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PEOPLE
Terrence Spivey
Energy Source
By Yuko Kur ahashi
T
Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain, directed by Spivey at Karamu House in 2006.
errence Spivey first encountered Karamu
House as a subject in his Acting 101 class at Prairie View A&M
University in Prairie View, Tex., in the early 1980s. Founded
in 1915 in Cleveland, Ohio, Karamu was one of four iconic
African-American theatres, young Spivey learned from his
textbook, along with the Negro Ensemble Company, New
Federal Theatre and Freedom Theatre. Karamu was the oldest
of the four. So it was with an acute awareness of his forebears
and the weight of history that—more than 20 years later, in
2003—Spivey took the reins of Karamu House himself.
Now he’s in his sixth season as the venerable but notalways-prosperous company’s artistic director. In September
’08 he opened Tony Kushner’s musical Caroline, or Change
(in collaboration with neighboring Dobama Theatre); the
following month he directed Waitin’ 2 End Hell, William a.
Parker’s family comedy; and on the heels of Karamu’s holiday
production of Langston Hughes’s Black Nativity, the theatre
is currently featuring Spivey’s staging of Thomas Gibbons’s
A House with No Walls. In July he will direct the revue It Ain’t
Nothin’ but the Blues and assist education and cultural arts
director Sheffia Randall Dooley with Karamu’s annual summer
theatre camp, where 100 to 150 children from 5 to 15 years of
age are trained in acting, dancing, singing and mime.
That’s a schedule and a half. But Spivey walks, talks,
teaches, directs and laughs with enormous energy—as the
challenges arise, as they have throughout his artistic career,
he simply keeps going. His tireless efforts were most recently
recognized when he received the Kuumba award at the second
annual Nguzo Saba awards ceremony in Cleveland this past
December, and this year he was invited to become a member
of the prestigious National Theatre Conference.
Born in Kountze, Tex., as the eldest of five siblings, and
raised by his single mother and great-grandparents, Spivey
was introduced to the blues in a juke joint next to his greatgrandparents’ house; in elementary school, he got his first
theatrical role, as a turkey, in a Thanksgiving play. Later,
when the family was living in Houston, his mother took her
children to the Majestic Theatre every week—it was there that
Spivey began to develop his love of “show business,” watching
Pam Grier, Ron O’Neal and Jim Brown in the action-packed
“blaxploitation” films of the 1960s and ’70s.
After high school (where he played a cattle rustler in
Oklahoma!) and his years at A&M (which became the first
traditionally black college to be invited to the American College Theater Festival at the Kennedy Center in D.C., with a
production of Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope featuring Spivey
in the cast), he moved with friends to New York City.
He was to live and work there for the next 18 years.
Spivey acted Off and Off-Off Broadway in such plays as
Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty and Waldo Pagune’s The
Crime of This Life, studied the Meisner technique with William Esper, directed when the opportunity arose—and, in
2001, founded a nonprofit company in East Harlem called
Powerful Long Ladder, for which he staged a critically
acclaimed production of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls….
Spivey’s one-on-one relationship with Karamu began in
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courtesy of karamu house
His tireless efforts are aimed at restoring Cleveland’s
Karamu House to its historic and artistic mission
YUKO KURAHASHI: Karamu House has an
important history that not many people
know about. How did it start?
TERRENCE SPIVEY: Karamu means, in Swa-
courtesy of karamu house
hili, “a place of joyful gathering.” It was
founded by Russell and Rowena WoodhamJelliffe, Oberlin graduates, as the Playhouse
Settlement for the city’s multiracial community. The Jelliffes wanted this settlement
house to provide artistic, recreational and
educational activities to improve the lives of
the underprivileged in Cleveland—originally
it was located in the Roaring Third district.
Spivey
spring 2003, when executive director Gerry
McClamy invited him to come to Cleveland to
guest-direct Carlyle Brown’s The Little Tommy
Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show for the
financially troubled company, which, despite
her best efforts, was on the brink of closing.
Tommy Parker was a smash. Karamu’s
subsequent resuscitation, as Spivey revealed
in an interview, is more or less history.
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So Karamu is one of the oldest AfricanAmerican theatres.
Yes and no. I see Karamu as a multicultural
company that produces African-American
theatre. That is what makes it so unique even
today—flexibility within diversity. In the
beginning, it was a community theatre for
diverse races and cultures—its identity as an
African-American theatre was first formed in
the 1920s, when Charles Gilpin encouraged
them to transform it into a professional Negro
theatre focusing on contemporary AfricanAmerican plays. But in my view, it continued
to keep its identity as a multicultural theatre
company until the 1960s.
The 1940s, 1950s—and even the
1960s—were the growing years of Karamu.
A fire in 1939 completely destroyed the original theatre—it was rumored that somebody
set the fire since some residents did not like
a theatre of mixed races. Karamu utilized
other venues to rehearse and perform before
moving to the current location at East 89th
and Quincy. During the years of the Civil
Rights Movement, Karamu received national
attention when two internationally acclaimed
German directors—Benno D. Frank and
Helmuth Wolfes—staged Macbeth, The Devil’s
Gold and Foolish and Fickle at the theatre.
Karamu’s production of The Medium went
to Broadway, and the theatre mounted the
musical Jamaica after its Broadway run. The
“joyful place” was rocking back in the day!
What caused the changes in the 1970s?
Like many other small theatres, Karamu
suffered from a heavy revolving door in the
aftermath of the ’60s. There was a change
in infrastructure. The Black Nationalist
Movement echoed throughout the country
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courtesy of karamu house
courtesy of karamu house
PEOPLE
Left, Caroline, or Change, a co-production between Karamu and Dobama Theatre this past fall; right, Purlie Victorious, directed by Spivey in 2007.
as more African Americans moved into certain districts—including where Karamu is
located. The Black Arts Movement pushed the
grassroots theatres, like Karamu, to become
black-only theatres, and in turn, Karamu lost
its grassroots audience. Also, mainstream
theatre companies began to receive funding to
produce ethnic plays, and that contributed to
Karamu losing its multicultural audiences.
How do you see the current status of
African-American theatre? Should we
compare it with the 1960s?
We cannot compare the current status of
African-American theatre to that in the
1960s, when it was represented by revolutionary playwrights such as Amiri Baraka,
Ed Bullins and Douglas Turner Ward. I
think playwrights today have diverse ways
to address social and political messages.
August Wilson, Pearl Cleage, Bridgette
Wimberly and S.M. Shepard-Massat use
realism. Suzan-Lori Parks, like Adrienne
Kennedy, uses abstract dramaturgy. The
problem we face in the 2000s is that some
black playwrights have to depend on commissions from non-black theatres for their
support, due to the lack of funding. So their
work tends to get done at more mainstream
theatres, then recycled for Black History
Month slots, or finally validated enough to
hit the local black theatre companies. Yet,
whether an African-American play is done at
a black or mainstream theatre, it still keeps
the African-American artist working.
That’s what August Wilson talked about
in his controversy with Robert Brustein.
Wilson wanted to grow an African-American
theatre that spoke to black audiences. I would
like to see Karamu grow as a multicultural
theatre, like it used to be—a company that
speaks to multicultural audiences. For that
purpose I collaborate with other theatres
in the Cleveland area, to broaden the network and bring visibility. A great recent
example is Caroline, or Change, a collaboration with Doboma—my primary goal is to
direct Karamu toward embracing different
ethnic cultures beyond the African-American
community.
Still, I think Karamu is important in the
history of African-American theatre.
Right. I also see Karamu, along with Crossroads Theatre Company and the Negro
Ensemble Company, as one of the few
“revived” black theatres. Crossroads was
founded in 1978, closed in 2000, and recently
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revived. The Negro Ensemble was resurrected, after many years of financial struggles
and lack of a permanent theatre, when it found
a home at the Harlem School of the Arts.
In a way, Karamu was also reborn. In
2004 and 2005, we won a spate of awards, from
such organizations as the Cleveland Theater
Collective, the Black Theatre Network and
the Ohio Alliance for Arts Education. With
a new executive director, Greg Ashe, who is
doing an exceptional job, we have been able to
raise funds through different venues. The past
three shows in 2008, in spite of the economic
crunch, managed to generate enough money
to cover expenses.
The Youth Theatre Program has
become one of the most vital arts
programs for youth in the Cleveland
area. What was your motivation to
develop this program?
In talking to my son, I realized that too many
important historical moments are no longer
taught in schools. Creating a venue for kids
to learn black history and theatre has been
one of our goals. In the past, the selection of
plays was less educational and did not address
serious issues. The Youth Theatre Program
totally changed focus by staging The Little
Boy Who Shook Up the World: The Emmett
Till Story, Breaking Barriers: Little Rock Nine
and Footsoldiers for Freedom: The Birmingham
Children’s March, which are all part of Nicole
Kearney’s 10-play cycle. We also added the
Young Adults Series for high school teens to
do full-length plays—last year we presented
A Raisin in the Sun with an all-teen cast, and
this year we will stage Nikolai Gogol’s The
Inspector-General. We also have the Cultural
Arts Program with after-school classes, and
the MU Troupe, a mime troupe going out to
the schools. The programs compensate for
the fact that many schools are eliminating
drama clubs and arts programs.
When you’re not engulfed in Karamu’s
schedule, what do you like to do?
I like spending time with my wife, Shari, and
our children, Cinque and Malikah. I also like
to collect movie posters from the black films
of the ’70s and to watch indie films. I’m also
finding time to teach an African-American
theatre seminar at Kent State—as a colleague
of yours.
Yuko Kurahashi is an associate
professor in the school of theatre and
dance at Kent State University.
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