Epps Where He Belongs
How the actor-turned-director found his niche at the once-troubled Pasadena Playhouse
By Bob Verini
In the opening moments of Play On!, the Cheryl L. West/Duke Ellington musical riff on Twelfth Night that Sheldon Epps conceived and first directed at the Old Globe in San Diego, Calif., the doors of Grand Central Station swing open to reveal the diffident but determined small-town girl Vy, luggage in hand and dreams in her heart. She’s overwhelmed, but within seconds she’s swingin’ and jivin’ to “Take the ‘A’ Train,” with a high-kick that puts the exuberant chorus to shame. Left alone, she plants her feet and announces, “Life for me is here and now!” All in all, not a bad metaphor for Epps’s own journey to his extraordinary decade-long tenure as artistic director of California’s Pasadena Playhouse.
| Related Links: These Are the Days, an article about Ray Charles—Live! scribe Suzan-Lori Parks’s recent project (American Theatre) Fences, included the August Wilson Century Cycle box set (TCG Bookstore) |
Trained for a theatre that offered little opportunity for an African-American classical actor, Epps turned to directing and enjoyed a robust freelance career until he was persuaded to take over a legendary operation that dated from 1917 but by the late 1990s was moribund: financially shaky and, worse, irrelevant. His apprehension was not unlike Vy’s in the big city. “Not everybody wanted to see this theatre diversified,” he remembers wryly.
Yet not only is the Playhouse now financially healthy, with $2 million a year in donations and an ongoing capital campaign for renovation and expansion, it’s thriving artistically, with a multicultural and youthful audience any theatre would envy. In the past season alone, a sold-out production of Fences starring Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett and directed by Epps won rave reviews throughout Southern California, while a premiere co-production (with Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre) of Sister Act: The Musical, and a rewritten revival of Cole Porter’s Can-Can, broke box-office records. Meanwhile, the director’s ongoing “legacy of artistic and theatrical diversity” won him and the Playhouse a $125,000 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award this past July. (Recipients are specifically cited for “successfully tackling pressing state issues that many considered intractable.”)
Married now and settled down, as much of a local cultural institution as the Playhouse he runs, Epps is preparing to direct the premiere of Ray Charles Live!, a musical tribute (with a Suzan-Lori Parks libretto) that could finally put Pasadena into the front rank of theatres feeding both the commercial theatre industry and their own constituents. Yes, life for Epps is here and now, and he enjoys reminiscing about the byways that led to, of all places, Pasadena.
When Sheldon Epps was 11, his preacher father moved the family from predominantly black Watts, Calif., to a predominantly white New Jersey suburb. “I was the only black kid in many of my classes. I woke up sick every morning with some malady; I was just so unhappy. I was kind of shy and tiny, so I didn’t go toward sports, but I was looking for a place of community, and I drifted toward the drama club, just to have a group to be a part of and hang with.” Young Epps’s ultimate decision to pursue acting won his parents’ support (after “a stunned silence that their smart young man would want to spend his time that way”), but they insisted that he go to college, rather than “run off to” a drama program such as HB Studios or the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.
At Carnegie-Mellon University, Epps performed in everything from Shakespeare to musicals to new plays. “My interests from an early time were always hugely diverse.” Yet there was frustration as well. “I was a classically trained black actor, graduating in the mid-’70s at a time when the nontraditional casting movement hadn’t really started. So I came out saying, ‘Well, I’ve played all these great roles in school, now I’m ready to play anything,’ and then I found out that that was just not the road for a black actor in the real world.” That frustration led him, along with three classmates (including the late Norman René), to form the Production Company in a Chelsea loft in New York City in 1979. Their 80-seat space hosted Craig Lucas’s early plays as well as the first incarnation of Blues in the Night (the revue Epps later mounted on Broadway and in London).
“In the second year,” Epps recalls, “Norman said quite generously, ‘When we’re in rehearsal and we have an argument or disagreement, to tell you the truth I usually think you’re right. And you may have noticed that I usually come around to taking your suggestions. I think that means that you think like a director. So why don’t you try your hand at it?’” Over time, Epps found work in most of America’s major regional theatres and in television, where his reputation as an “actor’s director” won him assignments on “Friends” and “Joey” (three episodes each), 22 episodes of “Frasier” and a five-season gig for the UPN/CW sitcom “Girlfriends.”
Nonstop travel; staging diverse work: Wasn’t that the life? Not quite. “I had a tremendous year where I did four or five really good plays in really good theatres— Death of a Salesman at the Guthrie, On Borrowed Time here—as good a career as you could hope for. But I was exhausted, not so much from the work as from bouncing around the country. I was at a point where I was saying, I don’t know how I can do this for the rest of my life.
“Around that time, [Old Globe artistic director] Jack O’Brien called to ask me to come down to San Diego to do a play, and at first I turned it down. I was just too tired to be out of town again. But he said, ‘Well’—in that very persuasive Jack O’Brien style—‘just come down and we’ll talk about it.’” That first assignment led to an artistic home for four years at the Old Globe as O’Brien’s associate. “Having a home base is what kept me in the theatre. I couldn’t have continued being a roving player for another 20 years. It would have driven me insane.” Over that period he directed several times at the Pasadena Playhouse, which began to come a-courting around 1996.
In the June 1956 issue of Theatre Arts, that late, lamented precursor to American Theatre, then Los Angeles Times drama critic Edwin Schallert wrote that “Never was a place so beleaguered with setbacks as Los Angeles in its theatrical enterprises.” By the 1980s, no local institution was quite as beleaguered as the playhouse founded by Gilmor Brown in 1917. Named California’s state theatre in 1937 (after performing the entire Shakespeare canon), with a theatre school that had trained hundreds of luminaries from the Roberts Preston and Young to Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, the Playhouse filed for bankruptcy in 1969, returning in 1985 only to hang by its thumbs. As current managing director Brian Colburn puts it, “By 1997, when Sheldon started, there were no play development or education programs, no artistic director, few staff, and a disengaged and worn-out board.”
Epps’s evaluation was typically precise. “The artistic quality was very spotty and frankly not very good, riding on a reputation built in the ’40s and ’50s. It wasn’t a place where people were anxious to work. It certainly wasn’t a place other theatres wanted to work with. I would describe it as dispirited—there was no joie, no passion about the work. It was a theatre about survival—about just staying open.” Moreover, he says, it catered to “an older white audience, frequently going to see what I described as ‘pretty much the same four- or five-character, one-set play with white people who thought they were funny.’ And sometimes they were funny, but often they weren’t.” (On the other hand, there’d been no artistic leadership for five years: “I always said, I can’t do any worse than the last guy.”)
Job One was to vary the programming, and four months after Epps’s arrival he staged Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. “That kind of complicated, wildly theatrical, thematically challenging play was considered a little risky. It certainly wasn’t Same Time, Next Year. But it was a huge success, and shortly after that we did The Old Settler: a lovely play, not wildly nontraditional, but a play by a black writer [John Henry Redwood] with great appeal to an African-American audience, who came. And then we did Play On!, which became at that time the highest-selling show in the theatre’s history.”
To Colburn, Sheldon succeeded “because, while prevailing wisdom was to remain conservative due to limited resources, his approach was to be aggressive. His view was that arts institutions survive by being dynamic and relevant and worthy of community support. Sheldon insisted on greater spending and more ambition on the main stage, and he demanded the development of new programs for education and play development.”
Diversity, to Epps, denotes difference and variety, not filling quotas or going out of one’s way to serve a particular group or demographic. “My thrust has been theatrical diversity: plays and musicals that touch more bases theatrically. Now, in serving that primary goal, you serve the secondary goal of doing more plays by and about people of all colors, for audiences of all ages.” (Ironically, the biggest controversy of Epps’s tenure occurred when an overbooking of media tickets at the opening night of Fences led to allegations by local black-oriented newspapers that the bumped first-nighters were disproportionately of color. It’s a charge he dismisses as “overblown” and “ridiculous,” though clearly it’s left a sting.)
“I’m proud and happy to say—and a substantial number of theatres can’t say this—you will never, ever, no matter what the play is, come to our theatre and find me the only person of color or under 60. We always have a diverse audience, largely because we give them a constant diet of diverse programming. But, also, frankly, there’s ownership of our theatre for supporters of color, based on the fact that there’s a person of color in a leadership position. That sent the message that ‘this theatre belongs to you as well, and you’ve got to support it all of the time. Of course I want you here when we’re doing Ray Charles Live! or August Wilson, but I also want you here when I’m doing Shakespeare.’ I’m not claiming that every one of the people of color come back to all of those plays. But many of them do, more than at a lot of other theatres. That’s a source of pride to me.”
Yet it’s a source of “some pressure and some sorrow” that at his hiring he was the only African-American artistic director of a major American theatre. “When you are ‘The One’ in any situation—the one artistic director, the one college president who is a person of color—there are extra pressures, within the organization and from outside. And I know people are watching. I am the one who had to prove that a black man can do this job successfully. After 10 years, it’s not something I personally carry around any more. Nobody’s going to lay that rap on this theatre or this artistic director.
“Everybody’s forgotten this, but there used to be an alternative L.A. newspaper that wrote a rather hard-hitting editorial about a black guy getting appointed to what at that time was considered a white, conservative, Republican theatre. The article was actually accompanied by a cartoon of me being boiled in oil while a bunch of old white ladies danced around the pot! At first I laughed, because I thought it was pretty funny. But I did read the editorial and think, this is actually a bigger issue in this L.A. theatre community than I thought it was; this is going to be a challenge. And it has been.
“But it’s also a source of sorrow to me that here in 2007 there are only three of us,” he says, citing Tazewell Thompson at Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse and Timothy Bond, recently appointed to Syracuse Stage in New York. “That’s a little embarrassing for the American theatre, I think.” Asked whether they will act as a sort of black caucus, he chuckles, though his dander’s up. “Well, you see, that’s the kind of pressure I’m referring to. Why should that be our problem to solve? We all have enough to do. Don’t lay that on us. There is that expectation that we should get together and work on that. Y’all get together on it. Because it’s y’all’s problem.”
Over breakfast at an outdoor cafe around the corner from the Playhouse, where he had just finished casting Brandon Victor Dixon in the lead role in Ray Charles Live! (“one of the best-prepared auditions I’ve ever seen”), Epps spoke “frankly”—one of his favorite words—about his many-faceted career.
BOB VERINI: Is it true that you saw your first play at the Pasadena Playhouse?
SHELDON EPPS: I know that sounds like a hugely fabricated story to impress people, but it’s true—my first professional show, anyway. My father and his congregation believed very strongly in the value of arts for young people, so on Saturday mornings I was always on a bus going downtown to hear the L.A. Philharmonic or see an opera. It was an odd Saturday when I was eight or nine years old and got on a bus to make what was then, and in some ways still is, the long trip from Southeast L.A. to Pasadena to see The Member of the Wedding with Ethel Waters. It would be a better story if I could tell you that was the day I decided to make my life in the theatre, but I did fall a little bit in love with going to the theatre that day, and certainly I did discover what a diva on the stage can be, watching the tremendous power Miss Waters had to bring all of the audience to her. Her bow was one of the greatest coups de théâtre I ever saw in my life! (Laughs.) It was also when I discovered the power of a play to move you and have a particular personal meaning in your life. I suppose that particular play, being about a young girl struggling to put it all together, and here I was, this young kid, going through all the stuff kids go through—I found something in it that meant something deep and personal to me.
How do you choose the plays you direct?
I usually have chosen material because I want to teach myself how to do it. You can theorize about doing an Ibsen or Noël Coward or August Wilson play, but I don’t think you really learn how to do it until you get into a rehearsal room and slug it out with the particulars of their style and language and theatrics, day after day. So for a long time that was my method of choice: What writer am I really interested in that I have not done? I may not necessarily find out everything there is about doing an Ibsen play, but let me find out what the challenge is.
Fortunately, in choosing that way I’ve gotten to cover the full range of the authors I’m interested in, especially finally having done an August Wilson with Fences last year. Lately it really does have to be something that ignites some personal passion, or my politics, or my own history—something to make me commit to my going into the rehearsal room. I’d rather not direct in a season than direct something, just to fill a slot.
Was the impetus behind Blues in the Night and Play On! to connect with those aspects of African-American culture and pass them on?
Yes. When I began Blues in the Night I knew very little about the blues. I certainly knew it was part of our musical heritage, but the show was an effort to teach myself about it, to put myself in the situation where I had to listen to it and figure out what was so great about it. And I did! I also found that there was huge variety to it; it’s not all, “Oh, my man done left me, what am I gonna do?” It covers a whole lot of other territory in other ways, including humor and sexiness. That was a tremendously valuable exploration. And Ellington’s songs I just always loved, and Play On! was a great vacation to immerse myself in them in the two years or so it took to get the show together.
What are television’s satisfactions, compared with theatre?
It’s differently satisfying, and in some ways less so. It’s so fast: You have five days to make that little play and shoot it, so there’s not the time for script or performance to develop in the usual rehearsal process. On the other hand, it’s kind of satisfying to take what’s usually 32–36 pages of a comedy script and make it into something that deserves to be put up in front of an audience.
Was it difficult to learn camera technique?
You learn it the way you learn to be a good waiter, by trailing somebody. You talk to the camera coordinator, the editors, the cameraman, but mainly by watching, which I did for about two years starting when I was at the Old Globe. I’d do a play down there, then take the freeway up to observe, then come back and so on. While it took me a while to be really good at it, my career in television was made by the fact that I could go onto a set and actually speak the actors’ language, which a lot of TV directors, even some very successful ones, don’t know anything about because they come from editing or assistant directing. When you’re doing a new show, it’s always clever of the director to drop a theatre reference very early. You say something about Sandy Meisner or Uta Hagen and the cast says, “Oh, I see, he’s one of our guys.”
Accurate or not, the rap on a lot of Southern California acting is that it’s kind of one-dimensional, because that’s what leads to media jobs.
In a huge number of the waiver theatres around town, shows get produced because people want to be seen for film and TV. But that’s a whole different stratum of theatre that has very little to do with what we’re doing. And it’s not a rap that extends to every 99-seat theatre, by any means.
I also think there’s a younger breed of actor who is in some ways only being trained for film and television. And so they get here to L.A. and the majority of their auditions, even if they went to a really good school like Juilliard or Carnegie, are for film and TV. So they come in here to audition for a play, and it’s as if they’re reading for a film. I’ve frequently had to remind even very good actors, “This is a 680-seat theatre—I need to know that you can fill it. Even though I’m right here across the table, play it as if you were in a theatre.” I think that’s just a training problem in the American theatre.
I will say, though, that I get a little pissed off hearing that about L.A. theatre. There are too many really wonderful actors working on the stage of Pasadena Playhouse, the Geffen Playhouse, the Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, who clearly are doing it because of their love and passion for the theatre. They wouldn’t do it otherwise: the work is too hard, the hours are too long, the pay is too low for Laurence Fishburne or Shirley Knight or Angela Bassett or Annie Potts to be doing a play at my theatre because they don’t want to get a job in TV! There are lots and lots of people who are deeply committed to doing this work.
What did you learn at the Old Globe?
Everything. That was my graduate school training in running a large institution. When you go to a theatre as a guest director, you focus on your play, and blissfully that’s all you have to think about: I just have to go to rehearsals, work with my actors and designers, and get to that opening, and then I leave. You can go and learn absolutely nothing about that institution. Jack [O’Brien]’s generosity of access—and, frankly, his security in who he was and is—gave me the freedom at the Globe to be a part of every area of the theatre. The marketing department. Board meetings. Subscription drives. Budget meetings.
What were your areas of ownership?
Well, it was a little like this: I got to the Globe just at the point where Jack’s New York commercial career was beginning to take off. Almost literally a few weeks after I got there, Jack was starting rehearsals for Damn Yankees in New York. And he pretty much said, “You got it, honey. Have a good time.” So I was de facto running the store—what I was assigned was: “You do what I would do if I was there.” Great on-the-job training! And, of course, he was always there, by phone or whatever, to help me through it all.
The Globe was at that time a substantial theatre, operating in a healthy way, fiscally secure, and the quality of the work was good. They were already sending plays to New York and all of that. But Jack was always one to say, as I have frequently said at the Playhouse, “This is great, but it’s not enough. We could do more, we could do better, we could have greater vision. And you’ve got to get out there and find the means to do it—that part of your job which is fundraising.”
Is the fundraising the toughest part?
The toughest thing is to have a grand vision, and realize that a grand or grander vision always has a price tag. And that somebody has to pay the piper, whether through ticket sales, subscriptions or increased donated revenue—or, eventually, a combination of all three of those things. You’ve got to make all three of those pay off. And I have to go back to my father again. To a certain degree, a preacher’s job is to be a fundraiser. He’s there to inspire and ignite religious faith and spirituality, but frankly he’s also there to raise the money to keep his church open. So I not only watched Jack for four years, I’d watched my father for 30 years doing that job. It’s never something that any of us liked, but I had a good education and I know how to do it.
What is your interpretation of the Fences flap?
The idea that because of a ticket mishap—which is what it was—this theatre in some way should be challenged on both its invitation and its service to the black community on an ongoing basis—it’s ridiculous. Frankly, it was a bit of coercion on the part of a very small newspaper to increase our advertising. It’s interesting to me that that newspaper, and others that provided a lot of space to the coverage of that mishap, have provided no space to our winning the James Irvine Leadership Award for success in diversity. That’s very telling.
Can transfers from a regional theatre to the commercial realm do damage to a mission?
Two things can happen. You can start to make choices about how much money is attached, which is the very worst thing. I’m very careful never to put into the season something I wouldn’t do if there was no money attached. And the other thing is, your focus can start to be on using your theatre as a step toward something, as opposed to doing it for your audience and for your own theatre’s growth. In a couple of weeks I start rehearsal for Ray, and clearly there’s interest in its going on. But the moment somebody asks me about moving the show to Broadway, I say, “That is not my interest right now. I’m looking to open this show at the Playhouse.” Thinking about it clouds your vision.
Fences obviously meant a great deal to you. Is there one moment you can think of that crystallized your work on that show?
The end of the play, the moment of Gabe coming on and attempting to play the trumpet once again, and the power of his spirit opening up the gates of heaven for Troy to pass over. I think that was clearer to our audiences in our production than it had been previously. Always, when you successfully pull off a somewhat abstract moment at the end of a play, it has to do with planting the seeds very carefully along the road. Much of that was the clarity of Orlando Jones’s performance. But it’s also the clarity of what all the actors are bringing to it as well as design support: the right sound cue, the right lighting cue.
Michael Bennett once said, about people criticizing people’s work in the theatre: “Shut up! You don’t know how hard it is to get five minutes right. So shut up. If you can get five minutes right, you’ve done a spectacular job.” In that play, that was my five minutes.
Bob Verini, a senior writer for Script magazine, reviews Los Angeles theatre for Variety. He is co-author of a history of the 20th Century Fox music department and is working on a survey of acting styles in Noël Coward plays.