Transcripts

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SPEAKER 1: Did you ever resent being dependent on the white community for your survival?

SPEAKER 2: Well, I think that artists are always dependent upon someone for their survival. So you get over that rather quickly. [LAUGHS] And sometimes it doesn't matter where that support comes.

It is important that Black people understand and have ownership in this organization. There's no reason for it to be if they don't. All of the drama is produced and presented as though there are no one but Black people in the house. Now we know that isn't so, but that's the way it's always presented. And that provides for a certain kind of truth and resonance in the experience that you get in no other way.

Now, it turns out that when one is specific, in this case, culturally specific with an art form, we end up finding a universal. And that's a lot of what I teach right now. All art is very, very specific.

We have been conned or snowed into believing that the European specific is the universal, and that's just not so. Any human experience treated specifically will yield human identification and so forth. I'm a human being. I can only think of human thoughts. And that's what art is able to do.

And that's why I'm so taken by it and why it can make us cry and laugh and feel pain and just ache with joy. I mean, only art can do that because it is the human experience stripped away. We walk into a darkened room in a community that is very dissimilar from our own.

I watched that as I watched Black people walk in the Guthrie to see Big White Fog. I mean, we understood that they're not used to coming there and getting the cultural nuance, the understanding of the experience. So we sought to introduce them to the building the minute they walked in. I mean we had pictures of the Black migration all over. We had music and video information that slides that begin to draw them in and let them know this was about them and establishing a Black presence in the 1920s in the United States.

And watching them walk into a room or a building that typically did not show that kind of understanding and insight about them and watching them begin to loosen up and feel part of that once they recognize that truth on the stage and they began to talk back, and it was a marvelous thing to see. And only art, I think, can do that, only it can touch people in those sort of real ways.

SPEAKER 1: One of the productions that you do year after year that seems to enliven the cash flow is Black Nativity. Where did it come from? And why is it so popular?

SPEAKER 2: Well, sometimes, because we have enjoyed at Penumbra a degree of critical success, I will be out in the theatrical or commercial community, and people will say, well, you guys always get good reviews. And it's almost as though we're being the perception is that we're being mollycoddled or treated differently because we're minority or Black or whatever those things are. And that's just not.

So this is good stuff. This stuff will stand up to anybody's measure. And Black Nativity is a great example. It's a Langston Hughes piece. He wrote it years ago and wrote it to be done very cheaply by the community.

He wanted it to be owned by the community. It's very sparse. I'll never forget the first year we did the show, this really nice old white lady I won't say her name, but she's been coming to Black Nativity for a while and buys tickets for her whole family. And when she came out, there was a little kid out there that I was watching because the child's parent was in the show, as a matter of fact.

And this old lady came out, and her eyes were a twinkle. And she was-- because that play boosts you. And she says, "Oh, is this the little Black baby Jesus?" And I went, "Wow, this is amazing" that that is considered, you see, and not in any sort of revolutionary sort of way as a part of life. And that's what good art can do for all of us. And I think it accounts for the popularity of a Black Nativity.

SPEAKER 1: Minnesota's population is changing. Demographics are changing. More people of color are moving in here. So I guess I was curious to hear how you view the future racial climate here. And perhaps the current one for that matter, how are we adjusting to one another? How are we getting along?

SPEAKER 2: Well, I think that there are issues that demand our attention. The Southeast Asian, African-American communication needs to be looked at. We're entering into a project with Asian-American Renaissance, and we're going to look at that communication between young people and begin to get at some of those issues.

There is certainly a degree of intolerance for art. If one looks at the political climate today, art is viewed as though it is a frill, an accoutrement. And we need to be very, very careful with that because you see, art for me is the laboratory of the mind. It is the linkages between all those disciplines. It allows us to not do anything in horrible little boxes.

And so I fear for that kind of thinking. People who say what we should be thinking and what we should not think and so forth, that frightens me very, very much. It isn't anything new. They've always been around.

I mean, we had a Federal Theater in the United States during the Roosevelt administration. We had one. And it wasn't that theater didn't work, it was that it worked, too, well. And we had the same sorts of questions and so forth about what art should do and what public money should be spent for and so forth that we're having today, and some of the same sort of criticism coming out of the same parts of the country even.

It's so interesting. Maybe there's something in the dirt down there. I don't know. [LAUGHS] But those sorts of things frighten me very much. I wonder as well about the role of cultural institutions in a society that has a multicultural mandate.

If everyone's going to do what Penumbra does, what does Penumbra do? You see what I mean? So those are all things that we need to somehow sort out. And there are a number of challenges there.

Fortunately, there are a burgeoning number of Black writers. And that's always the beginning of theater. I mean, we forget that. We tend to think about, well, it's producers, well it's the building, well it's the actor, it's the director, it's the music.

It's that writer. It's that writer who sits and puts those words together. And without that writer, you have absolutely nothing. That's where it all begins. And there are a number of those people that are coming up and waxing right now.

The idea that the society can only support one of everything, like you get your black writer, and it's August Wilson, and there can be no more, that's gone. There's so many people writing so very well right now. And so there's no dearth of material.

We can reach back and get, as I mentioned earlier, there's Theodore Ward. There's a playwright that's got 40-some plays and only two of them have been produced professionally. So, I mean, there's a lot of material out there for us to pull from.

We just have to, I think, keep our art relevant and speaking to our condition. I don't like art that gets too far out ahead of the people. I like broad-shouldered work.

I like work that high school kids and dock workers and all those people can look at and say, yeah, I like that, that made me feel something. And that's fine for me because I know if I've done that work for them, it'll have the relevance and resonance that the more sophisticated or the critical community will come to as well.