Photo: Garrett Houston.
Terrance Jackson came to Virginia’s Barter Theatre as an actor and now leads Barter’s Outreach and its Black Stories Black Voices initiative.
I have always loved August Wilson’s plays about the Black families in the Pittsburgh neighborhood where he grew up. I’ve seen most as many were tried out in Boston during Wilson’s lifetime. But there are other Black playwrights achieving success, and today’s article from American Theatre highlights efforts to help still more develop their skills.
Former Barter Theatre director Karen Sabo writes, “Barter Theatre in Virginia isn’t unique in their current position: It is a predominantly white institution that is currently attempting to better serve audiences and artists of color. But the innovative structure of Barter’s new Black Stories Black Voices program … could well serve as a national model for inclusive art-making that embraces and empowers Black communities at mainstream theatres.
“It may seem like a departure, but in some ways it’s also a continuation. When, 90 years ago, Robert Porterfield founded Barter in his rural, mostly white hometown of Abingdon, Va., in the midst of the Great Depression, he brought New York actors to this Appalachian agricultural area to match unemployed — and in some cases, underfed — actors with local farmers struggling to sell goods to people with little money. The price of admission was 40 cents, or an equivalent amount of produce, dairy, or livestock. ‘Porterfield and his partners accepted almost anything as payment,’ according to Encyclopedia Virginia. ‘A pig was worth 10 tickets, while two quarts of milk bought one ticket.’ …
“Full disclosure: I spent six years working as a director and resident actor at Barter in the early 2000s. My immersion in this organization gave me an appreciation for certain aspects of the institutional culture of this rural LORT [League of Resident Theatres] theatre. …
“During my tenure, Barter had an acting company made partly of out-of-towners — big-city pros who landed at Barter and stayed — alongside some home-grown artists. A few particularly talented local performers made their artistic home at Barter, and the Barter Players, the young, non-Equity company, produced many actors who eventually joined the resident acting company.
“While few would deny that the creation of regional theatres in the United States was a positive development, in their early days these organizations often operated with a kind of cultural imperialism, as they attempted to enlighten or elevate audiences by bringing work from the cities to ‘the provinces.’ In an attempt to better serve its Appalachian population, 20 years ago Barter started the Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights. This encouraged writers to tell the stories of the unique region where Barter is located, and while some of these new plays featured characters who were Black, Indigenous, or people of color, they mostly told stories of the majority-white population of the Southern Appalachian Mountains.
“Just before the pandemic, Katy Brown became Barter’s new producing artistic director, only the fourth in the theatre’s 90-year history. Brown herself is a home-grown leader; I remember seeing her first performance 25 years ago with the Barter Players shortly after she finished college. Like many other predominantly white theatres, Barter has begun hiring more people of color, and producing more shows telling stories of Black Americans. They’ve also designated that at least one play in the yearly Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights be written by a Black artist. But in the spirit of Barter’s culture of empowerment, honoring its region, and developing local artists, they’ve also created the program Black Stories Black Voices (BSBV).
“BSBV is the brainchild of collaborative thinking from many on the Barter leadership team. The first public performance under this new initiative was the 2022 Shine project last April 24, which featured professional actors reading new monologues submitted by Black residents of the counties surrounding Barter. …
“The Barter team wanted input from an authority regarding presenting more inclusive stories. They reached out to Dr. William H. Turner, a known expert on Black life in the South and Appalachia, and Turner suggested that rather than just focusing on producing Black plays, they help create Black playwrights.
“ ‘We wanted people who knew nothing about playwriting to get involved, so that’s where the story collection idea came from, and that came through Cathy,’ Brown said, referring to Barter’s resident playwright, Catherine Bush. Bush suggested asking local people to share stories and then hiring Black artists to help turn stories into monologues. At Shine, those monologues were performed by professional actors, and the Barter team intends the next steps to be turning monologues into scenes and eventually full-length plays.
“But to encourage the sharing of stories, Barter needed to strengthen their outreach and build relationships, especially with communities of color. Enter Terrance Jackson, a Florida native who initially came to Barter as an actor, and who now leads both Barter’s Outreach and Black Stories Black Voices.
“ ‘Our statement of intent is to provide a safe space for Black Appalachian artists to share their stories and showcase their work, while also fostering our Black community with a safe space to see theatrical work,’ said Jackson. … ‘I will be reaching out to different groups and different people, not just Black and brown people, but all types of people, and letting them know that they matter at our theatre, and that they have a place here.’ …
“Jackson summed up his experience with the project so far by saying, ‘Barter is a predominantly white institution still, and we are actively doing our best to, not necessarily to change that, but to make it equitable, and to build a space where all people feel comfortable to work and to see plays. We’re not done creating dope Black stuff — we’re just beginning. And hopefully we do work that really matters to Black folks in Appalachia, but also to the entire theatre world and theatre industry as a whole.’ ”
More at American Theatre, here. No firewall.
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