THEATER NOTES : In Search of the Black Audience

W hat would you tell an L.A. newcomer who asked, “Where can I go to see a black play?”

This question was raised by Shay Wafer, a panelist at “The State of Black Theatre Today,” a conference sponsored by the Mark Taper Forum’s Blacksmyths program last weekend.

Wafer pointed out that the L.A. theaters most regularly identified with African American theater--Crossroads, Ebony Showcase, Inner City Cultural Center--”have not been able to mount a full-scale season from year to year” and seldom produce even single productions lately. “Continuity and consistency--we don’t have it,” said Wafer, a producer and former Crossroads manager.

Wafer’s panel focused on black audiences. “The L.A. black audience is developed,” Wafer said. “It has nowhere to go.” She cited the black-oriented touring musicals that frequently attract audiences for brief runs at the Wilshire Ebell and other theaters. Despite the “tacky” tone of the radio commercials for these shows, Wafer said, “we need to explore what these independent producers are doing to get [people] into the theater.”

The producers of these musicals and similarly marketed comedies were not represented on the panels at the symposium. Many of the panelists and audience members referred to these productions disparagingly as “chitlin” plays on the one hand--but admired their marketing prowess on the other.

“I hear resentment of these producers,” said Sheldon Epps, visiting associate artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. “But I’m happy for their success. They’re getting thousands to plunk down money for theater tickets. I pray that 10% of that audience will come see ‘American Medea’ [a new play that received a workshop production as part of the symposium]. . . . We have to look at what they’re doing [in market ing] and we have to steal it.”

Duane Shepard, theater director of the planned Berry Gordy Center for the Performing Arts at the African American Unity Center, was harsher: “I consider these ‘chitlin’ plays minstrel shows. It’s got to stop. . . . Let’s use those marketing techniques for something that will uplift our people.”

“Blacks, for the most part, don’t subscribe” to theaters or other media, said Blacksmyths director L. Kenneth Richardson, noting that his mother buys Ebony magazine “religiously” but never subscribed to it. However, he added that his former artistic home, a theater in New Jersey, was gradually able to overcome the resistance of black theatergoers to subscriptions. “What demeans the black audience is that we assume they won’t come to plays that are ‘serious,’ ” Richardson said.

C. Bernard Jackson, the longtime head of Inner City Cultural Center, which has traditionally aimed for a multicultural rather than a black-only approach, objected to the panel’s focus on black audiences. He said Inner City audiences are consistently 30% black and 32% other “people of color”--but “what we’ve tried to do is find a way to that other 38% where all the money is.”

White audiences, Jackson said, are “most likely to pay the high price of tickets but least likely to attend shows in institutions with names like ‘Inner City Cultural Center.’ ” He told Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson, who was sitting in the audience, “if your objective is to get ‘colored’ audiences, I offer you the name: ‘Inner City Cultural Center.’ ”

The relationship between such mainstream theaters as the Taper, ethnic-specific theaters and funding sources became the focus of a later panel. Douglas Turner Ward, president and co-founder of New York’s pioneering but recently struggling Negro Ensemble Company, said that “major theaters are getting grants to do our thing when [funding sources] won’t give that money to us directly.”

Such major institutions “are being rewarded for having previously been racist,” Ward charged. Although “they have no record of ever using their own money” for black productions or development of black audiences, they get big new grants for those purposes, he said. He cited such funders as the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund and AT&T--which;, ironically, provided $5,000 to the Taper for the very conference where Ward was speaking.

Ward also noted that “once again we’re told we have one spokesman” in mainstream theater--playwright August Wilson--who is, in fact, the only black playwright to be represented in the coming Center Theatre Group seasons (his “Seven Guitars” will play the Ahmanson Theatre, the first CTG show by an African American since Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” was at the Taper in 1993). “There is nothing wrong with August,” Ward said, but he added that the Negro Ensemble Company presented plays by a much wider variety of black writers.

Playwright Robert Alexander (“I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle”) noted that even Wilson is not “a household name--but Snoop Doggy Dogg is.”

Director-actor Shabaka Barry Henley picked up on that theme, noting that the “well-educated, middle-class black people” who work in the theater have “in some ways, lost touch with our general community. The people who are in the revolutionary forefront of speaking to the audiences of young people are mainly in the rap community. We have to find a way to put some hip in our hop.”*