 Delwitz. I'm the artistic director emeritus of Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, DC. And now I am associate director of the Center for International Theater Development. And I want to thank CITD's director, Philip Arnau, as well as V.J. Matthews and Thea Rogers of HowlRound for encouraging this event and making it possible. So I absolutely love this book. I don't know what you'll get out of seeing the cover, proclaiming presence from the Washington stage. I am so excited to help introduce it to you, but I am especially honored to be joined today by the author of the book, Blair Rubel, and by not one but two distinguished professors from Georgetown University, Maurice Jackson, and Soika Diggs Colbert. Why don't each of you just take a moment to introduce yourself and then we'll dive right into the book. Soika. Good evening, everyone. My name is Soika Colbert. I am the interim dean of the College of Georgetown University. I'm also an idol family professor and performing arts and African-American studies, and I also serve as associate theater director at Shakespeare Theater in Washington, DC. Maurice. Maurice Jackson. I teach 18th century history in Washington and jazz history at Georgetown. And I've had the opportunity to work on a play on any number of projects, especially a recent book on jazz in Washington. And I'm finishing up a book in about a week on some aspects of history of Black Washington. So I'm honored to be here. And Blair. Blair. I'm Blair Rubel. I'm the author and a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. And you're the author of many, many books. Many books on Washington, correct. On Washington and on urban history and the intersection of urban history and the arts in particular and culture. Well, thank you all for being here. I feel overmatched and honored because I don't have the depth of historical knowledge that any of you have, but I had some tiny overlap with the events and some of the people in this book. So I'm happy to be to be part of this. Blair, why don't you get us started? And, you know, I've been working in DC for, as I said, for about four decades. And I have to say this book gave me an entirely new perspective on the ground that I stood on for all that time and didn't know. And I think it was because of the way it links together a number of different stories about theater in the nation's capital during the 20th century. So why don't you start by giving everyone a brief thumbnail of the four major stories in the book? And what gave you the idea to write about them side by side? Well, thank you, Howard. And thank you all for listening. Maybe I'll begin with where the idea came from. As Maurice mentioned, we had been co-editors of a major project producing a history of jazz in DC. And one of the observations I took away from that effort was that the arts in DC, like much in DC, always end up appearing to be less than the sum of their parts. That somehow there's an absence of interest or respect at real accomplishment that comes out of the city. And as an urban historian who's been looking at DC, that has captured my interest. And about a decade ago, I wrote a history of U Street. And when I was working in that project, I kept bumping up against figures from Howard University in the performing arts. And they're in my book, but I kind of put it aside. And when I had a moment, I thought, I'll go up to Howard and see what's up there. And I went up to the Moreland Springboard collection and the Howard Library. And there's a wealth of archival material, most particularly the papers of Thomas Montgomery Gregory, who was the founder of the Howard Players. So through Gregory and Elaine Locke and others involved in that story, I began to see some very interesting developments, which I didn't understand. And they were emphasized when I was fortunate to the acquaintance of Gregory's daughter, Sylvia Thomas, who is still living in Washington. And one of the things that struck me in the documentation around the founding was an explicit reference to the Irish National Theater. And I didn't expect that. And the reference really is important. This is the theater that Yates and Lady Gregory founded about 20 years before. And it was to tell Irish stories written by Irish authors to Irish audiences performed by Irish artists without being passing through the pens of others. And that image really stuck with Gregory in particular. And then I later noticed that I wanted to put the Howard material in context. And I looked around and Catholic was obviously a major player. So I started looking at the Catholic story and Catholic University. You mean Catholic University. And in the 1930s, Father Hartke and others wanted to create a national Catholic theater based on the National Irish Theater for the same reason of being able to tell their own stories. I thought this is interesting, number one. And number two, I'm unaware of people drawing connections between the Howard experience and Catholic experience, because Jim Crow's segregation played such an important role in the city. So that kind of led me forward. And the Catholic story flows directly into the development of Arena Stage, where Father Hartke helped the pitch handlers get started. And they wanted to tell the story of a theater outside of Washington and be recognized outside of New York. And they wanted to be recognized for regional theater. And then we end with Robert Hooks and the DC Black Rep, which is in the 1970s, and a very, very interesting experiment far more successful than the way it's usually discussed. So that's the through line of how these different groups chose to use theater as a way of representing themselves and proclaiming their presence in the city. One of the things that struck me in the book was just how big the dreams of all these people were. The idea of a national Black theater, the idea of a national sort of Catholic theater or a national network of Catholic theaters, the idea of the whole regional theater movement. And so one of the obvious questions, this is for all of us too, I mean, what is it about the nation's capital that sort of inspires these huge dreams? Is it just the fact that it's the nation's capital? I know that's one of the things that drew me here as a theater maker, but or is it something, you know, something else? What's going on here that kind of creates the unique environment for these very big dreams? Well, I want to hear from Maurice and Soika, but let me get us started. I think it is the fact that it's a national capital. You know, Washington is divided between hometown, Washington and nation's capital and all sorts of people who come here always want to end up playing on the national stage. It's also on the border between North and South, and clearly there's a deep racial divide as well. So these divisions inform all the theater and all the arts that take place here. Plus, you have the added dimension that Washington uniquely demonstrates, which is there was no political life here at all during most of the period of the book and home rule only comes in the mid-1970s and even that is very limited. So theater becomes, I think, a substitute for political discourse, but those are just my thoughts. Yeah. I mean, I think the piece that I would add in that I think something the book highlights really well is the way that universities contributed to what we would now understand as the regional theater scene. And so Howard became this hub for Harlem Renaissance artists who couldn't get produced in New York to have their work produced because you had who we understand now is these canonical figures in black arts helping to produce essentially and helping to steward along these young writers' work. And you know, the other figure that I would add to the mix is Georgia Douglas Johnson who had a salon on S Street and who would, to Blair's point, artists from, there were artists living in D.C. who would participate in the salon and who she helped to nurture alongside other folks at Howard in terms of producing their theater. But then there are also artists who lived in New York or who lived in the south who would migrate up and down to participate in the salon as well. And so you've got this cross traffic from north to south in Washington D.C. located as a hub where there could be some support for this work during the Harlem Renaissance period. And so although scholars often call this period in the 20 the Harlem Renaissance or the Chicago Renaissance, if you're talking about theater D.C. was really the space to be. And it was in part because a large part of that was because of the support that Howard University provided in cultivating and then producing theatrical works. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that, you know, when you went back to the point about about Ireland, you know, Frederick Douglass went to Ireland a long time ago and he became somewhat of a national hero there. And so there was that connection. And then, of course, you had the Civil War and the support of the Irish people for that. The connection just kept coming. In Washington D.C. was Howard University. You remember that the Fifth Jubilee Singers went to Europe in 1868. The Howard Singers went not long afterward. They introduced themselves, the Europe introduced themselves to Howard. And Howard Frederick Douglass' son taught music there. So you had this, this big input long before the theater. And then with this came, this revelation, I think, is quite right. The other day I took a class on a walking tour of U Street. And there we walked at 1461 S Street, which was the home of the Saturday Nighters. And this is where George Douglas Johnson had a paper. I should say this, it somewhat makes you mad because the house nines worth $1.4 million. And so it's been gentrified outside the existence of anybody of any black people coming to the city. This is part of the thing that Blair sort of ends up with. So you had this unique connection. And perhaps it is right, this renaissance hit Washington before it hit in many ways New York with Doug, with Duke Ellington, the people like that who came in. The other thing is this. And I think it's essential to Blair's book. It offers a unique look at the at the innermost sanctions of African Americans. In essence, all of us are not the same. We don't think the same. We don't act the same. We don't look the same. We have different cultures, but we all like the arts. And so even though people are as different as other peoples are, they come together around the thing. And that is for enjoyment. Can I just add one other thing? And this is Maurice's point about the diversity that's represented in the book. One of the other things I think is a great contribution is that it covers such a long period of time. And so in a lot of scholarship, we see some focus on the Washington DC theater scene in the 1920s, or conversations around arena stage as it pertains to the development of regional theater scene. But what the book does is draw connections to how those events built on one another or on relationship to one another in the context of Washington DC. And so I do think that that's an important contribution. And it goes back to your point around why DC, what's going on here? What is special about this city in terms of cultivating theater? Yeah, some of them to your point. So I think some of the most exciting moments in the book are when there's a connection between the four different stories like when Father Harky helps the Fitch Handlers and Ed Mangum rent their first space at the Hippodrome Theater, or when Robert Hooks goes and sits down in Zelda's office and talks about his hopes to form the DC Blackwrap and how arena might or might not be able to help. Those are like your mouth drops at those because everything, so much in Washington, can seem like these parallel worlds that don't connect, but around these figures, they did often connect. If I can make a pick up and make a point on this, I was actually surprised at all the connections that are interwoven. And you get out of beyond the Second World War, Harky is pushing to integrate audiences. And Jim Crow, you begin to get one of the mysteries or one of the tragedies of the story is that there wasn't more connection between Catholic and Howard since they were the right next door to one another. But those connections begin to be made. But because we think of this history in such a fragmented way, and we don't make the connections, we really lose sight of the larger importance of this story. I was talking to a colleague recently and I was describing the book and he said, well, I didn't know Howard University had any theater department or contributed to drama until recently. And I said, well, a dozen of the people in the Howard chapter are on US postage stamps. These aren't local characters. These are major figures in the development of American culture. But because the stories get told separately, they get diminished in some ways, I think. I want to go back to something you said a little earlier, Blair, about the arts. And I think you referenced it, Maurice, to the arts as almost a surrogate for political action. I'm not sure if I'm expressing that right, but because of the lack of home rule and the peculiar features of the nation's capital, taxation without representation, that the arts have a special kind of role. Can you all help me understand that? Does it, how does that play out? I mean, that kind of movement from one to the other. I think in the book, right at the beginning, you announced that story with the anti-lynching plays like Rachel are like the very beginning of your book and they are responding to the Jim Crow policies of the Wilson administration and the beginnings of the Howard Theater Department connect to the NAACP. So we see those connections right at the beginning of the story, but how do they play out over time? Well, I think the book starts there because I think there are important connections and they're explicit. Going through the archives, I mean, initially the impulse to promote Black Theater in Washington came in response to the Wilson administration and Wilson administration's attacks on Black Washington, quite explicit attacks. And there really wasn't any way for these viewpoints to be expressed from within Washington. Not only did you have the standard Jim Crow limits on voting, but you had no political life. This was a city run by Congress. And then it begins to follow through and you see in the lead up and the debates about home rule, Zelda Fitch Handler at Arena is really wrestling with some of the issues that swirl around home rule. So I think, and Maurice, you can talk about this more eloquently than I do. Music is another sphere where the Washington DC community, largely the African American community, but not only, found a way to express political points of view when they had no vote, they had no, there was no local political organization. Well, you know, I think that's part of, but I think that these actions are part of a national trend. And I don't know if it mattered whether we had state or not or city ruler. Let me just give you an example. Archibald Grimke wrote a poem on 13 Negro soldiers, I think 19, when Brownsville when soldiers were killed, W. B. Du Bois, the great Black leader was against publishing. You see, they were different opinions about how you express yourself. The Klan comes to Washington. And when the Klan comes to Washington, Black people see in Washington exactly what they're doing. They have this silent march. And I think this is part of a national trend because people are demonstrating all over. The Congress refused to pass an anti-lynching law. So Black people in Washington become very active in this. And part of a national trend, I think it's true of police brutality, it's true of other things, too. Wilson, of course. Wilson, as Blair points out, is, you know, his roommate wrote Birth of a Nation. It was racism from day one in every aspect of Black lives. But people were separated because, remember now, the people who go into the theater, the Black theater, aren't working, not at first. They aren't regular, they aren't working class people. The theater for Black people is as bifurcated as it is for others. It reflects the nature of the arts. The theater does. Other arts may be a bit different. So it's, again, it shows that complexity. Yeah. I would just, you know, I would say that I think, though, that there are some pockets within that. I mean, this goes back to the salon and some other non-commercial spaces where theater takes place that puts a little bit of pressure on that in terms of, you know, who can enter into the space and who can produce. But I would also agree with Maurice that one of the things that's great about the theater production, particularly in the early 20th century, is that there are a lot of different diverse points of view that get expressed in the artwork around political questions. And it becomes a space where Black artists can intervene. But many of those same figures are also participating in what we might call activist work or writing op-eds or writing in local newspapers. And so that they have different outlets in addition to their theater making to express their political views. Yeah. I mean, and historically, we see that in groups like the group theater in the 30s where so many of them were involved in different political activities at the same time that they were involved in theater making to express their, express their political point of view. For those of you who are longtime DC, we're all longtime DC theater goers. I mean, I feel as though politics shows up more on the DC stage than it does on the stage in New York or probably any other city in the country. Am I right? What are your thoughts about that or how maybe that has played out historically? Well, I think so much of DC life revolves around politics. I think there is definitely a segment of DC theater that is directly connected with the political. And there are also ways in which more classical works, a lot of Shakespeare's works sometimes get done here in ways that emphasize sort of political messages and political intrigue as well. So I think that's probably, there's probably some validity to that Howard. You know, as a theater maker, you kind of know you, you're always responding to the audience you have or the audience you want, whether you know it or not. And I think just just looking at who goes to the theater in Washington, you know, then the theater, the theater makers sort of respond to those, to those interests. And you know, so many people who work for the government who work in politics. I'm wondering whether that's a different dimension for the black community versus the white community in terms of what they're bringing to the, what they're bringing to the space. Well, I think when we get to the Robert Hooks DC black rep company, what was really interesting and just striking were the different responses of white, of critics from white media and critics from African American media to what was taking place. And I think one of the points that was made by, I think was a reviewer from the Baltimore African American was that when you go to the DC black rep theater, you are, it is a black experience in ways in which other theaters work. So I think there were divisions. Maurice talks about and certainly the group of people at Howard who were developing the Howard players represented a kind of intellectual elite. And they were some, some of what they were doing was geared towards, towards themselves basically. But there was also Willis Richardson who was, was much closer to working class life in Washington. He couldn't go to Howard because he didn't have enough money. And he became the first playwright to have a play produced on Broadway and wrote a whole number of plays. And also in the beginning, the Howard theater, the Howard players, this didn't, this didn't totally last, but they would take their plays to local segregated schools and perform in schools. When the emperor Jones came, there was a big performance downtown, but then the play was performed in a couple of, of schools around the city. So there was some awareness of outreach, but, but obviously theater has always been even in the white community somewhat more elitist kind of endeavor. Now I'm just going to say quickly, I think that it definitely is Blair outline, depends on the time period we're talking about, because in the early 20th century, there was, you know, strict segregation. And there even when we get closer to the mid century with the WPA and support, there's still, you know, separate support for black theaters, white theaters. And so the, when we think about the black theater and its audience, it depends on what time period we're talking about. Conversely, we can think about some productions that are currently happening in DC theaters that are meant to attract black audiences or written by black playwrights and directed by black directors, but are happening within traditional white regional theaters and how that's a different context for understanding black audiences than we might think of in a segregated context. Or again, in the development of the regional theater scene, which you might see as the sort of bridge category, we're trying to figure out how to desegregate audiences, we're trying to figure out how to engage with the diversity of DC, how we might understand audience cultivation production and in that time period. I have so many questions for all of you, my mind is exploding a little bit. Maurice, I didn't want to cut you off. You know, I wanted to post a bit because when Blair writes this, the two things, there's several things strike me. And the things that strike me mostly, the first thing is when these theaters emerge. And if you look closely, they both emerge following major disturbances in Washington, the big ones. After 1919, the new Negro, after 1968, the colony theater, things like that. What is about these events that so affect black people, that people want to express themselves in so many ways and the theater becomes one? What do you think, Blair? Well, I think these were in many ways traumatic events and they also signaled how deep the racial divisions go. And July 1919, when the African-American neighborhoods around the city were attacked by white mobs of veterans returning from World War I, was hugely traumatic. And what is interesting, though, about that story, and theater is part of this, but it's only part of it, the community organized itself and fought back. And I think these are moments, after 1968, this was also a moment when the community self-organized and theater was part of that self-organization and self-expression. But one of the things about the Wilson story that I think this adds an important dimension to is it's not as if African-Americans were sitting around and saying, oh, President Wilson is a racist. They actually engaged in all sorts of actions to try to counteract the influence of Wilson. And I think that's an important part of the story too. And I think I'd be interested to see what Saika and Maurice think. I think there are some parallels to the last two years where we see theater and the arts responding to a very traumatic moment that had a large-scale community mobilization around it. Yeah, I wanted to, I'm glad you brought that up because Saika, you were also, I think, bringing us up to date a little bit in your comments. But I mean, it's interesting. One of the fascinating things in the book is to sort of look at a lot of the stuff about the Harlem Renaissance period and all of the connections between the politics, the theater, then the black arts movement in the exploding out of the 60s. And I probably missed a movement in between at least. And then to look at the moment we're in today where we're coming out of this, what feels like another Jim Crow kind of administration in the Trump years and the emergence of these more experimental and I would say very politically radical black playwrights. I've worked with several of them. I mean, Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, Jackie Sibley's Drury, Robert O'Hara, Jeremy Harris, Alicia Harris, Antoinette Nwandu. I mean, several of whom are now working on Broadway, which is sort of an amazing thing. I mean, I guess my question is, I don't think it, I want to ask about the aesthetics and the evolution of the aesthetics of it. I mean, but right, I think we see history repeating itself with this thesis you're talking about, about traumatic political moments that then lead to an explosion of new kinds of, of new kinds of writing. I guess, I don't know what my question is other than to, if any of you want to fill in that story or, or help us understand what might be how the current cycle of black playwriting might fit into that, that tradition or that history. Well, I would say that there are two, there are two ways of thinking about this. So I had the great gift. I wrote a short little piece around Alice Childress's Trouble in Mine, finally making it to Broadway. So Childress wrote Trouble in Mine. It was first produced off Broadway in 1955. It was optioned for Broadway in 1957, but the producers weren't going to make changes to the script, which she refused to do. And so it wasn't until this fall, 2021 that the play was produced. And I had a chance to interview Kathy Perkins, who worked with Childress before she died. And Perkins is a lighting designer and designed the play that's currently at the roundabout on Broadway. And I asked her what Childress would think about her play finally making it to Broadway. And she said she would be delighted because that was always her ambition to have her work have the broadest audience possible. But she would also be saddened by the fact that it took a black man to die for it to happen. And so she was referring to, you know, the spate of death that happened over the summer, and that the uprisings that occurred in the summer of 2020 produced. And so I think on the one hand, you have the playwrights you mentioned, Brandon Jacob Jenkins, Jackie Sillsby Jury, Robert O'Hare, Alicia Harris, Jeremy Harris. I would also add Erica Dickerson-Dispenza, whose new play, Colored Water, I just saw the public on Saturday. You have these artists who are creating work before the racial uprisings. And we're anticipating how we might understand the racial dynamics of our current moment. So, you know, that there are these new formal interventions they're making that I would argue are some of which are in the absurdist tradition, and are pushing back against realism as the primary way of representing race. But then you also have this shift in producing. And that's the part that I hear you saying Howard around Broadway. So what does it mean that the uprisings of the summer results in us having seven plays by Black playwrights on Broadway this season? On the one hand, one might argue that's a good thing. But on the other hand, it goes back to Maurice's point about what types of crises present the context for Black theater to blossom, both in terms of creating work, but then also in it being produced. Yeah, I don't mean to state your thesis, but in other words, it requires that the idea that it requires a high level of trauma to reach that point is problematic. I think I hear you saying Maurice. Well, you know, it shouldn't, it shouldn't. You remember that, you know, Black artists have so much, the argument that Du Bois and others presented in the 1920s, does Black art have to be political? Does it have to make a statement to be art? And then it comes back again later on. Not all Black artists have to make this statement. It so happens that most do because they understand of the particular conditions. I remember the first play I ever read, and I was probably late, and it was a Douglas Turner, The War's Day of Absence. So I read that, and I'm thinking politically. Some years ago, I read about an event, Blair, and so you can probably know it, that in 1848, Black slaves just got on the boat and disappeared. And I'm thinking, it's called The Pearl. I'm thinking, I want this Douglas Turner Award, Haiti Red, that probably he hadn't, probably hadn't. But the experiences of the history of people so reflect and just keeps coming down. But the question always remains, must it happen, must it be art? It so happens, must it be political? It most happens, it has to be because this is what forms their, you know, their particular mind. So all these dilemmas are placed before the Black artists, before the Black theater, as they addressed them. And as Blair so well pointed out in the 60s, they was these debates. Because as you know, that some of the plays people produced, people upset because they weren't Black enough, they weren't political enough, they weren't anti-white enough, they weren't militant enough. But this is the question that is always going to be before us. Yeah, one of the features of the sort of aesthetic question that was fascinating to me, especially in the chapter about the DC Black rep, was the importance of music and dance within the universe of the DC Black rep. Obviously, Sweet Honey and the Rock comes out of that and is still going on to this day. Two or three dance companies and major careers flow out of what we think of as a theater company. And so many of the pieces, what was interesting to me is that they were sort of multi, a multi entertainment organization in a way, using a variety of aesthetic strategies to sometimes get political issues, sometimes just entertain people. And I think that you raised the question, Blair, about these different purposes of Black theater. But really, all theater faces this. Does it have to, how much does it have to speak to the moment and make a statement? And what audience is that that wants that? Is that one audience? And then is there a different audience that just wants to go to the theater to be entertained? And obviously, there's a huge tradition of dance and music and entertainment within Black America going back centuries. I wonder whether that struggle helps to account for the struggle that Black theater has had gaining a kind of permanent foothold in DC, in terms of an institution that would last as long as arena stage does, or something like that. That may be the wrong thesis, but I think there's something to that. If you go back and read the reviews and the star and the post, the white papers, the reviewers were often very sympathetic to Hooks' efforts, but they didn't really grasp this notion of a pageant, this notion of nonlinear storytelling, the notion that there are ways of telling stories that don't necessarily develop characters in the way in which European theater does. And you could see that even though they were sympathetic, they were struggling. And this actually is an interesting difference. And the 60s and 70s really are at one level a different story. If you go back to the folks in the 20s, teens and 20s, they're coming out of a very Eurocentric American classical theater tradition. Several of the people involved, Gregory being one, cut their teeth on Shakespeare. And there's great pressure on the Howard players to perform Shakespeare. By the time you get to the 60s and 70s, the kind of European notion of what theater is is not on the table anymore. And I think that that's an important development and evolution in the story. And what it has done, and you also begin to see not just in African American theater, but I think of a theater like Sinetic Theater, which is a movement theater, and they do silent Shakespeare through movement. Well, that's an anathema to a number of traditional theater people, but the artists creating this come out of their own European periphery and the caucuses. So I think that there are lots of different trends here. But what happens in the 60s and 70s is a breaking away from a kind of notion that we need to be like European theater or Euro American theater or white theater in order to be validated that there's less interest in that kind of validation. So you could this is your field. I'm going to throw this to you to elaborate a little bit. Sorry for the pressure. No, I think that that's right. I mean, we definitely see a lot of formal intervention, innovation in the 60s and 70s and black theater in particular, and in the US theater more generally, and then shift away from realism and just, you know, these questions around the pageant. What's interesting, though, is that Du Bois had a pageant at the start of Ethiopia, which I know Maurice knows about, that was staged in the teens. So there is a longer tradition in black theater of innovating in form. But I think that there's a greater volume of that innovation that happens in the 60s and 70s, and it becomes more of the standard, not an exception like the start of Ethiopia was when Du Bois did it. And so you see black artists really pushing at what does it mean to create theater. And of course, the other piece that the book draws attention to, and I think is an exciting shift here is that there's a lot of conversation amongst black theater artists around the diaspora. And so the traditions around incorporating dance and music have to do with this new engagement with thinking about the black world. And this coincides very much with what John Coltrane is doing. You see he's looking, you know, to Africa. But you know, you see, here's the thing, I once heard Sterling Brown speak. And Sterling Brown, you know, he was the man of the third, he went back like Zoranil Hirshen to the dialect and people criticized. And he went to a event, he says, now I want to quote from you, the great black poet, the great black poet I want to quote. And then he says Shakespeare. So you see, here's this man who understood the totality of life. And he went and why was he saying that because he was going back to to the Tempest and Caliban and things like that. So the Baraka, Amir Baraka used every tradition, he used the European tradition, he studied this man studied, you know, he studied O'Casey and he studied Hikmet. He studied all the great poets and playwrights because he was just a great international man in bringing this to the stage, even though he was very contentious, very contentious. But at his heart was, at his heart was rhythm and the rhythm of the play and the African is of the play. And I'm just to mention a contemporary piece that was here, that Willie brought here to Washington before the pandemic and is now on again in New York, the movement theater companies, what to send up when it goes down. It was just very interesting piece because it's a series of stories in a kind of ritualized, somewhat pageant like format. It's explicitly for by black artists and for black audiences, they welcome what white audiences into it. This is Alicia Harris's piece with Whitney White directing. They welcome white audiences into it, but they explicitly say at the beginning, it's not for you. We're happy you're here. And it to me that and this whole discussion raises the question of where we are now with respect to the integration of black theater within the larger fabric of what used to be white theater institutions like my own, which over time really started to be much more multicultural. And now under my successor, Maria Guyanis is extremely, extremely multicultural. And we, I think we all applaud that. And we think that's a great thing. But the question is, what do we lose when we, when we don't have theater of by and for black people in Washington in the way that we at least have one example in the in the Hispanic community, the Gala Hispanic theater. And you know, I just, I just want to raise this question of what's, I feel like something's lost if we're, if we're just integrating everything, but that some aesthetic exploration or tradition or ownership can be lost. Any thoughts? I don't think these are, I don't think these are either or questions. I think it's very important that the notion of a black theater for written by blacks performed by blacks for black audiences is secure. Now, like Maurice, we're both jazz people. We love the idea of traditions coming together and mixing. But and, and I think a lot of innovation happens on the edges where different traditions meet. And that's a good thing. But, but in order for traditions to meet, there have to be traditions. And so I don't think it's either or I think it's both and if, if possible economics, economic reality may, may make that into a silly statement. But I think in an ideal world, you could have both. But I'd be interested to see what my colleagues think. I think it's complicated because again, you know, there is the producing piece that in some ways can ebb and flow depending on where we are in our aesthetic tastes and in our political consciousness. And I do think one of the central thoughts around having black theater historically has been because it offers more chances for experimentation historically it has. And so, you know, this again goes back to the point around some of the plays that were produced in the civil rights era and how they were able to experiment with forms in certain ways that might not have been as viable in a white commercial theater. I think that though one of the things that Alicia Harris's work and Brandon Jacob Jenkins work and the others that you've mentioned has proven is the profitability of these plays. So the question is, you know, how much trust producers will have in letting playwrights and directors guide the vision. And I think that, you know, it's an exciting moment for us, because I got to see what just end up. And I also, as I mentioned, got to see colored water at the public. And it was one of the most diverse audiences I've sat in a long time. And you could feel the different cultural customs emerging during expectations emerging during the production. And so, it does present an opportunity for us to rethink what does it mean to be in a space together when you're having the production of these plays in these right regional theaters. Yeah, and we shouldn't forget that the question of integration of audiences is an important dimension of the book as well. Because, you know, both of the white theater leaders who you profile were leaders in the movement to integrate audiences. Irina had the first integrated audience in Washington, D.C. You know, just one other thing to this, you know, it bled talks in the book where Robert Hooks, they have a Robert Hooks day. And a couple years ago. Yeah, a couple years ago. Now, I was just looking at something that Robert Hooks said. And it just, he's speaking about the Lost Colony Theater. And he says the ticket prices were not high. We couldn't make a ton of money off the box office. The grants, the grants dried up. But he says this, we couldn't get support from the black elite because they would not come to the play. You see, so here's the question. The mayor can give Hooks all there was in the world, but it doesn't mean anything unless the city puts money to try to help create a black theater. And there's no reason in the world that the city in Washington could give 50 million to 100 million dollars to open up the Franklin building down and things like that and not support the African-American theater because there's a demand for it. And when white people come to it, of course they will because they won't have to come to the ghetto anymore. When black people come, of course they will, but it's necessary to have it. And it really does bother me whenever I look and I see a theater and the things that is never once that is in a space that's created by an African-American places when you go to the atlas or when you go to the Gala theater. The Gala theater was a black, though it was never integrated, but it was in the black areas. And you have areas downtown, you have the Lincoln theater. It's just, it's going to nothing. The Howard theater is going, they are vacant, they don't use them. And there's no reason why enlightened people can't in the city, including black people with some money do something to open these venues. Well, I know that these are really intense discussions that happen at the DC commission on the arts and humanities and and other places and certainly at the NEA right now is this tension between supporting, you know, traditionally white led institutions versus supporting, you know, black and and other led institutions and whether we can get to Blair's vision of a both and instead of, instead of trade-offs between either or. I see, I think I would assume we all, we all hope for that on this call. You know, I want to just finish with a little celebration, though, because I do think that we can tend to fixate on how long a theater company lasts. You know, and we can say, oh, arena stage is still going, but such and such a theater only lasted for four or five years. Hey, the group theater, which is the most influential, one of the most influential theaters in American theater history only lasted 10 years. So I would like to just take a second to remind people who are tuning in or who tune in later, you know, the legacy of companies like that Howard, that dream at Howard University of a national black theater. I mean, if you could just name some of the names of the people whose careers came out of that and had this enormous impact on the whole Harlem Renaissance and on theater in America. The same is true at Catholic University, just to mention Alan Schneider and Walter Kerr. And the same is true at the DC Black Rep. My god, it's just, its legacy continues to this day. Can you, can you all flesh that out for us a little? If I can say something about DC Black Rep, because they often, because it folded, it's often thought of as a failure. But it wasn't the failure for the people who were involved. In fact, they just had a 50th anniversary reunion. Their alumni association is really vibrant and vital. And it had all sorts of people, Louis Johnson and Mike Malone and Melvin Deal. We've mentioned Sweet Honey and the Rock, Charles Augans, just a whole bunch of people who went out to New York and London and Hollywood, who have had really successful careers for whom this was a formative experience. And as I note in the book, you can draw a line between some of the activities there and the establishment of the Duke Ellington School for the Arts. So the DC Black Rep has an enormous influence, not just on Washington culture and African American theater, but on world theater and dance. And yet, you know, when you you get snide remarks about how it only lasted a couple of years. So I think we need to shift our focus on what success means a little bit away from some of these kind of material measures of success to look at the lasting impact in innovation and the lives of the artists that pass through these institutions. And DC Black Rep is a perfect example of it. Their 50th anniversary reunion was just inspiring, just a month ago, two months ago. So Yica Maurice, other other historical legacy points that come to mind from all those from Howard and from. Well, Howard has such a, you know, rich history. I know we're over time, but I'll just say quickly, as you've already mentioned, many of the figures that we know of Alan Locke, for example, are on postage stamps and are known to us as canonical figures, but we don't necessarily associate with the DC theater scene. Zornal Hurston and Langston Hughes came through the scene. Of course, they weren't living in DC at the time, but they were associated with projects at Howard and came to the salon. And, you know, Georgia Douglas Johnson and others. And so it definitely was a space where it produced all of these well known figures, some of which we don't even necessarily associate with theater at all, like Du Bois or Hughes necessarily, but we're all part of that mix. Yeah, I think one of the exciting things for me in the book was just this, you know, reading about these gigantic dreams that theater makers had at very important moments in the history of Washington, DC, and to feel as though some are continuing in name and some are not, but they're all somehow part of the soil that anybody making theater in Washington, DC. And I have to say, perhaps in the nation is part of whether they know it or not. And at the same time, I think we can give a plug for Maurice's point. We want the city to invest more, to continue to invest more than they do in creating that long lasting DC Black Theater. Listen, our time is about up. I just want to thank Soika Diggs Colbert. I want to thank Maurice Jackson and you Blair Rubel for lending your incredible expertise, besides the book Blair, but all of you for your incredible expertise. This discussion was like too much for me to take in, but it just makes me want to learn more and more about the history of the community that I've been working in all the years. For those tuning in, I hope we've managed to tantalize you into reading Blair's book. And once again, it's called Proclaiming Presence from the Washington Stage. You can order it online from New Academia Publishing, which is located here in Washington, DC. And I believe it's also available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. So again, that's New Academia Publishing. Great. Thanks again to all of you and thanks to those of you tuning in and to HowlRound TV. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you.