Interview with Jackie Alexander, artistic director NC Black Repertory Theatre
Perry Gaffney interviewed Jackie Alexander, artistic director of the North Carolina Black Repertory Theater for ROUTES. Get an insight into the challenges Black theater companies face and how Jackie Alexander managed to steer the North Carolina Black Repertory Theatre through the crisis caused by Covid-19.
If you prefer to read, here is the transcript:
Hi, I’m Perry Gaffney and i’m your host for this ROUTES’ edition of theater in the time of COVID.
Jackie Alexander, artistic director of the North Carolina Black Repertory Theater
Q: When did you become the artistic director of the North Carolina Black Repertory Theater?
A: 2016. It will be five years July 1st of this year.
Q: Were they looking for a new artistic director when Larry Leon Hamlin’s health was failing?
A: Well, Mr. Hamlin actually passed in 2007 and a couple of years later Miss Mabel Robinson was named artistic director. So she had been the artistic director during the interim and she announced her retirement, I think mid-2015. I got a call October 2015 to come down and interview. I interviewed late 2015 or early 2016. Got the job and was brought on board in July of that year.
Q: You were at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn when you got the call?
A: The Billie Holiday Theatre, actually, it was just fortuitous timing because the Billie Holiday closed in 2016 or was scheduled to close in 2016 for a two-year renovation. They weren’t going to be producing, so I just stepped down from the Billie Holiday.
I had been working there as a producer, writer, actor for years. I just stepped down and maybe two three months later, I got the call from NC Black Rep.
Q: What projects had to be canceled or postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic?
A: Everything!
We had a world premiere scheduled. We had rehearsed it, set was built, costumes. We were five days from opening night of “Freedom Summer” by Cynthia Robinson when the shutdown happened. So, we had to shut that show down five days before it was scheduled to open.
We also had the world premiere of a new play based on the life of Dr. Maya Angelou scheduled for May of that year. We had our spring reading series, so, it had been a really busy year for us.
The festival was huge. The biggest festival we had ever had in 2019. Our Nativity our holiday show played to … we had one show that played to over a thousand people. I think it was close to 1,100 people. That was the biggest performance we ever had for our holiday show, so we were really rolling. But everything got shut down in March like for everyone else.
So, the rest of our season was canceled and of course the Fall season that we were ready to start to work on in the fall of 2020 was canceled. We pushed “Freedom Summer” back two months and we pushed “Phenomenal Woman” back two months thinking this will blow over.
And then that process repeated itself multiple times over the next four months, until we realized nothing is happening for quite some time. We should just find another way to produce, and, that’s when our focus really switched to virtual productions.
We had been doing stuff online through zoom, but at that point we wanted to raise our game as far as what our virtual productions look like.
Q: You just recently presented “Freedom Summer”.
A: The same show that we had to shut down a year ago. We did a virtual world premiere of it. We actually filmed it.
We partnered with Appalachian state. It was the second time we partnered with them and they had just gotten in some new equipment in January. We used four cameras to shoot the play. We basically made a movie and it really turned out well.
I was very happy with it, two character piece, beautiful play. And you know, silver lining, we were able to get the play to 12 universities got the play for their students. That would have never happened in the in the real world. We would have never been able to get to get students from 12 universities here and I know the playwright, she really wanted to get the play in front of students because the play is set against the backdrop of the 1964 Mississippi voting rights project. So it was really important for her to share that history with young people and this worked out.
We had multiple schools. We had schools in Vermont, New York. All of the major universities here in Winston-Salem, so you know, it was a blessing in disguise or a silver lining. I don’t want to call it a blessing, just a silver lining, of the pandemic that we were able to shoot it and have it reach an audience that we wouldn’t have been able to reach with a live production.
Q: Have there been many other silver linings?
A: Many actually. You know with technology, once that door opens it never closes. So what happened was — our first main virtual production of a main stage was your show “The Resurrection of Alice” and we had over a thousand viewers for that. We provided that no charge to our audience and then we followed up with “Nativity”, our holiday special. We transitioned that online and again a lot of people had heard about the show, but if you lived in California you weren’t flying to Winston-Salem to see it for the holidays. So this year people everywhere were able to get a taste of it. So it really opened up the door for us to communicate with our national audience. We’re lucky because of the festival we have a national audience. We have a mailing list with, I don’t know how many people on it now, but it’s all over the world.
So with the virtual programming it’s a click of a button and I feel like we’ve been connecting with that audience much more on social media. A lot of likes and clicks on videos and stuff have been through the roof just because the programming. People can see from anywhere and I think that’s really helping to create excitement about NBTF 2021 — if we can ever nail down how we’re going to do it. But people are excited about it.
Q: Talk about NBTF, the National Black Theater Festival.
A: Anything it would be a hybrid, I mean the festival really is about people communing together. I don’t think it would work as a virtual only festival. Also, you know the economy of Winston-Salem it’s a huge boost that they the economy in Winston-Salem. So they need people here. We’ve been planning a hybrid of having some live events cutting down not nearly as big as you know as much as we normally produce, but having some live events and having virtual offerings also.
I got to be honest, we’re still planning that because as you know the goal posts keep changing. The rules keep changing every other week, really. And that’s what’s tricky right now. The rules that are in place today won’t be in place six months from now, five months from now when the festival comes in.
That could be for the better or that could be for the worse. So it’s really a guessing game and trying to find a plan that will work either way which there’s no guarantee.
So, we have a press conference coming up, I think it’s the second Monday in April. That’s kind of the deadline we set to make final decisions as to what we’re going to move forward with. But right now the plan is a hybrid festival.
Doing some things live, taking some things virtual, like the International Colloquium which is normally a live event. That’s something we can do online. So that’s something we can do virtually. So, we will probably move that online. But again, there’s a lot of discussions and meetings trying to figure out how to do this. Hopefully everyone gets back vaccinated and the numbers keep going in the right way and things really open up by August.
My only fear there is what I mentioned earlier last year: every three months, we had to cancel something because what we thought would happen did not happen, so it’s a lot of guesswork right now.
Q: Do you still offer acting and play writing classes?
A: We do those for our teens. We have our Teen Theater Ensemble which actually starts this Saturday and it’s a very exciting year for it.
This year we have a month of play writing, a month of acting and a month of musical theater. And the 10 teens who’ve been selected for the program will write their own play in the play writing session, then work on it in the acting session and those teens will also, hopefully, we we can do MBTF 2021, will perform “To Catch a Fox” by Charles Burkes which is a hip-hop musical based on “The Taming of the Shrew”. And the plays that they write will be incorporated into that play.
So, at the festival we now have this program called “Shakespeare at Sunset” which is a free offering to everyone. We do it outside, in 2019 we did “12th Night Set in Jamaica”, Ted Lands directed it. So, this year we are going to have the teens, and, we’ll be casting additional actors for the full production itself. But the teens are currently, or, at least this Saturday they start. And the play writing session is going to be virtual, and again, we’re doing little guesswork. We’re hoping by April people will feel comfortable enough where we can have the acting and the musical theater workshops in person — followed by the production in August. And then we will also be doing a virtual productions of the plays they write in June. We are going to film a virtual production of just their plays.
Q:How have the enrollments for classes been?
A: It really increased this year. I think we limited it to 10 people just because that’s a lot. 10 kids to write a play in four weeks. Now they are long sessions but it is a lot to do. So we limited how many people will come in, but the interest was really high this year.
I think because of what the kids are getting and also the instructors. We have got some amazing instructors with some really great credits who are coming in to teach the classes. And also this will be the first time the teens have the opportunity to be showcased at the festival.
Normally, we do a showcase of them during our season, but this year they will perform on the festival main stage. So I think that attracted a lot of attention.
Q: Are you planning co-productions with other theaters?
A: At NBTF 2019, we did “48 Hours in Holy Ground” and it sold out all three days. It was an amazing experience. We have some plans for that because that was really popular. Because it gave actors at the festival the chance to perform. All you do is show up. You didn’t have to be cast in the show. You show up and be cast in a show. And I really want to do something like that this year.
It’s just the logistics and how you do it with all the rules that are in place right now. We’re working on something. It may not be the exact same thing we did last year but I want to do something at each festival where we give actors who are in attendance the opportunity to perform.
Q: What are some of the benefits of co-productions?
That was a new project we started at NBTF 2019, also, the Sylvia Sprinkle Hamlin Rolling World Premiere Award and really we started that to help. I think Mr Hamlin started the festival to connect Black theaters across the country. And this award allows us to connect on a production which helps in marketing the show, you know.
We hear about a show that’s got three this year. The 2021 winner of that award will have five regional productions, guaranteed out the box.
Whoever wins that will get five productions at NC Black Rep, Hattie Lou, The Ensemble Theater in Houston. Hattie Lou is in Memphis, West Coast Theater Group in Sarasota and St.Louis Black Rep. So that already creates an energy and excitement behind a show, and, it also gives it a life right out the box.
I think that’s what happens to a lot of brilliant shows. They have a great run, people talk about it, but then you forget about it. Because now you’ve got to go find another production, and, you’ve got to catch somebody’s interest again.
When you go to someone and say the show’s being produced five times, producers stop, you know like, well, it must be a hot show. You know perception is everything. The playwright says “My show’s being produced in five different big regional theaters”, well that must be a great show.
What is it that’ll stop and make people listen. Publishers it’s like “Hey maybe we should publish this.” That was the reason to really give birth to new works. To give them a life — not just give them a production. Give them a life. As far as other collaborations we do Appalachian State University in Boone which is about 90 minutes from us. Without our collaborations with them over the past year, we wouldn’t have been able to produce the virtual shows we produce.
What we just did with “Freedom Summer”, there’s no way we could afford to do that without them. I mean the equipment we used, the space we had — it was really through our partnership with them that we bring a show to their festival every summer. The partnership started the second year I was here and we’ve brought a show up to an Appalachian Summer Festival every year since 2017. So we’ve got a great relationship with them.
At NBTF 2021, it’s going to be our first live production partnership with the Winston-Salem Symphony. So partnerships, you know, it helps audience-wise, it helps resources-wise, just for non-profits, it’s the best thing you can have. You always need a little assistance and partnerships and Winston-Salem has a lot of organizations that are always open to partnerships.
And last, I think it was September, October and November, we partnered with Zika the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art on an outdoor reading series. They have this beautiful lawn behind the museum and we have a stage set up out there. We partnered with them, so we were actually able to produce live theater.
We were limited on how many people we could have out there, but we were able to produce live theater through that partnership. So that’s been a key since I’ve arrived here. Just partnering with not only artistic organizations but businesses, corporations who might do plays that have a certain subject matter that might fit with them. We had a health fair at the 2017 festival that every major medical company in the city partnered with us on.
So it just helps elevate the projects.
Q: What careers have the North Carolina Black Rep and The National Black Theater Festival helped to launch?
A: Jimmy J. J. Jeter started in team theater ensemble. I don’t remember, wasn’t that long ago, because he’s pretty young. And, yeah when “Hamilton” early 2020, he was playing the title role. I think he was playing title role when the show shut down.
Daniel Bate’s been here. Chester was actually the the co-chair of the festival in 2019. He shared the story with me in 2019 that the first festival he came to Mr Hamlin told him, before he got here, “You’re going to be a star after you do this show.”
He heard and was excited, but it was exactly what happened.
Q: What veteran celebrities have attended the National Black Theatre Festival through the years?
A: If they are Black theater icons, they’ve been here. It’s funny, we have a trailer for the film we are doing. A film about the festival which I am really excited about. Actually we plan on it being finished by November of this year, 2021. But we did a trailer and at the end there is this long just scroll of everybody who has been here. And every time we play it the audience reacts to this scroll of names because they are like oh my god.
And at the end Nathan Ross Freeman who was very integral to the formation of the company, he is talking about, you know, he has this really great line. He’s like “Everybody’s been here. Everybody came the first year except Denzel. He came two years late.” So it is like if they weren’t here the first year, they eventually made it to Winston-Salem which is pretty amazing that you’re able to convince all these icons to get here.
But, that was Larry Leon Hamlin. So, say the name and you know people ask me and it’s like, I can’t keep track. I just say everybody. If you know them they have been here.
Q: Do you ever lose hope or get discouraged?
A: It’s funny you ask that because I did a panel for leadership Winston-Salem yesterday. And one of the questions from the participants was how do you deal with the grief? How have you dealt with grief over the past year? And I thought about it and I was like I haven’t experienced grief. And I mean that’s my own personal experience, but it’s been challenging. I have had a lot of disappointments but the challenge of finding new ways to make things work never allowed me time to get disillusioned or so.
No, the answer is no. There’s always been just the next challenge how do we make this work. You know things shut down and it’s like well, we got to connect with our audience.
What do we do? We will do a live zoom reading. Okay. I think our first zoom reading, I don’t want to exaggerate, but I think we had like 1500 people who watched it.
We never have that many people in one area, you know. So I am like okay. And we kept doing the zoom readings.How do we do it live and actually capture that feeling of live theater? And we did your show and actually a reviewer of Carolina Online Arts Journal commented: “This is the first time I have experienced live theater. They made me feel like I was back in the theater. ”
We just did Freedom Summer and one of the reviews also said: You know, this is the first time I felt like I am back in the theater. So there’s always been that challenge of finding a way, to create the work, elevate the work, and, that doesn’t leave a lot of time.
There are disappointments, don’t get me wrong. We were on a roll. We were had been in the past from 2000, from the fall of 2020 to the shutdown. We have been presented three national awards. Theater Communications Group in New York Southeastern Theater Conference and North Carolina Theater Conference had all given us their theater of the year award. Basically, we were really on a roll. We were about to produce our show on Dr. Maya Angelou and everything went kind of boom.
That was it, but that opened a whole new set of opportunities. Like I said, we connected with the new audience, we connected with our whole audience more often, not just every other year. They were watching our shows during the pandemic. We have a book project. We are doing an anthology book project on the festival. In 30 years of the festival, producing three plays and monologues.
I guess I always try to find something to keep it going. I try not to sit in the disappointments or deal with what went wrong. It’s like well, what is next? What do we do to keep it going?
Q: Are you training your replacement for the near or distant future?
A: You know what, we’re working on strategic planning right now. Because I feel that’s really important. And I think it’s something that’s overlooked in a lot of theaters.
It’s, what’s the word, succession, a succession plan. And you know not-for-profits. It is hard because, you know, money is always tight. Can you pay somebody who is really experienced and prepared to step in? But I think it’s really important to have that line of succession, people lined up. Because you never know, it could be, I don’t have plans to go anywhere. I still have things I want to do here.
But, you never know what’s going to happen. The institution is what’s most important. It’s not about the person, it’s about the institution. And the institution has to have someone in place to take over. So we don’t at this point, but we’re working. That’s part of our strategic planning of making sure if I were to step away NC Black Rep wouldn’t miss a beat. You know, NC Black Rep would just keep going. The festival would just keep going and the festival is dependent upon so many people. There’s not one person who would step away and the festival would stop. Maybe Ms. Hamlin, but outside of her, you know. But that’s something we are working on.
Q: Any advice or encouragement to future career artists?
A: Take advantage of every opportunity presented. You never know what an opportunity can lead to.
And, I am the perfect example of that. I never planned on being an artistic director. I often joked that my career is a series of happy accidents. I started as a director and someone was like, I mean I started as an actor this was like why don’t you write a movie. Okay, I did it, it got produced. It actually won some awards. Then all of a sudden people like oh you’re a director, would you like to direct this show? Okay, so each time the opportunity was presented I kind of jumped at it, gave it my all and it’s been paying off.
So really, take advantage of the opportunities presented, and, to hearken back to something I just talked about don’t let grief or disappointments stall you or defeat you. Because this is a very tough profession. Do your best in the room and when you walk out forget about it. If they call you, great. But if they don’t call you don’t check on it. Don’t ask about it. When you walk out of the room, it’s over. Move on to the next thing, and, find something else to work on. Don’t let disappointments derail your dreams.
Q: How can our audience partner with the North Carolina Black Rep in the National Black Theatre Festival?
A: Go to North Carolina Black Rep Org. All the information on the company and the festival is there. Join our mailing list, follow us on social media.
We’ve got some great programs coming up. A new thing we’re also doing at this year’s festival and kind of giving the scoop because we haven’t even announced it yet, but we’re going to be presenting scholarships to students, design, acting and directing students, to attend the festival and other conferences around the country.
It’s called an Emerging Artist Award just to connect students and give them opportunities because again, everybody is at the festival. It is the greatest networking event you can possibly be at for a Black theater actor. So we want to pass on those opportunities to college students. So follow us on social media, join our mailing list to stay updated on all the events. There is a lot of stuff going on.
Video interview by Perry Gaffney, edits and technical direction by Frederic Michaels, Abstract Video Productions.
ROUTES, A Guide to African-American Culture
Video interview by Perry Gaffney, edits and technical direction by Frederic Michaels, Abstract Video Productions.