From NYFA Quarterly - The Long Run: A Performer's Life
Winter 2004 issue

In this column, NYFA Program Officer Edith Meeks interviews performing artists about issues relating to their working careers. Here, she speaks with Woodie King, Jr., about his extensive and esteemed career as a producer.

Woodie King, Jr., a pioneer of the Black Theatre Movement, is one of the most prolific and prestigious African-American theater producers in the country. He is the founder and artistic director of the New Federal Theatre in New York City, now in its 34th season. He has produced and directed off-Broadway, on Broadway, across the country, at festivals around the world, and has launched such plays as What the Winesellers Buy by Ron Milner, The Taking of Miss Janie by Ed Bullins, and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. He co-founded and managed the Concept East Theatre in Detroit (1960-1963), and co-founded the National Black Touring Circuit (1980 to present). Also a writer, director, actor, and filmmaker, his publications include several anthologies of plays for the black theater, including Black Theatre Present Condition (1981) and the recent Impact of Race: Theatre and Culture (2004). Numerous awards include a 1997 Obie Award for Sustained Achievement and this year’s Actor’s Equity Association Paul Robeson Award.

Edith Meeks: Can you talk a little bit about the origins of the New Federal Theatre?

Woodie King, Jr.: I kicked it off in 1970, and in 1971 I had a huge hit. I had a hit every year for the next 8 years. What the Winesellers Buy moved into Lincoln Center under Joseph Papp, which was unbelievable at that time. The next year The Taking of Miss Janie won the Drama Critics Circle Award. And the next year we had For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, which was a huge hit; it moved into Joe Papp’s theater. So it was just whatever we touched, because the critical establishment that covered Broadway also covered off-Broadway, also covered off-off-Broadway. Of course you know that abruptly changed in the mid-’80s. Now, you can’t get a first-string New York Times critic to come to off-off-Broadway, and a great review from a third-string critic means absolutely nothing to people who move shows to Broadway.

EM: I’m interested in talking about how you stay in it for the long haul.

WK: Almost every theater that I know that started off with really good intentions, but were trying to produce when they didn’t have the money, ran into major, major problems. And eventually they had to close because the one deficit you cannot overcome is federal taxes. You’ve got to have theater programs, you’ve got to have theater rent, and you’ve got to pay Actors’ Equity salaries. And once you run into problems there, it’s almost impossible.

EM: What do you do when you don’t have the money?

WK: Well, fortunately, I’ve been able to get it. Just when you say, “Oh, man, I can’t do this any more,” someone calls and says, “Did you talk to this foundation?” And it’s a foundation that I would never talk to. And they say, well, call them right now and tell them so and so said call. And in three months we have a grant to do a play. That’s why you cannot give up. You’ve got to be always active.

Everything is about negotiating, whether you work with a star or you work with a total unknown. The difference now is that it may take me two and a half months to make a decision on doing something. Back then, I would just say, “Yes, I’ll do it,” and go in and do it. But now you’ve got all this pre-work you’ve got to do; you’ve got to lay it out. It’s much more important because there is so little time; so everything has to be right. You can not go back and fix it after it’s done. You’ve got to stand or fall on what your decisions are. That’s why when you trust someone to direct a play, ultimately it’s going to rise or fall on that person’s decisions. All the other stuff doesn’t matter. You don’t want to know about how he and the playwright didn’t get along; he’s got to negotiate past that. Until someone knows they can do that, certainly you wouldn’t trust him with your money on Broadway; you wouldn’t trust him off-Broadway. So you start at this level, you know?

EM: In building your career, what resources and networks were you able to draw upon, and has that system changed?

WK: That network and system in the beginning was based on a body of black people who earned between $30,000-50,000. They could make a contribution of $500 or $1,000. The cost of living back then was such that they could do that. Now, a play that would cost $25,000-30,000 back then costs $200,000. Their income has not increased appreciably. And the foundations and corporations, the funders, are young energetic college graduates whose world does not include blackness at all. They’re not interested in anything outside of their immediate focus. So the funding becomes extremely difficult, and the few remaining funders are in terrible dilemmas where the rules and guidelines keep piling up and piling up. Those guidelines become more and more impossible to meet. If they give a grant outside those guidelines, their own position is in jeopardy. There’s no one to blame other than a changing world. I find it is a waste of time and energy to try and blame, because it’s outside of blame now. It’s how you negotiate within that.

EM: Is there more competition within the ethnic theater community than there used to be? And does that affect you?

WK: No, no competition. It’s more working together. It’s more co-productions, more collaborations.

EM: Theater is a spoken medium, and is most exciting when it’s a vehicle for ideas that haven’t been spoken before. But in marketing commercial and regional theater, there always seems to be a tension between finding material that will engage the audience and challenge their assumptions about things, and the pressure to make friends with subscribers or customers and not go too far beyond what they can comfortably accept. How do you handle that here, and in your efforts to bring work out to a wider audience?

WK: Here, we don’t have a subscriber base. When we go into a festival, they’re bringing the play in because they’ve heard of it and they’ve read the reviews on it. The problem with our theater here in New York is the critics endorse it. The critics that are endorsing it are not necessarily familiar with the nuances of the work. They’re not really interested in learning it. The work has to fall within traditional Eurocentric ideas, what they’re already familiar with, what they’re trained to deal with.

EM: Can this change? How does it change?

WK: I’m not quite sure how it changes. I would like to see the New York Times, the New York Post, Daily News handle theater criticism the same way they cover movies. They hire a white movie critic, a black movie critic. Elvis Mitchell is wonderful. He can speak of white films; he can speak of black films. The theater somehow doesn’t do that. Margo Jefferson is a black critic, but she doesn’t cover only black plays. The plays she covers are in white institutions, black institutions, Latino institutions, etc.

EM: Is it possible to speak more frankly in your work at New Federal Theatre than it is at the Public Theater or at the Manhattan Theatre Club?

WK: I don’t know; I doubt it. I think the theater is so now, you can almost say whatever you want to say in the theater. It is the taste of the artistic leadership of that theater that controls what that theater’s about.

EM: I went to see The Trial of One Short-sighted Black Woman vs. Mammy Louise and Safreeta Mae at the Performing Arts Library collection, and I thought, “This is a play that’s really specific and nuanced culturally, but is also clearly universal.” What keeps it from reaching a broader audience?

WK: I think the reviews found it awesome and interesting and new, but even after we’ve been producing 30 years and produced so many hits, a new generation of critics come in and they think, well, it’s an accident that it’s a hit. All these things are accidents. They don’t look on our theater as a theater that contributes to the arts in New York. They don’t look at our theater as a major contributor of ideas for the American theater. So what do you do about that? You can’t stop; you just keep on doing. It’s recorded, it’s there, and we have more plays on film in the Public Library of the Performing Arts than any other black theater in America. So you say, damn, okay? They recognize that our work is cool. I don’t know; it’s trying to produce good work and not having the money to do good work. You can only deal with good stories and hope that the set that we built for five or six weeks will last for five or six weeks. Because if it’s a hit, you know the set’s not going to last, even though it may be beautiful and all that. I don’t want to sound bleak, but I really want to make it very clear that we’re here and we’ve been around. Thirty-three years is a long time, and the institution’s pretty solid. We’re not going to go away.

EM: Of all the things that you do, what gives you the most personal delight?

WK: You have The Trial of One Short-sighted Black Woman, right? At the end of the play, five minutes to the end of the play, five women are standing on stage and they’re naming these slave ships. And the audience rose to their feet and they were applauding. And I said, “Wow, they saw what I saw, and I made this happen.” That’s an unbelievable pleasure. And that’s what you go into producing for, that one moment where that happens.

I produced a concert in Liberia. In Liberia we produced James Brown in a soccer stadium. It was a year before that major coup. There is five months of planning, and you go there; you make sure the soccer stadium is the right size. You deal with getting James Brown in London; you get the airlines to bring him in from London into Liberia on a private plane. And so James Brown and a group of dancers, singers, and musicians, totaling 25 are met at the airport, they are picked up in limos, and they are driven into Liberia from the airport. From the airport, along the road going into the city, are thousands of people saying, “James Brown. James Brown.” And maybe 50,000 people at the airport, “James Brown. James Brown.” And in those moments you look and you say, “I made this happen.” That’s why you go into producing.

EM: According to a recent study (The Performing Arts in a New Era), increasingly it’s the small groups that serve a particular community or small audience and the really big mainstream institutions that are surviving. You’ve been able to transfer work from a niche group, to the middle, to Broadway. How do you do that, and is it still possible?

WK: To be able to negotiate the system really, really comes from knowing the system. I think it would be very difficult for someone coming into the system in New York to be able to do that. Especially if they operate under all the union rules and regulations. And ultimately what you really need is funding to do what you have to do. So the energy always will be between funding and doing quality programming. Ultimately, nothing matters except whether the show on stage is brilliant, excellent, wonderful, unique, different. That’s what ultimately matters, so that’s where the energy has to be. So once you lose track of that and take a $500,000 grant right here that you have to match three to one, then you have to really decide: I cannot match that $500,000 three to one, so why accept it in the first place? And why would anyone put that kind of burden on you, to match it three to one? So you’ve got to always ask those questions. Those are very difficult questions, you know. You have to look at where your energies are going to go. And you have to negotiate between that.