the human race

Well, race.

 And why do we insist on putting our skin differences beneath the umbrella of "race?" Of course, we're all the human race. So as there is only one race, in this blog I'll refer (for the most part) to "culture" instead. It's a more complete and nuanced name for the complexities for which I intend it.

 Well, culture.

 I have had the extraordinary privilege of performing in a few (nearly) all-BIPOC casts in the last three years and directing another. In these post Ahmaud Arbery-Brianna Taylor-George Floyd days, post Trump days, post insurrection days, and lesser COVID-19 days, it's been a joy and a necessity to explore my own African American culture and the culture of the Western Hemisphere through the lens of the African diaspora. I have blogged before about my experience in CHOIR BOY at Yale Rep. In the early spring of 2019, I was previously at Yale Rep for my first all-BIPOC Shakespeare production, TWELFTH NIGHT (as Malvolio). This came on the heels of a paralyzing personal tragedy in my life. Heartbreak.

Being there with this very special company of artists who, in many ways understood me and what I was going through better than I understood (it) myself, was intensely healing and reviving. And it set me on a path of looking inward to find all that I had missed about myself for nearly my whole life while trying to fit into a larger culture that misunderstood, undervalued, used, and fetishized me in my black skin. The larger culture did this, and I allowed it, under the aegis of "Liberalism." 

 A short time ago, a collaborator of mine managed to nearly completely erase me in the work environment. I always came to work on time, well-prepared, ready and hopeful for the day's tasks. But I was never asked to contribute and frequently my presence was ignored. In my field of work (the theater) nearly everyone is socio-politically "liberal." Theater people are determined that all have equal rights, that all cultures and communities are seen, heard, and valued, and that American history -- all of it -- is taught, told, and learned from. Yet here I was in a collaboration with an individual from the larger culture who, figuratively, would not let me in the room.

 And this is racism in action.

 It was being perpetrated (unknowingly!) by a person of strongly liberal socio-political values but it was, nevertheless, the action of racism. Culture (race) prejudice is an often harmless distaste/dislike/hatred for persons and things based on culture (race). But it is the necessary spark that ignites racism. Racism is the enforcement of disadvantage and oppression on one group or individual by another group or individual who posses(es) socio-political and/or corporate advantage. I am sure that my collaborator did not realize or understand that they were doing this to me. I feel certain they believe they "do not have a racist bone in their body." But because of the pervasiveness and insidiousness of systems of racism in our American fabric, it seeps into our thoughts and perceptions, and therefore our actions, without us ever knowing it has done so. Then we move in the world with unchecked ideas and behaviors of institutionalized (systemic) racism born from constant, varied influences that we encounter many times a day. These influences come from systems that have existed in our larger (Western) culture for centuries. Battling systemic racism is why James Brown taught little Black children like me to, "Say it loud! I'm Black and I'm Proud!" It is why I was taught to say, "Black is beautiful." It is why today we must truly understand that Black Lives Matter. Without those degrading and denigrating systems created by the more powerful (white) culture, there would be no need for these affirmations.

 White people, most of whom experientially know very little about racism, too often think of racist behavior as an absolute (e.g., membership in organized groups for the purpose of fostering hate, disregard for cultural boundaries in language and action, willful exclusion of "the others," etc.). Many of those who do not participate in and/or subscribe to these behaviors immediately dismiss the question of racism in themselves and close the subject. They are unaware(?) that racist thought is still there in the corners of their minds where they don't think to or dare to explore. There is a perceived immorality and ignorance associated with culture (race) prejudice that liberals find shameful and others resentfully consider being "woke." Because this self-reflection may be painful or disappointing and tends to prioritize the needs or opinions of the oppressed, both groups tend to avoid it and lazily fall back on a blind reliance on the cultural systems of oppression that are already in place -- systems that have given them visible and invisible advantage in America since this country was established and long before.

 And I know this because I have the racist thoughts myself. I learned them from the American and, by extension, the Western cultures of which I am a part. I have learned them as a means of being able to navigate my way inside this culture that I was taught could and would do me great harm if I did not learn the rules and try to play them to my best advantage. But this is in itself a miscalculation! Because although one tries to use those rules to one's advantage, you are still playing their game -- with their rules. 

 So my recent journeys in art and in society have allowed me to explore, learn, understand, and heal some very old wounds that have hampered me for nearly my entire life. I owe this healing to OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR at Goodman Theater in Chicago and the Ohio University in Athens, OH, to THE TRAGEDY OF KING LEAR at The Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis in St. Louis, MO, to CHOIR BOY at Yale Rep in New Haven, CT, and once again to TWELFTH NIGHT at Yale Rep and most recently at the Classical Theater of Harlem in New York City. They all dealt with issues of the African diaspora and did so with all or nearly all BIPOC artists.

 I'm Black and I'M PROUD. Black IS BEAUTIFUL. And BLACK LIVES MATTER. My journey of healing is UNlearning the things I have acquired, some unawares and some lucidly, from a system that does not value me equally.  I'm proud to be a contributor to the human race. But when my culture calls me to stand, I'm already standing.    

in gratitude

I just returned from a very successful production of Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, CHOIR BOY, at Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, CT. I blogged earlier about the ritualized start to all their rehearsal and tech processes with their Statements of Acknowledgement. Now, I'll talk about myself and my experience working on this fascinating piece of art.

I had no idea that the play would impact me as it did. Or that it would shed such a healing light on decades old wounds that I have carried with me, as subtly as the lining of a pocket, since childhood. These wounds had (have) become such a part of me, that they had (have) informed who I am, how I see the world, how I function in it, how I respond to it, and many of the choices I've made throughout my life -- for better or worse.

Let me do something now, because of these wounds and the resulting lifelong choices I've made, that I've never done before. And that is to say for the first time on social media that I am a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community. I grew up in a very openly, solidly homophobic world in the Black community of my childhood in Texas in the 1960s. Of course, this isn't unusual. The default setting for all the country and the world at that time was revulsion at the idea of homosexuality. I myself certainly thought it was wrong, and I paid a heavy price of self-fear and self-loathing throughout practically all of my youth and into my middle-age. There were many instances in which I might have stood up for a friend, for an idea, or for myself, but I remained silent for fear of seeming sympathetic, understanding, or oddly too knowledgeable. In solitude, I would curse myself.

CHOIR BOY deals with the character, Pharus Jonathan Young, a gifted singer/musician at a Black all-boys boarding school in the present day. He is that young man that my community (in my youth) would have targeted. Openly queer and prone to flamboyance, he is not hiding and he is not apologizing. He gets lots of push back from most of the students and one particularly. But he's also got one friend, confidant, and ally who is a confidently heterosexual baseball jock. I regard this character as the play's secret hero.

But Pharus is its champion.

My role was that of the school's Headmaster. Somewhat a bystander as Pharus moves through his senior year, but with all the support he can give to Pharus, it was a perfect vantage point for the character and for me, the actor and fellow queer person, to watch this young man's story unfold -- and to think about my own life and the youth that shaped me. While Headmaster had not definitely been written as a gay character, I decided to make him subtly (closeted) so. I felt it gave both the character and myself a secret route into a closer, more invested interest and experience of Pharus's journey. And this eventually lead me back to an examination of my own childhood. It lead to the healing I had long needed though never realized that I did -- that working on CHOIR BOY ultimately provided.

Watching Pharus negotiate his treacherous path through his circumstances at the boarding school with unshakable will and determination, good humor, patience, cleverness and kindness, and nevertheless, finding the result of his labors turn to tragedy is the ultimate call to all of us to know each other and to try to love one another AS WE ARE.

I feel I must thank these great artists by name that shared this epic journey on the stage. They are (in no particular order, save one): Walton Wilson, Denzel Fields, Darian Peer, Jarrett Anthony Bennett, Wildlin Pierrevil, Gilbert Domally, Anthony Holiday, Malik James, Aaron James McKenzie, and Israel Erron Ford who played Pharus. Likewise, I am enormously grateful to our director, Christopher Betts for shepherding this story, and the brilliant writer, Tarell Alvin McCraney for this magnificent and incredibly necessary lesson by, about, and for the Black LGBTQ+ community and the world.

There is so much more I could say regarding my life and decisions as shaped by my upbringing, and perhaps in a future blog, I will. But for now I will say simply that my journey of healing has begun. And it continues . . .

fire with fire?

Decades ago when I was in conservatory in college, I was at a dinner party given by a faculty member with my classmates and any plus one we wanted to bring. The boyfriend of a classmate was there and he was repeatedly making pseudo intellectual comments and observations to (in my view) impress our host. I chuckled quietly at one of these. But he heard me and shot me a look. He eventually located a book on one of the shelves titled "Nigger Heaven" (a classic of the Harlem Renaissance by Carl Van Vechten). He quipped, “Oh Look! ‘Nigger Heaven.’ That sounds like an evening with (Allen)." I was so in shock he went there in this company and in this place that I was completely paralyzed. But also, I was outraged beyond belief. But I didn't have a rejoinder and in this situation, I dared not stoop to his level.

Some years later, this situation again crossed my mind (as it had many times before). And I thought then, with complete certainty, that I should have just smacked him and left. You see, today more than 40 years later, I still metaphorically run my fingers across that scar. Meanwhile, I doubt he remembers it at all, assuming he's still of mind and body. But I haven't ever forgotten it. Had I gone to brutality, he'd remember it today too. And he would never again feel secure to use that language with any Black person.

Looking back, it does not matter to me what would have been thought of my act. I know who I am and my true friends know me too. But that's the one instance of my life that I would be okay to cave in to the weakness of violence.

Having said all this, I don't support Will Smith's actions at the Academy Awards. But I certainly understand the confusion of the moment and the paralysis that confusion mingled with rage creates. And how that can prompt a response that can be endlessly second-guessed.

this new era

I recently began work at Yale Repertory Theater in Tarell Alvin McCraney's brilliant play, CHOIR BOY. But on the first day of work, administrators at the theater began the session with the reading of these three statements – drafted by the theater following the pivotal, global social uprisings spurred by the murders of Brionna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and the public and recorded murder of George Floyd. (Slide composition by Grace O'Brien and DR559)

Many theaters and corporate organizations have begun to really look at the fabric of the America that was created before this current time of our lives. It is a system that functions off institutionalized norms that maintain various kinds of inequity—some obvious and some subtle but pervasive and insidious. And these inequities had become so ingrained in our daily functioning, that many of us had become blind to them.

No! We had not BECOME blind. We had never had sight! There had never been any level socio-political landscape. Previous generations had not ever really seen and understood the full depth of the “what/how/why” of American discrimination. Like water torture, many maddening, incredibly saddening, frustrating, confusing, angering, inexplicable, and indefensible events had occurred. With each drop, the BIPOC community was more motivated to scream out to the world the many macro and micro aggressions endured daily. 

And then there was COVID-19 and George Floyd. 

It was impossible to ignore Floyd's murder because there were now no distractions of work or play or commitments of any sort. The world was forced to stop and awaken to the true, epic horror of being a person on the wrong end of American society. We all got "woke," like it or not. Of course, some didn't like it because it meant they had to confront the status quo that had always favored them. It had always made them feel safe, entitled, and righteous. They argue loudly against Affirmative Action without realizing that they have always benefited from a form of cultural (racial) preference. This racial preference had no name because it was simply one of the ways in which American society functioned, one of the many ways it had been set up to always favor certain kinds of people (white). But with the senseless killings of Floyd, Taylor, and Arbery and our "awakening" to the tangential and metaphoric realities associated with those lives and the lives of all persons of color (POC), America can never return to pre-2020.

Today, many individuals and corporate organizations are sworn to find ways to acknowledge the new American culture and to do better, going forward, by acknowledging the past – and even trying to do something about it.

These very powerful statements and moments of silence to accompany them that began our work on CHOIR BOY, this all-Black story of a young LGBTQ+ man, had me fighting back tears because I finally felt seen and validated by them.

It was a brief moment of Critical Race Theory (CRT). I could talk here about reasons I've heard from conservatives why teaching CRT is not a good idea, but I will leave that for another time. I'll simply say that for this country to begin to pull itself back together, the systems of the past must be acknowledged and discussed. The effects of institutional racism must be acknowledged and understood, and those systems then obliterated completely and forever. 

 I thank all the persons who concede that they have had the seen and unseen, large and small privileges of American systemic advantage. And I appreciate their efforts to do something about it. And I greatly appreciate the corporate organizations, especially Yale Repertory Theater, that has created this truly revolutionary language that, I believe, they are committed to, from now on, as a way of life.   

thank you sidney poitier

I fully intended to be timelier in my blogging and posting, but a funny thing happened… life. As we find ourselves in a whole new year, no time is better like the present.

Sidney Poitier passed away on January 6, 2022. All stop. A legend, our legend is gone. Many of us grew up watching the adults in our families swoon at seeing him on screen and trying to emulate his swagger. It was unprecedented how a Black man could tell stories that transcended and do so with the style and grace of royalty. Our royalty.

His work in “A Raisin in the Sun” inspired me to be an actor. He carefully sculpted his career by choosing and crafting his roles. He was a man of his age and a man for all ages. And in his example, much of my career has been designed around the desire to tell stories of the HUMAN condition through the indelible lens of Blackness.

This past holiday season, I was honored to once again take a turn as Scrooge in the Goodman Theater’s production of A Christmas Carol. This timeless story shows that by learning from the past, opening our eyes to the present and considering what could be, we can make a change for ourselves and for others. That is a human story, one that transcends.

Through Mr. Poitier’s many movies, he showed us how we can be that change and impact the generations to come. So, I thank him for showing this Black man what is possible and how I too could be part of telling the human experience.

hello, world!

Welcome to my blog. This is a completely new endeavor for me, and one I wasn’t sure I’d ever embark on. But after decades of bringing so many wonderful characters’ stories to life through my work, I decided it’s time to tell some my own stories.

I’ve been blessed to have a long, wonderful, enriching career in the theatre as a classically-trained Black actor. This wasn’t initially what I set out to do. When I began taking my craft seriously as a young actor, it was because I hoped to one day land my dream role of playing Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun. But after being accepted to Juilliard and getting access to the kind of incredible training few actors are ever lucky enough to have, my dreams shifted.

I fell in love with the Classics; those seminal stories of human life that have captured the attention of audiences for hundreds of years, and remain just as resonant today as they did when they were first written. And I realized that, even though these stories are universal, they weren’t usually being told by people who looked like me. So, I set out to build a career where I could portray the stories I love and connect my lived experience and my community to my passion for the stage.

Along the way, I’ve seen some incredible things, met some amazing people, and learned more than I thought possible. And even though I’d never really thought about starting a blog, I’ve come to understand that this is a forum where I can share the experiences that have shaped my perspective and connect with others who share the same love for the arts that I do. So here I am, joining the 21st century! I hope you’ll follow along with me.