On making ‘responsible’ artistic choices
Sam Jackson
Age: 29 Lives in: Lower Haight, S.F.
What she does: An actor, singer and teaching artist, Jackson is equally affecting in comedy, drama and musicals; she’s performed with New Conservatory Theatre Center, Aurora Theatre Company, Shotgun Players and 6NewPlays, among others.
Career highlights: In the Aurora’s “Splendour,” from June, Jackson shared the stage with Bay Area theater legend Lorri Holt and veterans Mia Tagano and Denmo Ibrahim and more than held her own, endowing her character’s every move with acute clarity of intention, which was especially helpful in an enigma of a play. In NCTC’s “Compleat Female Stage Beauty,” from 2015, she took what could have been a thankless role and made, with Stephen McFarland, a physically intimate scene that was tense and tender, hopeful and heartbreaking.
On the brink: This Vacaville native and San Francisco State University grad — she was the first person in her immediate family to graduate from college — recently reached a milestone in her still-young career. When she first started auditioning, she estimates she had a success rate of about 5 percent among theater, film and commercial opportunities. That’s not uncommon among actors, but some of the rejections especially stung. She remembers that at her first film audition, the director stopped her and said, “That’s exactly what I want; I didn’t have to give you any direction . ... Unfortunately, we cast the rest of the family, and they’re all white.” Reflecting on the experience recently, at a cafe across from her Lower Haight apartment, she calls it “the first time I genuinely felt rejection for my blackness.”
She didn’t give up, though. “It really made me want to try that much harder.”
The work has paid off, especially in her projects with Susannah Martin, under whose direction she was in the ensemble for Shotgun Players’ 2014 production of “Our Town” and in 6NewPlays’ “That It All Makes Perfect,” from March. The latter, by Erin Bregman, Jackson describes as a poetic play, one in which she couldn’t make the beautiful language in a “fourpage monologue” work. Martin, she says, told her, “Stop reading me poetry. Feel this.”
Stripping away her “actor-ness” was also part of Jackson’s process in “Splendour,” which was directed by Barbara Damashek (who was also one of Jackson’s professors at S.F. State). Her takeaway from that linguistically complex play was, “The lines are just the lines; what you want to say is inside of you.”
Jackson doesn’t have any plays on the horizon at the moment, but that’s in part because she’s turned down opportunities that don’t align with her values, especially with regard to how a script or a production deals with race. “Being a black woman in America right now, I feel very responsible for my artistic choices,” she says. One choice she’s proud to claim is to work, as she has since 2011, as musical director for the Handful Players, which teaches free theater classes to Western Addition youth.
The Gentlemen Amateurs: Jackson doesn’t limit herself to theater stages. She’s also the vocalist for funk-soul band the Gentlemen Amateurs, with whom she just recorded her first EP, soon to be released.