ON AND OFF CAMPUS PROFILE: STEVEN SAPP '89 AND MILDRED RUIZ-SAPP '92

Steven Sapp ’89 and Mildred Ruiz-Sapp ’92 returned to Annandale in September for a talk and conversation, moderated by Professor of Dance Jean Churchill and introduced by President Leon Botstein, in Weis Cinema. They also taught intensive workshops for students in the Theater and Performance and Dance Programs. Photo by Karl Rabe

STEVEN SAPP ’89 AND MILDRED RUIZ-SAPP ’92 UNIVERSES IS A STAGE

In February 2020, the multicultural performance ensemble Universes premiered AmericUS, a play about the state of contemporary America, to enthusiastic reviews at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. They were in conversations to take it on tour when the pandemic hit. “We watched two years of work literally get canceled, lost,” says Universes cofounder Steven Sapp ’89. “We had to turn down so many gigs,” adds fellow cofounder Mildred Ruiz-Sapp ’92. “But we couldn’t travel the company and be responsible for people’s lives.”

They returned to Ashland, Oregon, where they and other Universes members—including Ruiz-Sapp’s brother William “Ninja” Ruiz ’03—have been playwrights in residence at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival since 2013. Universes is a collective of multidisciplinary writers and performers of color who fuse theater, poetry, dance, jazz, hip-hop, politics, blues, and Spanish boleros. The company was founded in the Bronx in 1995, but its origins lay earlier and farther north: Bard College in 1988. Sapp grew up in the Forest Housing Project in the Bronx and arrived at Bard via the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) and his high school guidance counselor, who gave him a brochure that read “Bard, a Place to Think.” “He said, ‘Trust me, go here,’” says Sapp. “For me, thinking about being a writer, it clicked.”

At Bard, Sapp was further encouraged by Alex McKnight ’79, associate director of HEOP, whom Sapp describes as a “father figure/crazy uncle” to him. Three years later, Sapp’s Senior Project adviser, Elizabeth Frank (now Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature), suggested he create a play based on Edmund Perry, a 17-year-old Black honor student enrolled to attend Stanford University, who was shot to death after allegedly mugging a plainclothes police officer. Sapp was struck by the similarities between their lives. “Coming from the inner city, I felt the push and the pull my entire time at Bard. I wanted Bard students to know what students of color go through,” he says.

During registration for Sapp’s final semester, McKnight introduced him to his future wife, first year Mildred Ruiz, on her first day at Bard. It was the beginning of a lifelong personal and artistic collaboration. Ruiz, from the Jacob Riis Houses on New York’s Lower East Side, intended to become a fashion illustrator, but her guidance counselor showed her the same Bard brochure. “I kept telling him, ‘I’ll think about it.’ But he said, ‘Here, this is the one. You keep saying you’re going to think about it, so go think about it there,’” she recalls.

Sapp’s Senior Project play, “Purgatory,” in which Ruiz was cast, became a rallying cry for students of color to discuss issues that they’d previously kept to themselves. “It sparked everything that happened from that moment to now,” says Sapp. “It was the beginning of being our true selves.” RuizSapp adds, “That’s where the Universes aesthetic was born.” “Purgatory” won the HEOP Award and the Reamer Kline Award, among many other accolades. It also caught the attention of the New York Times, which mentioned it in its Campus Life section.

While Ruiz-Sapp finished her BA in literature, Sapp, who earned a BA in theater, worked in the Bard Admission Office. “They sent me out, as a Black man, to articulate what it’s like being at Bard,” he says. “I was honest to students of color. I said, ‘This is how it is: the good and the bad.’” The couple also volunteered at Devereux, in Red Hook, New York, working with developmentally disabled kids. After Ruiz-Sapp graduated, the pair put their Devereux experience to good use, helping to create the Point Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit dedicated to youth development and revitalizing the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx. At night, they headed downtown, becoming part of the burgeoning poetry scene at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. “The stakes kept getting raised,” says Sapp. Material that started off in open-mic stand-up evolved into 15-minute vignettes, then a whole night of poetry, music, theater, and movement; they brought in other performers, and suddenly, they were a theater company.

In 2001, they created Slanguage, a hip-hop, jazz, poetry, and rap-infused subway ride from Brooklyn to the Bronx that captured the city’s sights and sounds. The Boston Herald wrote, “It’s a linguistic fireworks display, and it’s difficult not to be swept along with its percussive momentum and dazzling wordplay.” More plays followed, including Blue Suite, a trip through music history; The Denver Project, about homelessness in America; and Ameriville, set in posthurricane New Orleans. Then came the awards, grants, rave reviews, global travel, and commissions. In 2012, the Oregon Shakespeare Company commissioned them to write what became Party People, about the next generation of the Black Panthers and Puerto Rican activist group the Young Lords. “We wanted to look at what happens to these revolutionaries, postrevolution,” says Ninja Ruiz. “We had two young people who were presenting an art exhibition, talking about the lives of the Panthers and Lords, and inviting them to come into their space.” Adds Sapp, “We wanted to write about them because we grew up around the Panthers and Lords; we saw their programs in our communities.”

The trio traveled the country, talking to Panther members, including cofounder Bobby Seale, graphic artist Emory Douglas, Ericka Huggins, and David Hilliard. In Chicago, they met José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez, founder of the Lords, who introduced them to the mother and brother of Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader assassinated by Chicago police in 1969 (and focus of the recent movie Judas and the Black Messiah). Party People grew out of these conversations. It premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, near Oakland, California, where the Panthers were founded. “The activists came to see the show, which was a big deal,” says Sapp. “Their relationships are complicated, and the conversations they had afterwards would not have happened had they not had a common place to come that was safe.” The New York Times raved: “In the current political climate, it may be the most frightening and exciting piece of theater now up.”

In 2016, they began work on UniSon, a musical based on playwright August Wilson’s unpublished poems, woven together with their own poetry, music, and storytelling. “All of our stuff is so political,” says Ruiz-Sapp. “But UniSon is about aging and the legacy we leave behind. It’s about lovers and friends existing on the same stage.” Also in 2016, Bard honored them with the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters. They invited McKnight to attend the ceremony. “He kept fighting for us while we were at Bard, and we didn’t want to let him down,” she says. “We told him, ‘It’s because of you that we are here, so be proud.’ Everything we learned and experienced at Bard helped shape who we are today.”

Sapp and Ruiz-Sapp spent 2020 working on commissions, such as Africantic, which traces the African musical experience; a piece about house music; and Maria, in which a young Puerto Rican woman tells her “East Side Story” journey up until Hurricane Maria hits. Ninja Ruiz, meanwhile, has been living in Puerto Rico, working as a curator and writer, and promoting the spoken word. They have also been putting their work on film, and are developing the idea of a Universes Institute. “A lot of the things we learned along the way aren’t taught,” says Ruiz-Sapp. “Such as how to tour, produce your work, and construct your design team. We want to organize all this in an institutionalized form. We’ve just passed our 25th anniversary, and we want to set down roots for ourselves and our aesthetic. We want our legacy to survive.”

Steven Sapp ’89 and Mildred Ruiz-Sapp ’92 received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College in 2016.