‘Owning the stage’
Former teachers and classmates are left to sift for their own clues as to how Ellington helped mold Chappelle. The image of the tall and skinny teen donning tights to play a prancing horse in a daring production of “Macbeth” set in Haiti remains vivid. “He did not delude himself to believe he was going to be the next Macbeth,” says Tia Powell Harris, who taught in the theater department at the time and now is chief executive of Ellington. “After all, he was the horse. But he knew that the training and preparation that came out of that experience were going to serve the thing that he did want to do. And he was very clear about what he did want to do. He was very good about taking what he needed and leaving the rest behind.”
After full days at Ellington, Chappelle spent many nights at clubs such as the Comedy Cafe and Garvin’s. These were like internships that the selfstarter arranged for himself. His mother chaperoned. He joked about Jesse Jackson running for president and ALF’s spaceship landing in a black neighborhood.
Harris caught his act one night. “It was these kernels of ideas made big,” she recalls. “I thought I was going to be rolling over laughing ... and I wasn’t, because half the time I was thinking.” She saw a certain professionalism, a command of the stage and a rapport with the audience that she considered an Ellington stamp.
By day, Chappelle’s teachers could sense an idiosyncratic mind at work. “He was interested in the thing that makes something happen, the motivation behind things,” says Donal Leace, whose theater history class was a freewheeling forum for students to try out monologues and scenes. Years later, in tribute to one of his favorite teachers, Chappelle brought a camera crew back to Leace’s classroom to film a scene for “Chappelle’s Show.”
One of Chappelle’s chores as an underclassman was to sweep the stage. “I noticed him because he was paying attention,” says Tracie Jenkins, a senior at the time. “Usually when you’re the freshman in there, you’re sweeping the stage to get it over with and goodbye. But he was checking in and listening and observing. So you felt him when you were in rehearsal.”
Chappelle has the same memory, from his point of view: “I used to watch the seniors dance and all that stuff. It inspired me. And made me want to do better. And we all pushed each other in a real friendly and loving way.”
Jenkins, who is now director of arts at Ellington, saw Chappelle when he hit New York, where, just months after graduation, he made it into some of the hottest comedy clubs. “He owned the stage and everybody in the room,” Jenkins recalls. “From sweeping the stage to owning the stage.”
“We don’t make the stars here,” Harris says. “They come with something, and we give them the technique and creative freedom and the humanity to do that thing. ... Dave came with something, and we gave him what we could. I would tend to believe that he would have kept going in that direction even if he hadn’t come to Ellington. But we readied him for an immediate jump into that place.”