38 minute read
Your Art Is Your Song of Immortality
by SDC Journal
AN INTERVIEW WITH RUBEN SANTIAGO-HUDSON
BY AWOYE TIMPO
On September 14, 2021, Ruben Santiago-Hudson helped re-open Broadway after the Covid-19 shutdown with the first performance of Lackawanna Blues at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. (The play was originally produced in April 2001 at The Public Theater.) The one-man play—the season’s first Broadway show produced by a nonprofit theatre company—was written, directed, and performed by Santiago-Hudson. Accompanied by blues guitarist Junior Mack (performing original music by the late Bill Sims Jr.), Santiago-Hudson played more than 20 roles in this theatrical remembrance of the woman who raised him in Lackawanna, New York, in the 1950s. Miss Rachel—or “Nanny”—ran a boarding house at 32 Wasson Avenue, caring for all who came through her doors; in 2021, her love and strength became a balm for audiences emerging from the pandemic.
As both actor and director, Santiago-Hudson is recognized as one of the preeminent interpreters of the works of August Wilson. He earned a Best Featured Actor Tony Award for his performance as Canewell in the 1996 Broadway production of Seven Guitars. As director, his productions of Wilson’s plays capture the dazzling musicality of Wilson’s words. His 2017 production of Jitney—the play’s belated Broadway debut, at MTC’s Friedman Theatre—was honored with Tony, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, New York Drama Critics Circle, and Drama League Awards.
Santiago-Hudson was interviewed by Awoye Timpo, who worked with him on many productions as his associate director and directs Off-Broadway and regionally. She won an Obie Award for Direction for her production of Alice Childress’s Wedding Band and is the Founding Producer of CLASSIX, a company dedicated to exploding the classical canon through an exploration of Black performance history and dramatic works by Black writers.
AWOYE TIMPO | When did you first start directing? Was it when you were at Wayne State?
RUBEN SANTIAGO-HUDSON | It was before that. They needed somebody to direct when we were doing our shows at the Friendship House Community Center in Lackawanna, New York. Willie James usually directed, but sometimes when he was not directing then I’d direct. But it wasn’t deep. We didn’t have too many lights. We didn’t have much set. We just had talent. That was where I thought, “I really like doing this.”
AWOYE | How old were you?
RUBEN | 15 or 16.
AWOYE | Did you know then that you wanted to be an actor?
RUBEN | I knew I loved acting. I didn’t know I was going to be an actor. I knew I loved it. I thought I could be a basketball player, but you need more talent than I had to be a basketball player. But I found out that on stage—I found this out in college, at Binghamton University in New York—that my artistic talent could carry me and put me in a competitive spot. They would have guest artists come to Binghamton and I’d be acting or working with them, and they’d be looking at me like, “Yo, you going pro?” And I’m like, “Am I?” It kind of reveals itself to you.
AWOYE | What did you go to Binghamton to study?
RUBEN | I just went because my mama wouldn’t let me take a job in the steel plant. I wanted to take a job in the steel plant. That’s where everybody was making money in Lackawanna. But my mother wouldn’t let me. She said, “You’ve got a good brain, you’re going to college.”
Loften Mitchell, the great writer, was my advisor at Binghamton. He had written Star of the Morning already. Bubbling Brown Sugar is what he was working on at this time.
AWOYE | Did you know who Loften Mitchell was when you got to Binghamton?
RUBEN | No. He imposed himself on me. He heard about this little Black kid running around thinking he’s good. He knew I needed some protection. Being Black and really good at something, being better than other people, you become a threat.
AWOYE | Was Binghamton the first time you started to acknowledge and recognize that?
RUBEN | No, the world let me know early on who I was, what the world looked at me as. When teachers would tell me I’m not college material and I shouldn’t even go to college. Or when people would drive by and call me expletives or tell me that I couldn’t get in the swimming pool. My father, who was Puerto Rican, and the kindest person you ever met, that I ever met, would just pile us in his car—us being 11- and 12-year-olds, not even teenagers. He would take us to the pool in Cazenovia Park and tell everybody, “Get in, get in. Take a swim. Everybody’s swimming.” And the white people would just get out. So they let me know early on that I wasn’t welcome in a lot of places.
AWOYE | How did you navigate that at Binghamton? Because you’re doing a thing that you’re great at—
RUBEN | I don’t know about great; I was good at it. I’m still trying to get to be great.
AWOYE | And you have this mentor, this legendary person at the program. How did you navigate those four years? How did you uncover your artistic voice?
RUBEN | I started creating my own. I started doing things during Black History Month—I would do programs at the social room, and I would put together poetry and monologues with a couple other Black people who weren’t in the theatre department but wanted to be actors. Or I’d get my conga player and we would just run some revolutionary poetry, and I’d have a couple dancers with me. I was putting together shows.
I would audition, I would get little roles or character roles in Binghamton playing old men with cotton in the side of my mouth and a lot of makeup on. Never playing who I was. And then I was cast in Sizwe Banzi Is Dead [by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona]. The director was in grad school, but he really wasn’t a director. He wanted to be a writer or a dramaturg. But they thrust this upon him, to direct the Black play, and he basically fell apart in rehearsal, and I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll direct it.” He said, “If I don’t direct it, I won’t get my master’s.” I said, “Don’t worry. Your name will be on it as the director.” It took the campus by storm. Everybody had to see Sizwe Banzi Is Dead. And no one knew that I directed it.
AWOYE | What do you think you brought to that production as a director?
RUBEN | Authenticity of the struggle. Authenticity of the people who feel they are below, trying to rise up. I brought that to it. The other part, the cultural part, I had to really, really do research. At one time I was talking to this South African brother, and I was wanting him to tell me about South Africa. Now we are talking about the ’70s. And he would not talk to me about it. He was at this prestigious United States university. He said, “There are things I should not talk about.”
One day at the pub, he said, “I’m going to give you something, but you cannot share it. You have to give it back. Give it back to me tomorrow.” It was a tape, a VHS tape of police shooting school kids who were protesting. Shooting them, killing them. If it came out that he gave me this information, he would be deported. But I started really realizing the depth of the turmoil, the depth of the atrocities, and it gave me a deeper, more profound direction of what I needed to say and what this play meant.
AWOYE | That story helped to ground the play in an experience that you wouldn’t know otherwise.
RUBEN | That opened it up, and then he opened up to me and started talking to me about what it was like, about the mine workers and the trains that came by that picked up African workers from different villages. Sometimes they had to jump on the train, and they would take them to the diamond mines, and they would be working 14 hours.
These were things I did not know. I was in college. I read, I had access to information— but not this information, not firsthand, not to this guy sitting here with his eyes turning red and tears just dripping down his face.
AWOYE | How do you think about what your responsibility is to research and to learn and understand everything about the world of a piece as you’re preparing for a project?
RUBEN | My style is to fill myself up to bursting with information and allow it to reveal itself in the process. Sometimes I’ll come up and do a 20-minute lecture before we start rehearsal. Sometimes it’s historical information, sometimes it’s motivation. But I want everybody to be like, “Put me in the game, coach.” I can’t do that, motivate, if I can’t lead you properly. Any good leader should be properly prepared for whatever the battle is. I don’t believe in stalemates. Mediocrity is nothing that I want any part of.
“Contentment is your enemy.”
AWOYE | You’re in it to win, as it were, to make it great and successful.
RUBEN | That’s the goal. To get up every morning, excited to be better and know more and do better. Contentment is your enemy. That’s one of my mottoes. I teach it all the time. Contentment is your enemy. Just when you’re satisfied, somebody is going to pass you. That’s the way I was as a so-called athlete, and that’s the way I am as a director.
AWOYE | What’s your balance for taking care of people and also really pushing them?
RUBEN | You know how it is when you’re a director. You become the therapist.
Sometimes you’re leading, sometimes you’re following, sometimes you’re listening, sometimes you’re talking. Sometimes you have to have a real sober, bold conversation.
AWOYE | You have high expectations for everybody who walks into the room; you’re taking care of them, but also setting a standard for how the room is going to work and function. How did you come to find that balance or understanding of what your responsibility is to the room?
RUBEN | Well, I am the director. Since I invited everybody to the party, it’s my job to be a good host. Every individual has different needs. You just got to know how to read it. Sometime if I’m working with Brandon [J. Dirden] and he does something, I may say, “You know better than that.” I might have to go to another actor and say, “Now what did that mean when you did this?” I have to make them explain it to me so it can be clear. I say, “Well, does that serve the moment? Does that serve the play? Or can we serve it better? Is there a better option?” That might be the tact for that person.
Or I can just call out to a person like Harvy Blanks, “Harvy, you are doing three things when you walk into the room. You’re mugging this, joking that, dancing this. You get to do two of them. Drop one right now. You pick.” “Which one should I drop?” “You pick, I’m going to give you two. You get the ‘hey’ and then you get the punch. That’s it.” I could talk to him that way. Every actor, you can’t talk them that way. That’s my people.
Even when I’m casting, people wonder why I spend 15 minutes, 20 minutes with an actor when they come in. Because I want to see how they react to my energy, the needs that I feel the play has, the needs that I have, the needs that their character has. Can you serve them?
AWOYE | What are you looking for in the audition room?
RUBEN | I like people who are striving, who understand their responsibility, so they’re striving to please the ancestors. They want the ancestors to be pleased at what we presented to the world. And it gets a little deep and ethereal.
But I think it’s very important because we, as people of color, we don’t get as many opportunities. So those we get—don’t squander them. Don’t do some play about, “Whoa, the paint was drying, but it didn’t dry that well.” Other people can write plays about that.
AWOYE | Let’s circle back. So you finished at Binghamton. What did you do after that?
RUBEN | Went to grad school. I was going to come to New York. I had an offer to do a play in New York, just a little role, but it was in New York. I had never lived in New York. I lived in upstate New York, 520 miles away. I didn’t have a place to live, and one of my professors, Don Boros, suggested that I go to grad school.
At the time, I was doing Equus, playing a horse in a regional theatre [in Binghamton]. So I got on the bus after the show and did an URTA audition at 8 am in the morning at the Roosevelt Hotel. Afterword, you wait in the lobby, and they come around at 1 pm and they call your name and hand you an envelope. I opened up my envelope and I had a list of offers from 13 universities.
So I was contemplating it; I wanted to do classical theatre. Professor Boros said, “Why do you want to do classical theatre so much?” I said, “Because Professor so-and-so told me I wouldn’t be able to do classical theatre because my lips were too big. So I’m going to show him that these lips I’ve been using my whole life are good for classical theatre.” So I took the scholarship to Wayne State. They gave me a full scholarship and per diem and made me a teacher’s assistant. I got a check every two weeks so I could get my housing and keep gas in my car, and learn classical theatre—I thought.
AWOYE | Can you tell me about who the people were that you met at Wayne State that really helped to shape you as an artist, as a director?
RUBEN | My first good buddy, Dr. Von Washington, was working on his doctorate. I would wear him out because my hunger and thirst for knowledge were insatiable. I would constantly knock on his office door and say, “Look, have you read Big Man by Randolph Edmonds?” He’d be like, “Rube, I ain’t got time.” “No, let me read it to you.” And I’d read some of it. “Man, come back tomorrow and read the rest.” As soon as I finished it, I would come back in. “Have you read Goin’ a Buffalo by Ed Bullins?” “Rube, I ain’t got time.” “It’s a long play but give me three days. I’ll read the whole thing.” So I just read everything in Black Theatre USA and Black Fire, and he would direct me in plays.
It started because I didn’t get one lead role at the Hilberry Classic Theatre, zero. [Wayne State University’s graduate repertory theatre company, Hilberry Classic Theatre, was founded in association with the university’s Graduate Performing Training Center in 1963.] So I did something radical on my fourth play. I walked off the stage in the middle of being the rug bearer and left the rug on. I was just not carrying another rug. I just had had it. The first play, Pygmalion, I was bystander number two. Wild Oats, I was ruffian three. Antony and Cleopatra, I was the fan boy and rug bearer. I got to the fourth play, I said, “I can’t take it.”
AWOYE | You’d had enough. Did you have a kind of a breakdown?
RUBEN | I wouldn’t call it a breakdown. It was a defiant act. I was like, “I’m out.” They didn’t want to kick me out because I was the only Black guy in that company. They were like, “Are you okay? What’s wrong? Do you need...” And I said, “I’m just sick of it. I can’t take it no more.” They told Von to talk to me because that was my buddy. And he said, “Hold on, hold on. You don’t want to lose this. Who else got a master’s in Lackawanna?”
I said, “I don’t know anybody got a master’s.” “Well, get your master’s. Don’t leave. Let’s figure this out.” I said, “Von, I’m sick of it.” He said, “Let me go talk to the white people, because you don’t know how to talk to them.” So we go to talk to Leonard Leone, who started and ran the Hilberry Classic Theatre. Von appeals for me; they love Von. Von is the charming-est. So I step outside, and they talk for a little while. Von comes out, he says, “Okay, okay, okay. What do you want to do? Because they’re going to loan you to me for the Black Theatre Program.” I’m in grad school. This was an undergrad Black theatre touring company that Von was the director of. “What do you want to do?” I said, “Native Son. I want to play Bigger.” He goes back in the office, closes the door. I’m still sitting there.
He comes out, he says, “Good news and bad news.” I said, “What’s the good news?” “You are going to do Native Son, and I’m going to direct you in it.” I said, “Great. Give me the bad news.” He said, “It’s at the Bonstelle Theatre [a theatre and former synagogue owned by Wayne State], which has been closed for two years. We got to open it up and clean it up.”
AWOYE | That’s incredible.
RUBEN | This is a story that makes me cry when I think about it. My other buddy was the custodian. Bill’s his name. I call him Still Bill because he always moved real slow. He used to be a boxer from Alabama. He took us to the Bonstelle Theatre, me and Von, when the day came that we had to go look at it. We got to the parking lot, the weeds were high—three, four feet high—in the parking lot. It was all boarded up, the windows. It’s a domed building, a gorgeous, historical theatre. So Bill said, “I’m going to go to this door.” I run in behind him in the dark. I walk onto the stage, and I look up. There’s a double mezzanine and there’s this big dome. I looked up to the top and I said, “Ma, I made it.”
We cleaned up that theatre and we did Native Son, and we broke attendance records. The last time Native Son was done there in 1943, Canada Lee did it. Canada Lee did it, and then I did it. After that, my name’s still ringing in Detroit. That’s why I go to Detroit. Ruben’s in town. It’d be in the paper. Ruben coming.
I stayed a year with the theatre, directing and acting. After graduation, Von said, “Why don’t we form our own theatre company?” So we formed the Afro-American Studio Theatre. We made all our money during Black History Month. We toured all our plays—we did a lot of schools. We did rehab centers. We did jails.
AWOYE | What kind of work were you doing?
RUBEN | Wine in the Wilderness, Home. We actually did a big musical at the music hall, Purlie, in which I played Purlie. We did some new work. When we didn’t have our whole company together because we couldn’t afford to pay them all, then Von and I would just go. We would read words of Malcolm and Martin, or poetry, just to keep money in my pocket. The thing was, keep money in Rube’s pocket so he doesn’t go to New York.
AWOYE | Who are some of the directors you have learned the most from or looked up to the most?
RUBEN | Lloyd Richards, George Wolfe, and Douglas Turner Ward. Completely different styles, completely different men, but all extraordinary in their own way, and all gave me a lot to think about to incorporate into my process.
AWOYE | What did you learn from each of them?
RUBEN | Patience from Lloyd. George, never being satisfied, always going deeper, and being bold. Doug was more about not overdoing things. Avoiding excess. You are enough. Those strategies work very well for most people, but not for everybody.
AWOYE | These are three amazing men, amazing artists—
RUBEN | I have to add one woman, [actor and theatre director] Billie Allen. She taught me a lot more about myself than directing. She always made you fabulous. No matter when you felt your lowest, her squinting her eyes and looking at you and saying, “You are fabulous”—you just felt it. Okay, I can walk through a wall. So that lady, that woman, that beautiful woman, she taught me a lot as well.
AWOYE | When you think about Lloyd as a director, do you remember a moment, a note he gave to you that revealed something new to you, or something that he did as a director where you were like, “Oh, that’s how you do it?”
RUBEN | Too many, too many things. He never would give you the answer. He would ask a question and he demanded you supply the answer. If you didn’t supply the answer, he would ask the question again a different way, or sometimes the same way. So he would let you know that you’re not answering the question or you didn’t do what he wanted. One day he said to me— I was in the middle of rehearsing a scene [in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars] that I’m really not active in, and it made me kind of uncomfortable because just being there was really uncomfortable. So I moved off a little bit and sat down on the steps and just watched the two actors who were principals in that scene.
So he said to me, he said, “Canewell?” I said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Richards?” He says, “Where did you go when Floyd and Vera were hugging?” I said, “I went over and sat down on the steps and just watched.” He said, “Okay. We’re going to do it again after a break.” That was it. So when we came back and they started hugging, and because I love Vera just like Floyd loves her, they start hugging and I didn’t move. I stood there on one side of Floyd while he’s hugging Vera. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t move. I just stood there. Lloyd never said another word.
AWOYE | How about George? He’s such a master at catching the audience, but I’m wondering also about things you learned from him as a director.
RUBEN | George had a way of emboldening you, making you bigger than life or feel that way, and building you up. Billie Allen did that in a different way. George did it in more of a way that empowered you, not only physically, but intellectually; you felt that you were in the smart set by being with George and him spending time with you.
George had a way of passing on that acceptance of your brilliance and your boldness through the rehearsal process. He would say, “You know what I mean? Know what I mean?” Whether you know what he meant or not, you’re nodding your head, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” So this is a gift of that too, because actors get caught so many times in doubt and George just won’t allow it.
AWOYE | I’m trying to think of the thing that encapsulates Douglas Turner Ward’s energy and spirit as a director.
RUBEN | He would take off the adornments that you had. You would come on with all these things that you wanted to project to the audience and Doug would make you drop them. The way he gave notes, people needed an interpreter. I understood him because I had been around people that talked like him my entire life, because I was raised in that rooming house. Doug is a boy from a farm in Louisiana who walked to the University of Michigan. The kinds of people that would hitchhike and walk and jump a train were the people that taught me the life lessons in that rooming house, 32 Wasson Avenue with Nanny. I could interpret it, so I would have to interpret it to other people who weren’t country.
Doug would just, in his own way, make you stop the posing and profiling, stop being aware of yourself, and he would say it his own way. “It won’t interpret well when you come... no, no, no, don’t come in talking about… Boom, bam, that’s all.” That’s Doug.
AWOYE | That’s wild.
RUBEN | “Boom, bam. That’s all.” That means say your line, he’ll say his line, and it’ll be there. It’ll be there what’s supposed to be there.
AWOYE | I think a lot about the ways that directors get cultivated and have space to do their work, experiment, and try things out. I’m wondering what your thoughts are about what needs to crack open for directors, especially young directors, to allow them to find their way and stay true to their artistic voice when there’s not really that much space for that in the industry.
RUBEN | Well, it’s a different time now. The younger directors, and I could be wrong, but the way it seems to me is they don’t want to apprentice. They don’t want to stand next to you and be your associate; they want to compete with you. And they should compete with you, but later. They don’t apprentice enough in my opinion. I may get in trouble for saying it. Somebody offers a play to a younger director, and they get a decent review and that’s it. Where’s the growth? Where does the continued growth come from other than just the process of continuing to do work? Who are you listening to? Where’s your Lloyd? Where’s your George? Where’s your Doug? Where’s your Billie Allen? Are you interested in being next to them? No, you want to compete. What we don’t understand is that there’s still learning to be done.
AWOYE | When you are thinking about ideal opportunities and pathways for directors— new generations of directors, early- or midcareer directors—are there things that you think should be taken advantage of?
RUBEN | The best knowledge that I’ve accumulated has been being an actor and being in all these rooms, doing over 100 plays and being with all kinds of directors. There are other directors I’ve worked with that were very good directors, very good directors, and I had a good time with them. But most important is to make me say I need what they just did in my toolbox, I need to take note of how that was handled, how that was done. What people don’t understand about direction is that it’s not just direction, it’s leadership.
AWOYE | There’s a conversation happening these days about the idea of leadership and the idea of hierarchy. I wonder how you’ve been thinking about that. As directors, as you say, so much of the work and the role is about being a leader. I wonder if you’ve been thinking about the tension between leadership and hierarchy at all.
RUBEN | Well, everybody looks at leadership in a different way. I don’t lead in a vacuum; I lead being surrounded by people I can collaborate with, who help inform me of how a decision should be made. I don’t make any unilateral decisions. I need information from everybody in the room and then I need trust that I’ll make the decision that’s best for us, our vehicle, for what we are all a part of. I try very hard to earn that trust. But there are some people that don’t want to hear nothing from nobody. I’m sitting in the room with a director once and he said, “When I say something, don’t question it. I know everything about this play. Just do it and you’re going to be all right. If you start questioning, it’s going to be a train wreck.”
I want to be accepted in my weakest and most vulnerable, in my most powerful, in my most silly, in my most angry interpretation, so that who I am is going to find its way into this play. And then we just have to refine it. But if I can’t do none of that, if I’m just waiting for your instruction, I don’t need to be here.
I didn’t get kicked out of that one and we ended up finding a way to coexist.
“The first thing you have to try to build is trust. Trust in the fact that we are all in this together.”
AWOYE | How do you start your rehearsal process?
RUBEN | Well, I think after the regular process things—introductions and the artistic qualities of the play, the lights and the style and the costumes—then it is trying to begin to build this family around this purpose. We get around the table and figure out what this play is, even though we all think we know. But I want to make sure that any question that anyone might have gets asked; no question is a silly question. If we don’t have an answer, we should say, “We going to find that out in the process.” But everything should have a moment.
We’ll sit at the table until we don’t want to sit at the table no more, until everybody’s, “Let us up, coach,” and they can’t sit in the chairs anymore and they start walking around reading the script. That still doesn’t mean you’ve got to let them up. Let the lions and the tigers keep running to the edge of this cage and bump into it and then finally open up the door and then they just know right where they want to go. Then you start refining it and honing it, but always have a plan. But the first thing you have to try to build is trust. Trust in the fact that we are all in this together. Trust in the fact that we all have a common conversation and idea of what this play is about.
AWOYE | Do you have bucket-list plays?
RUBEN | They keep stealing the ones I want to do. That’s why I’m doing all new stuff. But it’s got to be a mix of our classic plays that we define and our new plays. It’s got to be a mix because they’re related. They’re kin. We can’t leave that behind. Some of our stuff is dated and a lot of it is straight to the day. No Place to Be Somebody. They wanted me to do that on Broadway for a long time. I just didn’t want my first play on Broadway to be about pimps.
AWOYE | Right. It’s such a good play, but it’s a hard play to do.
RUBEN | I might consider it now. I’d love to do Big White Fog. I’d love to do that. I want to do some more Shakespeare. I’d like to act in a really good play. I like a great role for myself. Because people forget that I can do that.
They saw Lackawanna Blues, but act like, “Oh, that was easy, he just walked out the bed and fell into that.” Like I didn’t have to really do that work. And no one has mentioned publicly that I’m the only person in the history of Broadway to write, direct, and star in a play.
AWOYE | That’s amazing.
RUBEN | No one’s ever said it anywhere. It didn’t bother me because I didn’t know until Jeannie, my wife said, “You might be the only person that ever did that.” We called the American Theatre Wing, and they were like, “No. We did the research. No one’s ever done that.”
AWOYE | We think so much about all these amazing artists who preceded us. When you think about even what you’re just telling me now, how do we make sure that we’re keeping these stories alive?
RUBEN | We have to acknowledge our successes. The other thing that I’m very aware of is that none of my success is possible without all the people that fortified this journey I’m on and continue to do so. From when I was a small child to today, people have continued to offer me their grace and generosity.
Jim Houghton got me. He understood me. George, I would push, knock his door down, sit on his doorstep handing him scripts. “You’ve got to read this.” Gregory Hines was one of the most instrumental people in my entire career. He wanted me to be Ruben. He would always say, “I love you in all your Ruben ways.” He directed two movies; I was in both of them. He would come up to me after I did a take and he would say, “Do that Ruben thing.” That’s it. Just do the Ruben, be Ruben.
When I look up and I don’t have him, and I don’t have Bill Sims and I don’t have Harvy [Blanks] or Chiz [Anthony Chisholm]… that’s my team.
AWOYE | That’s the family.
RUBEN | Look at Chiz, one of the finest character actors I’ve ever seen in my life. Precise. People just thought it was him being him. I mean, precise when he folds his coat or when he gives a look, or how he unscrews the bottle, the effort it takes, it’s all acting. How, when he walks out a door, he does not grab the doorknob, he reaches back and grabs the door frame to pull it closed. Who does that? I would point it out to Trey and Lily, my kids, and say, “Watch it. Watch it.” I said, “I guarantee you he going to reach back and grab the door frame.” Just excellent.
No one fully appreciates or acknowledges the brilliance in our community. We will applaud mediocrity. We just, as a community, have to not allow that. I don’t know what we need to do to not allow it. One of the things I want to be said, Awoye, is this: until our community, those that have the greatest impact and power in our community— financial or political influence—until theatre is important to them, we’ll never build our own or have our own. All of us just marching the march and out there on the battlefield. We got nothing. We can’t build it. We ain’t got the money. Those that do have the wherewithal think acting in theatre is just cute to have around. And it has to be important because it is seen as who we will be for the rest of the civilization in history.
AWOYE | How do you educate and bring people in to an understanding of the importance of art at all, Black art in particular, to galvanize those resources?
RUBEN | It’s got to be important to them. I have a lot of energy and a lot of passion. But I get weary too. Sometimes I feel I’m just on the top of the mountain or on the bottom of a well, and it ain’t going anywhere. So I get tired and then I just start thinking, you know? “Shit, I’ve been working for 48 years professionally. I got five pensions looking at me. That don’t make me a rich man.” I’ll never be a rich man in that respect, but I’m rich in a lot of other ways.
I don’t need this. But I love it. So I get up every morning and want to do it. I can’t imagine a world without it, but it’d be much easier for me to fold my tent up, get my tools and put them in my toolbox, take my little history. I’d have made history; I’d have made my mark. And then I wake up the next day and I laugh about it and say, “Nah, nah.” Who is going to say charge if I don’t say charge? It gets on a lot of people’s nerves that I say “Charge!”
AWOYE | When did you first realize that theatre can have an impact on people? Because I feel like you’ve always very much been about making the work, but also very much been thinking about the audience and who the work is serving. When did you first get an understanding about what that relationship is between the work and the audience?
RUBEN | It was progressive. It kind of grew. People kept putting microphones in my mouth and sitting down with tape recorders and wanting to hear what I had to say. It dawned on me that a lot of what I was saying was about empowering my community. And then some people would say, “You need to stop saying that.” “Well, I can’t reverse it now because I’ve been talking about empowering the community for a long time. So if I reverse it, they’ll know I was a charlatan so they wouldn’t even buy it. They’ll laugh.”
As I said earlier on, we don’t have opportunities to squander. At the Lortel Awards, when I went up to do my speech, all I knew was that what I wanted to say had to do with the value. The value in our community of acknowledging the power in our community. It’s some currency in us knowing who we are. And it also is a threat in us knowing who we are. “Don’t squander your opportunities with your art. Your art is your song of immortality. You will live forever when you’re great as an artist.” They’re still talking about Honi Coles. They’re still talking about Romare Bearden. They’re still talking about Alvin Ailey. Greatness lives forever. So what do you want your greatness to be defined as? That you represented your people in the highest standard of integrity.
AWOYE | So you’ve always had good boundaries so that people can’t just pull you in whatever direction they want to go.
RUBEN | How do I feel in the morning when I look in the mirror? How do I feel when I look at my kids and my kids see this work I’ve done? They don’t like a lot of characters I played; they get scared of them. They be like, “Dad, you were so believable as that.” But because some part of me has to get magnified in that performance. There are parts of me that have to be magnified even more so when I’m directing, because I want everybody to know who their leader is and what that leader expects from everybody there. But your leader also has to be accountable. If stuff is continually going wrong in your room, did you look at yourself? Even if I don’t want to, if I’ve had a bad experience with someone, or am having a bad experience, I have to look at myself, and say to them, “I’m going to be better. I got to do better for the process, for you. I want to be better.” But you know what that means, though. It’s got to be reciprocated. Particularly speaking truth to power.
I couldn’t do what I do without all the people fortifying the journey. They keep me strong, they keep me fierce and they keep me fearless, and they keep me knowing that “it’s all right, we’re with you.”
I’ve had people walk up to me that you would not believe. Maya Angelou sat me down. We were at an event, she called for me. She said “Keep doing what you’re doing. We’re not going to let them hurt you.” I don’t know what that meant, but why she felt compelled to say that to me made me feel like, “Okay.” Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, the same thing. Harry Belafonte. Why do they say this to me? Because they recognized that I’m out there.
AWOYE | I feel like your North Star is the integrity of the work. Are there things that you are working on as a director?
RUBEN | Some really exciting stuff. First up is John Leguizamo’s The Other Americans, which is his first real full-length drama, a six-character drama. It is an amazing, deep American tragedy. [The Other Americans is being produced this fall by Arena Stage, in association with The Public Theater.]
Next year I am directing John Kani’s twohander, which is a brilliant South African play called Kunene and the King. [Kunene and the King will be produced by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in February–March, 2025.]
AWOYE | Is it new?
RUBEN | He did it in South Africa and he did it in London. This is the American premiere, which is set to tour the country eventually.
I am also working on three other incredible projects that I can’t name yet, but they are all dynamite in their own ways.
AWOYE | My last question is, what does it mean for you to be a storyteller?
RUBEN | I’m born to it. I’m born and bred and raised in storytelling. All I’ve ever known was people telling me stories. Anything these old Black illiterate men would tell me, or women would tell me—the women sometimes had a little high school education, some would have what they call a little piece of college. Like a year or semester in college. But most of the men were illiterate or didn’t have a lot of formal education, and the only way they could communicate was either physical or in the story.
So I learned by mimicking them. So in paying respect to them and then paying more respect into who I am, it’s being true. I’m a storyteller. And it’s very important that we create the narrative and then we direct the narrative. Because things that are important to us as a people, no one is privy to, unless they’re in the room with us in these times. And most of the people, a lot of people directing plays about us ain’t in the room. So they don’t know how we behave when they’re not in the room.
Their narrative does not have to change so much sometimes. Ours does. We feel we have to go into a room in an environment to make white people comfortable. If we make them uncomfortable, it’s not a good thing for us. So a lot of times we can’t be who we are. That’s why I loved August’s plays and fell in love with him. He said things and did things, and he didn’t care if white people said, “What does he mean by that?” “My feet ain’t on backwards.” “I ain’t studying you.” You got to be Black and colored to know how that is. And if you want to know how to be colored, listen to the blues. They never stop, blues men don’t ever stop being colored. They just colored. The way they tell their stories with cultural specificity— Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson—you know? That culture has to be preserved and who else to preserve it? Who else has the responsibility but the storytellers with the same hue we have, the same melanin we have. Or it’s going to get lost. Like a lot of other things born from us, it’s going to get taken.
Awoye Timpo is a Brooklyn-based director and producer. She will direct the American premiere of The Swamp Dwellers by Wole Soyinka at Theatre for a New Audience in spring 2025.
