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Penumbra Theatre founder defines American black stage

Lou Bellamy's vision is that everything is performed as if there were only black people in the audience.

By Marjorie Kehe | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 24, 2008 edition

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St. Paul, Minn. - I call the Penumbra Theatre box office and explain that I'm a journalist hoping for an interview with Lou Bellamy. The young man on the other end of the line hesitates a moment.

"OK," he finally tells me. "I can give him your information. But I can't make him call you back. Do you understand that?"

Uh oh. Is this going to be a problem?

Lou Bellamy is a man with a reputation for feistiness. ("Incendiary" is another word a journalist once used.) But to my relief, I receive an e-mail within minutes. Sure, he's happy to talk.

It's hard not to be curious about a contrarian like Mr. Bellamy. In 1976, he founded the Penumbra Theatre Company, an all-black repertory theater group in this small Midwestern city where blacks make up only a little over 10 percent of the population. In the struggling field of local theater, such demographics ought to spell disaster. Yet Bellamy was clear from the start that he would not be courting white audiences.

"Everything is performed as if there were only black people in the audience," he says of Penumbra, which uses all-black casts to perform only works by black playwrights. For white people, Bellamy acknowledges, coming to Penumbra "is like being in a foreign country." If white audiences have to work harder, it doesn't worry him. After all, as he once told a journalist, it's "just like what I have to do when I watch Chekhov."

And yet, extra work or not, for more than 30 years, the audiences have come. Last season, Penumbra productions drew 44,000 spectators – largely white. And although there have been years of financial peril (Bellamy says that he has more than once taken out a second mortgage on his house to keep the theater afloat), Penumbra is currently debt-free with a budget of $3 million.

But Bellamy and Penumbra are best known for launching the career of playwright August Wilson. From 1978 to 1990, Mr. Wilson worked with Penumbra and wrote "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson," both of which won Pulitzer Prizes. Bellamy was one of Wilson's first directors, and some say he remains his best.

Bellamy's theatrical success is as unlikely as that of Penumbra's. In the early 1960s he was a student at Mankato State University in Minnesota, running on the track team and majoring in sociology. Ted Paul, a professor there decided he wanted to do a production of "Finian's Rainbow" and needed some black actors. The school had only five or six black students, so Mr. Paul invited them all, and Bellamy accepted.

"I always liked showing off," Bellamy says. And "there were more girls in theater than at the track." But he was quickly hooked on a deeper level. "You can't be around that literature and not have it change you," he says. What has always been particularly meaningful for him, he says, is the way black drama – everything from works like the abolitionist drama "The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom" to Wilson's plays – has allowed him to find his place in history. "I went from being a spectator of history to being a participant. It was empowering."

After graduation, a job opened up as the cultural director of a community center. Bellamy jumped at the chance to use it to create his own theater company. For Bellamy, it was an opportunity to do black theater correctly. In the shows he saw, he says, "I wasn't seeing my grandmother, my grandfather, up there." He insists that black theater – which he defines as stories of the black experience, rooted in the black community, as told by blacks – can only be done correctly with a deep understanding of black literature and culture, including the impact of slavery. Without that background, Bellamy says, a director is likely to overlook or misread clues embedded in the text – everything from West-African story motifs to the tendency of a race cowed by slavery to hide learning rather than to celebrate it. Also, says Bellamy, when it comes to contemporary black drama, some in the white theater community just don't get the basics of urban life. He still laughs remembering a white critic who saw a Penumbra production and missed every clue indicating that a character was a drug dealer. "There wasn't a black person in the audience who didn't know that," he says.

That first year, Bellamy put together a lineup of six plays, despite the fact, he now says, "I hadn't a clue what I was doing."

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