All day long, Cherry and Fourth are bustling with festival activity. Connected to the Embassy by a sleek underground walkway—and shielded from the sweltering heat—the M.C. Benton Jr. Convention Center comes alive with an International Vendors Market and various events with a youthful edge, including the TeenTastic series of teen-targeted plays, a National Youth Talent Showcase, and the wildly successful and freewheeling NBTF Poetry Jam, beginning at midnight.
After kicking off the festival with the opening-night gala on Monday, Embassy Suites hosts the Youth/Celebrity Project, offering more than 6,000 young people from across the country the opportunity to interact with NBTF celebs. The children's talent showcase, youth-targeted plays, and a Storytelling Festival give participants plenty to talk about. Three meeting rooms and two ballrooms buzz with activity starting at 8:30 a.m., including this year's four-day International Colloquium, "Black Theatre and the Critical Canon: A Call to the Culture Bearers." Harry J. Elam Jr., a scholar of black drama and vice provost at Stanford University, keynoted the colloquium, following in the distinguished footsteps of poet-writer-actor Maya Angelou, who in 1989 served as the first NBTF chairperson, and Nobel Prize–winning dramatist Wole Soyinka.
For the most intensive festival activity, cross Cherry Street via the swanky pedestrian overpass that connects the partnering hotels. Celebrity limos ease into the courtyard outside the Marriott at all hours. Inside, the beehive of activity begins at 9 a.m. and goes on past midnight—including workshops, lectures, artist networking, and performances in seven meeting rooms.
The daily schedule at the Marriott peaks twice. In the lobby, where tables are set up to distribute fliers and sell NBTF souvenirs, daily news conferences—including samplings of various shows at the festival—begin at noon. There, about two dozen actors, producers, directors, and celebs join media relations director Brian McLaughlin at the dais. Another glittery gathering happens upstairs at 10:30 p.m., after the evening shows, as nightly celebrity receptions allow festivalgoers to mingle with the stars. A ticket stub to any of the shows that day gets you in—past the barricade set up outside in the courtyard for crowd control.
Of course, the main mass-audience drawing cards at the festival are the musical, dramatic, and comedy productions, where many of those beloved stars of stage, screen, and TV spring into action. In addition to the Storytelling Festival and the Youth Talent Showcase are 40 shows, including two from the host, the North Carolina Black Repertory Company. There can be as few as one performance of a particular show or as many as five, fanning out to 18 different venues in the downtown area or nearby at Winston-Salem State University, Salem Academy and College, Summit School, UNC School of the Arts, and Wake Forest University.
NBTF outdoes the New York International Fringe Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with its vibrant nerve center on Cherry Street. Yet the cohesiveness of the Winston-Salem event doesn't break down as theatergoers head out to various venues. Quite the contrary. Green hybrid electric shuttle buses line up in front of the Marriott, beginning on Fifth Street and stretching past the hotel, each bus assigned to one of the venues. Volunteers hold signs aloft, guiding ticketholders to the correct bus in the mighty green parade.
At an event that often looks like a sprawling block party, the synergy and convenience of such a system cannot be overpraised. Huddled together in groups for an upcoming show at 3 p.m. or 8 p.m., festivalgoers begin to exchange information on the sidewalk, praising or issuing warnings about shows they've already seen, disputing or agreeing when they chance to have seen the same production. The buzz of theater conversation continues onboard, and by the time the buses reach their destinations, the lines of people streaming into the lobbies aren't a motley group of total strangers. After the shows, the common bonds are even stronger on the ride back, with even more animated conversation.
The shuttles are also a foolproof way, in a strange city, to find your show and arrive there on time. Beginning on Tuesday night with the New Federal Theatre production of "Knock Me a Kiss," other full-length items included a staged reading of the SonEdna Foundation's new musical, "Charleston Olio," featuring Phylicia Rashad; the Black Theatre Troupe's "Three Sistahs" the host company's "Four Queens—No Trump" Ensemble Theatre's "The Waiting Room" Billie Holiday Theatre's "The Legend of Buster Neal" Penumbra Theatre Company's "Two Old Black Guys Just Sitting Around Talking" the Layon Gray Experience–Black Gents of Hollywood co-production of "All American Girls: A Negro League of Their Own" and a late-night forbidden pleasure, "M.O.I.S.T. (Multiple Orgasm Initiative for Sexual Transformation)."
Unlike in the fringe fests of New York and Edinburgh, most full-length works aren't compressed into smaller time slots to facilitate teardown and turnover. But in the Celebrity Performance Series and the L.L. Hamlin Solo Performance Series, longer works often do become shorter. At the Wake Forest MainStage Theatre, Vanessa Williams' one-woman show, "Feet on the Ceiling," was paired as a celebrity performance with Dorien Wilson's "Un-Ringing the Bell."
Other works hailed from Brooklyn, Manhattan, Houston, Phoenix, St. Paul, Winston-Salem, L.A., and Charleston, Miss. Among the best was "Knock Me a Kiss." According to theatergoers, other greats included "Voices of Haiti," the multimedia production by poet Kwame Davis and photographer Andre Lambertson for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, D.C.; and Black Ensemble Theatre's "Those Sensational Soulful 60's."
"You can't catch everything," says T'Keyah Crystal Keymáh, celebrity co-chair of NBTF 2011. "You can't catch half of everything," she adds in consoling tones.
There seemed to be a chance that NBTF would be reduced to nothing when Hamlin died suddenly, at age 58, just before the 2007 festival. Keymáh had first been invited down to Winston-Salem in 1999, when she was at the height of her "Cosby" fame, portraying the only daughter of Rashad and Bill Cosby. She recognized that the festival had come to a crossroads.
"The first festival after Larry Leon Hamlin passed away was a difficult festival," Keymáh recalls. "A lot of people didn't come and haven't been back since, because they felt like they would miss him too much. Miss his presence. And I felt the same way. I actually had something to do during that festival and was not going to come. I changed my plans because I thought this was not the year to miss this festival, because I don't want the momentum to stop building."
Themed as "An International Celebration and Reunion of Spirit," the first NBTF, in 1989, drew 17 professional black theater companies to Winston-Salem for 30 performances. Hamlin's "marvtastic" formula for his festival always included a heavy influx of celebrities to help fuel audience interest, press coverage, and funding. This year marked the first time that the National Endowment for the Arts joined local, county, and statewide agencies as a sponsor. Corporate friends included Reynolds American (parent company of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco), HanesBrands, Wachovia, and another banking powerhouse, BB&T. Before a couple of late cancellations, 40 theater companies were expected to give 123 performances at this year's festival, attendance having grown since the inaugural event from 10,000 to more than 65,000.
That would certainly qualify as momentum. Mabel Robinson, the festival's current artistic director, headed a committee that sifted through approximately 130 submissions, mostly on DVDs, to arrive at the 40-plus picked for the main stage. Quality, diversity of subject matter and genre, and audience appeal—that's where those celebrities carry weight—are parts of the equation.
"It's about giving artists work," says Robinson, "whether they are actors, dancers, designers, or whomever, trying to make it as easy as possible while giving work to black artists." That's another difference between NBTF and New York's fringe festival. The companies that are chosen receive a fee, and the artists who participate in Winston-Salem get airfare and living quarters. For the Actors' Equity outfits such as Penumbra and New Federal, the festival has secured a special code from Equity that makes it happen.
André De Shields, who starred as W.E.B. DuBois in "Knock Me a Kiss," began his association with the festival in 1995, when Equity sent him down to scope out compliance with union rules in offering proper representation to "protected groups" of performers. After reporting his favorable findings in the Equity newsletter, De Shields was invited back to perform at the 1997 event, served as celebrity co-chair in 2001, and received the festival's Living Legend Award in 2009. Citing the abysmally low percentage of African Americans—a paltry 3 percent—in the audience for Broadway shows, De Shields offers a hearty endorsement of NBTF's achievement.
"Right now, this is the epicenter of the black theater culture," he asserts. "This is where the canon of black dramatic theater and musical theater gets its start. It's certainly one of the reasons why I come here, because this is where I can access and be accessible to a community that is traditionally underserved by the marketplace. This is where we get the opportunity to grow the community of artists, producers, playwrights, performers, hopefuls."
NBTF is also a place where black theater artists can develop and take the pulse of their audience. De Shields had this vividly brought to his attention in the denouement of Charles Smith's play—arguably the most significant moment of the entire festival. This is where De Shields, as DuBois, learns that his son-in-law, the revered Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, was gay. In the staging by Chuck Smith, DuBois is literally staggered by his daughter's revelation, backing up two or three steps and plopping down into his easy chair. The audience roared with laughter, openly deriding DuBois' naïveté, not at all offended by the scrutiny aimed at the founder of the NAACP. Weeks after the first same-sex marriages were performed in New York, De Shields indicates his awareness that a good portion of gay black men, even in sophisticated Manhattan, are still on the down-low. So how was he struck by the audience reaction in the heart of the Bible Belt?
"It's shocking," De Shields admits. "It's shocking in a good way, however. Shocking in the sense that we as artists are powerful tools in terms of defining how much progress we've made as a culture. And we must continue to chip away at this monolithic perspective of who black men are. We are still trying to recover our masculinity from having been emasculated by 400 years of slavery. That's what that laughter is about. The skeletons are finally being shaken in the closet."
It's also a sign that "Knock Me a Kiss" has a fighting chance of becoming part of that black theater canon.
