardson, who runs the Mark Taper Forum’s Blacksmyths workshop for black playwrights, said that serious black plays “appeal to a very small, bourgeois audience. The reason why there’s a ‘chitlin circuit’ “--the touring gospel musicals and broad comedies that attract almost exclusively black crowds to large theaters after extensive advertising on black-oriented radio--”is because these plays appeal to the majority [of blacks]. . . . I want to see black plays that deal with contemporary black America.”

“I’m a black playwright,” replied Wilson, whose own plays are set in earlier eras of the 20th century and are usually performed in mainstream theaters before multiracial audiences. “I do not write plays for the black community. I work as an artist. An artist for one--that’s who I have to satisfy.” He was fortunate in finding theaters that helped him develop his plays, he said, but most upcoming black playwrights lack those opportunities--a gap that his campaign for stronger black theaters is designed to fill.

Richardson’s remarks drew a rebuttal from the panel moderator, UCLA professor Beverly Robinson, who cited “the incredible diversity” of African American plays and condemned the commonly used phrase “chitlin circuit.” She called the same phenomenon the “urban circuit.”

Wilson’s current project was set off by his controversial 1996 speech in which he criticized “colorblind” casting and called for more money for black theaters. These sentiments turned into an organized movement at the Dartmouth conference, which has since sprouted a training program for managers of black theaters and is moving into publications, a Web site, and similar town-hall meetings in other cities.

The Getty Research Institute sponsored a Thursday event at the Getty Center in which Wilson and two colleagues, Dartmouth professors William Cook and Victor Leo Walker II, discussed their initiative. The Getty has offered to be the local home of the initiative, Walker said Friday.

However, the Getty discussion didn’t venture into local issues as much as the conversation at LATC, where actress Lee Chamberlin discussed the plight of L.A. actors who “are put in the position of doing nonunion work because they’re not hiring us” in the relatively few local theaters that pay union wages. In response to the idea of training black theater managers, Chamberlin asked, “Where will the money come from to create the theaters these managers can manage?”

“It’s our fault we don’t have those theaters,” replied Wilson. “We’re seeking to build relationships with funding institutions.”