Acting director steering Alley past drama
Theater’s interim leader pushes for hiring local talent, diversity in casts, play lineups
James Black is silent, using a pregnant pause to consider the response to the question. He knows he’ll have to answer carefully.
The interim artistic director at the Alley Theatre is weighing the best response to the query of, “What will be Gregory Boyd’s legacy?” Boyd, who left in January, helped grow the company’s reputation as artistic director over nearly three decades but was also accused of harassing several women on his staff and creating an abusive work environment.
Sitting in the Alley’s donor room, with its red carpet providing a vibrant undertone, Black, sporting a flat-top hat, goatee and spectacles, takes a deep breath.
“He did extraordinary things for this theater,” Black says of Boyd. “When I compare what it was when I started to where it arrived, I think he did a lot of good. There was some questionable behavior, but … I don’t know. I’m not interested in talking about the past.”
During the first major interview with an Alley leader since the Boyd controversy, Black says it’s time to look forward. The theater needs to adapt to the modern zeitgeist, he says. He wants the Alley Theatre to be a more inclusive place, an organization that hires more people who are young, local, female and ethnically diverse. And he wants to ensure the Alley’s “resident” company of actors re-
mains through these changes.
That change starts with the Alley’s lineup for the upcoming season, which was announced Friday. It is headlined by Stephen Karam’s Tony Award-winning “The Humans,” which uses the tradition of the kitchen sink drama to deconstruct the mythology of the white middle class, and Dominique Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew,” which argues for the humanity of working class people of color. Plenty of safe, family friendly picks are present as well: Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap.” It’s an interim season by an interim director meant to show stability and familiarity to subscribers while at the same time suggesting the embers of an overhaul.
Company’s morale is up
Black, an associate artistic director with the Alley since 1999 and an actor with the theater since the late ’80s, says he plans to serve a total of nine to twelve months as the artistic director until someone’s hired. He’s not interested in pursuing the job permanently.
“I’m proud to represent what was great about the past here, but we need to start thinking about the future,” he says. “We need someone younger.” And, potentially, female. “The theater was founded by a female. It should return to (similar) hands,” Black says. “The whole resident theater movement was born in Dallas with Margo Jones, and (Alley founder) Nina Vance was an employee of Margo Jones. I think women are better leaders than men. Current history shows us that.”
Whomever is hired will walk into a theater that, according to Black, has high morale after a troubling start to the new year.
“People are sensing a forward movement. We’re embracing what works and jettisoning what didn’t work,” Black says. “There’s fear and pain as well, but there’s also excitement.”
The picture of positivity is in stark contrast, however, to the public image of the Alley in late January, during which Houston’s theater community — and the theater world at large — was up in arms not only at Boyd’s treatment of women but at an organization that allowed such behavior. The hashtag #WhyWeWearRed trended on national theater social media on Jan. 26, dubbed “Red Friday,” as Alley employees wore red in protest of Boyd and in solidarity with the women who had come forward with stories about him.
As Black spoke of the Alley’s new season, he was asked if he felt there was any connection between Boyd’s treatment of women and the theater’s lack of female writers and directors over the years. Lauren Halvorsen, associate literary director at Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., had pointed out on Twitter that, during her time at the Alley from 2008-11, the company produced 34 plays. Of those, four were directed by women, zero were directed by people of color and seven were written by women — three of those by Agatha Christie.
“I’m not sure there’s a connection between Gregory Boyd’s conduct privately and publicly,” New York theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli said on the podcast “Three on the Aisle.” “But if you have someone who shows no respect for women on a personal level, that person is not going to be interested in having women’s voices.” Black considers those points. “I don’t know, I’m trying to find the correct way to answer this. What she’s saying is true about the number of plays. That’s factually true. I don’t think it’s any relation to the difficulties that we had,” he says. “Again, I’m focused on the future. I’m very proud of the inclusivity of next season. That will speak for itself.”
Black emphasizes three major tenets for the Alley of the future. The first is diversity. “We need to hold a mirror up to the community,” he says. The second is the hiring of local talent: “I’m going to push for a utilization of local artists as directors and actors and designers. You could be seeing that next season. I’m going to make sure we look in our own backyard first before we go shopping for out-of-town actors.”
‘A transition season’
It’s a shift in procedure from Boyd’s time at the Alley, which was a point of contention to some people in the Houston theater scene.
“It would help the theater scene by encouraging more talent to stay in the city after college,” says Trevor Boffone, an advocate for Latino theater and a Hispanic Studies professor at University of Houston. “Houston has the potential to be competitive with Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia, but we need more, better-paying theater jobs in town. The Alley can be a beacon of change if it wants to be, but it won’t be easy and will require a full shift of the company’s DNA.”
Black’s third tenet for the Alley’s future is to retain, define and diversify its company of actors. He hopes to soon announce new members who will help achieve some of that, but also ensure the company doesn’t dissolve amidst the changing tides.
“That’s a fear that the company has right now. That’s why I tried to pick a season that highlighted them,” Black says. “I’ve known no other way. … It allows you to do some more challenging programming. The audience is so much more willing to go along for a ride in a difficult show with people they’re familiar with. We’re having a lot of meetings with the acting company, trying to define what the company is, so we can present a clear working model.”
The Alley Theatre will soon announce an official list of company members, which will add new names to the roster, Black says. Fresh blood, he says, will be a must for the Alley.
“I think of this season as a transition season, a preparation for our audience for where I think we’re headed, and we have to head in that direction for survival,” he says. “We can’t continue to play to a sea of white, aging faces.”