Richard Scharine

In 2003 I received the University of Utah Diversity Award—probably because I was the artistic director of People Productions, Utah’s first and only African-American theatre. But it didn’t end there, and it didn’t start there either.

It might have gone back to Ft. Carson, Colorado, in 1957 when I was the only white face in the cadre barracks of a company that also had a black commander, or to the Wisconsin tenant farm I grew up on, where my father allowed black workers from the Cudahy slaughter house to come out to hunt. But I prefer to think it began on the evening of August 28, 1968, when I was driving my wife and daughter in our VW “hippie bus” from Iola, Kansas, where I’d been a community theatre director, to Lawrence, where I was about to start my theatre PhD studies at the University of Kansas. The car radio was tuned to the Democratic presidential campaign in Chicago, and (periodically) to the “Battle of Michigan Avenue,” during which 600 protesters were arrested and a hundred hospitalized. The convention ended with Hubert Humphrey being nominated, despite not having entered a single presidential primary. The protests were just beginning.

It was a rough year.

On the evening of April 4, I was carrying my 11 month old daughter around the basement of the African-Methodist-Episcopal-Zion Church, which was having a bake sale. I’d integrated the cast of a community theatre production, and was hoping to expand the idea in the summer. Then word of Dr. King’s assassination arrived and nobody was much interested in talking about theatre. I was working on the set for the last show of the year when Bobby Kennedy was killed, and suddenly I found myself buying over the counter antidepressants at the local drug store.

In July the theatre board of directors informed me that there was no money to pay me the next year, but if I could get some teaching work at the local junior college, would I be interested in continuing to do the job? Four minutes after talking to my wife I was on the phone, trying to get accepted into a graduate program whose beginning students had been chosen in April. As you may have guessed from the PhD after my name, I was accepted, and—after another student dropped out—even had an assistantship.

But what I was thinking as I drove through the evening of August 28^th?

In my (second) junior year in college, I fell simultaneously in love with theatre and Marilyn. It took her three years to decide I was worth the risk, four for me to decide I had no future in the profession, and ten years later the educational elite were still watching me with a certain wariness.

My country was falling apart around me and I was in the process of committing my life to “plays.” I had to find some way to justify doing what I loved.

For me the answer began with the “Angry Young Men,” a coterie of English playwrights whose subject was the decay of an Empire whose time was past. They turned the theatre into a probing device which explained the present by exhuming the past. (You could call it “Critical Empire Theory.”) My first dissertation choice was a documentary theatre located in the English Midlands. They were happy to have me as an assistant and a scribe, but not happy enough to pay for support for my wife and daughter. The second choice was black theatre—questionable in that there was not a single black professor (or woman professor) in the department, but interesting in that it provided an opportunity for academic ju-jitsu. If there were no black theatre professors (and no other interested graduate students), why shouldn’t I teach it myself? It was only a series of lectures, such as all PhD students were required to give, but they still form the basis of classes I have been teaching for the past fifty years.

The new problem was that to write a dissertation you have to have an advisor, and so I was back with the Angry Young Men, who had published plays which didn’t require me to go to England. My revised dissertation became my first book, The Plays of Edward Bond, which was accepted for publication in 1974. How successful was it? Very, judging from the number of times it was cited by critics and other academics, but that was not entirely my fault. Bond has remained controversial to this day, and mine having been the first book on him made my career. In the 90s a graduate student on a bus in Louisville recognized me from a book cover, and made an attempt to mine me for my Bond insights. When I confessed I hadn’t directed a Bond play since 1975 or written a paper on the subject since 1977, his disappointment was palpable: “But we all had to read your book!” Three months ago another graduate student—this time from Turkey—wrote to ask how he could get the book, which was a key to his dissertation. I would have liked to help him, but the next day two months of my in-box disappeared from my laptop and the chance vanished forever.

In 1978 when Marilyn and I were on a performance tour of the U.K. and Wales, Bond invited us backstage at the National Theatre where a play of his, The Woman, had its premiere. As a farm boy from Wisconsin, I was too shy to take him up, and didn’t meet him until another premiere at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2012. “I know you from somewhere,” he said.

Meanwhile, I spent seven years in Minnesota and Iowa colleges, directing 35 plays which demonstrated my obsession that political theatre could save the world. One of them was Edward Bond’s The Sea, but there was a sharp turn in the road in the spring of 1973 when the Black Student Union at the Quaker college of William Penn asked me to direct a play for them. I explained that I was already directing another play and turned them down. “We want you to do Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun,” they said. I directed one play in the afternoon and Raisin in the evening, and the next semester I added Black Theatre to the curriculum.

Shortly after that we added a little Vietnamese boy to the family, just as when my daughter came out twenty years later, we added her life partner. Each of these young women eventually added a PhD and a grandchild to our group, and we might have stayed at William Penn forever.

However, in 1977 I spent the summer at a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar at NYU, soaking up avant-garde drama in the classroom and anything New York City and its theatre had to offer the rest of the day and night. And that was plenty—including the NYC bankruptcy, the “Son of Sam” murders and a blackout that lasted three days in Greenwich Village. The best eight weeks of my life! If you’ve read “Blackout” in my book, the accounts are fictionalized, but most of the events are true.

Back in Oskaloosa, about the third time someone said, “yeah, but you wouldn’t want to live there,” I’d had enough—and so had Marilyn. “I’m not living with you like this. Find a place you want to go, and we’ll go there.”

To be fair, that “place” was not the University of Utah, which was nowhere near New York City, but it was a university and they only wanted me to teach theatre history and introduction to theatre. At William Penn I taught 10 different courses (not all at once), and I believed what Utah asked for would leave me plenty of time to work in the theatre. It was not until I was about to sign my contract that Keith Engar, the Department Chair and godfather to virtually all the campus performing arts, said to me: “You know, of course, I didn’t hire you to direct.”

I was to have a father/son relationship with Keith, with my hoped-for role being Oedipus. I wasn’t kidding about his importance to the local arts scene. In addition to having created Utah public radio and television, he did everything in theatre, including acting, directing, and writing plays. Had Alzheimer’s not shortened his career, the relationship between the University theatre and the professional Pioneer Theatre Company might well have been much closer.

However, Keith Engar was also a categorical thinker. To him—with him being the exception—PhDs were theorists and MFAs were creators. (I didn’t direct on the Department’s Babcock main stage until my 21^st year.) He assigned the Department’s one Hispanic and one Black faculty members the literature courses conforming to their ethnicity—despite the fact that both were acting teachers. (That was to my benefit, in that the Black faculty member asked me to team-teach). Years later I was on the tenure committee when the Hispanic teacher came up for promotion. One faculty member sniffed, “All he does is teach that Mexican stuff, and we all know that’s useless.” I made sure the exact words were in the minutes forwarded to the College of Fine Arts and my friend got his promotion.

Keith was also a bishop in the LDS Church, and years before I came to Salt Lake City he took it upon himself to rid the Department of gay students. The process left a lot of emotional scars. (I got the full story from an actor in that program backstage at a 2012 production of The Crucible.) After Keith was gone some students came to complain about a teacher who gave out grades, roles, and rewards to students with whom he had relationships. I took the problem to the current chair, who was a veteran of the gay witch hunt period, and who refused to do anything that might revive its memory. The teacher was eventually passed on with a glowing recommendation, and it was two colleges down the road before the shit hit the fan.

All of this soured my early years at Utah, but things had worked their way out by the time that I returned from my first sabbatical in 1985. Acting opportunities around town had presented themselves, I was enjoying my work as Director of Graduate Studies, I had both African-American Theatre and American Political Theatre classes—courses I’ve maintained to this day, and I’d started work on my second book: From Class to Caste, a study of the shift in emphasis of American political theatre from the Communism/Capitalism clash of the 1930s to the race, gender, and sexual orientation issues of the 1980s. It was finished in 1989, but didn’t come out until 1991. If From Class to Caste was not reviewed as often as The Plays of Edward Bond, it was probably more useful to the day to day teacher. Looking at the number of our students who eventually became educators, I’d taken to teaching theatre history as a means of using theatre to teach history in general. As someone whose high school history classes were taught by a series of football coaches who were excellent teachers on the field, but appalling in the classroom, I didn’t want the arts students to have the same experience.

My second sabbatical was due in 1991. I applied for a Fulbright Fellowship to the United Kingdom, and received not only it, but the interest of two English colleges in easy reach of London. The only problem was that I didn’t get the sabbatical and didn’t feel I could afford to go without it. I had one child in college, and another about to start, and to go with me, Marilyn would have to give up her teaching job at nearby Westminster College. The sabbatical went to a member of the directing faculty, who went to London’s Royal Central College of Speech and Drama. It’s hard for me to feel bad about the good fate of a director who not only gave me the only male role in Euripides’ The Trojan Women, but who’s casting me in the title role of Oedipus at Colonus gave me the chance to play the part in a tour of Greece ending in Athens—which has to be a perfect example of hubris. It was, however, also typical of a department that always put performance ahead of scholarship.

It was Seneca, the Roman stoic and playwright who said: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” In 1992 I got the sabbatical—but didn’t get the English Fulbright! I had three days to brood before the telephone rang one afternoon. It was a Fulbright representative wanting to know if I’d be interested in going to the University of Gdansk in Poland. I asked my wife across the kitchen, “Do you want to go to Poland?” “Why not?” she answered.

It was at this point when all the pieces—of whose existence I was unaware—began to fall in place. My grandfather was born in and emigrated from East Prussia, which prior to 1793 and after 1918 was part of Poland. His father (who had never gotten around to marry his mother) died in Gdansk as a member of the Prussian army. Needing a Fulbright scholar to fatten up his teaching staff, Andrezej Ceynova, Gdansk’s Deputy Director of Education at the English Institute, chose me because we were both African-American theatre geeks. I once asked Andrezej if he thought I was black when he hired me. His answer was the perfect salve: “I figured that you and Marilyn being actors could communicate what was in the plays in human terms, and that was the only way the students could understand and remember them.”

Andrezej wasn’t the first or last to figure that getting my best meant having Marilyn next to me. Her research ability also established the identity of my great-grandfather, and found the house where my grandfather was born—which I visited in 1992 and 2012 and in both cases was treated like a long lost son.

These stories are best told in my unfinished memoir, “My Life as a Polish Actor, which includes a comparison of the Polish and American education systems, as well as a visit to the three plays we did in 1993—one in a nightclub at 2 a.m., and another which visited Warsaw and Poznan in addition to Gdansk. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 we brought Utah-originated productions back to Gdansk’s “Festival of Drama in English.” I returned to teach in 1997 and there directed David Ives’ All in the Timing at the Teatr Naucezania Webrezezak. The last role I filled was with Marilyn, who couldn’t come until the Westminster school year had ended.

In September of 1997 Marilyn was diagnosed with cancer, and on July 9, 2002, she died. In between she missed only two classes at Westminster, continued her work as an organizer for District 30 of the Utah Democratic Party, her second career as radio host of an Arts program on KRCL-FM (winning the Stephen Holbrook Award in 1998), and serving as the Arts Chair of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. She was to become the Academy Chair in 2002, and was posthumously named an “Academy Fellow.”

In my book, The Past We Step Into, she lives on as co-star, subject, and inspiration.

If you were paying attention you would have connected Poland with my return to directing. You would have been at least partially right. On April 19, 1993, I gave a guest lecture at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and at the reception afterwards complained about my plight to Susan Mason, a Utrecht McKnight Fellow.

“Why don’t you just do the plays by yourself?” she answered reasonably.

Why not indeed? For the rest of the nineties I just directed anything I liked in any place I could find—most often the Lab Theatre, a tiny space on the second floor of the Performing Arts Building which was closed in the twenty-first century when the fire department discovered it had only one exit. Just before leaving for Gdansk in 1997, I returned to black theatre with the particularly foul-mouthed Pill Hill by Sam Kelley, which found a surprise home at the Salt Lake City Presbyterian Church. For every student actor in the production, it was the first time as theatre students they played a role in their own race. Three years later African-American drama was to become for me the norm rather than the exception.

In the winter of 2000 I received a long-awaited phone call from Edward Lewis. Lewis was the president of the Tri-State NAACP and for years I had tried to get him to speak to my African-American theatre class. However, this Edward Lewis worked in a Salt Lake suburbs liquor store. This Edward Lewis was also the founder of People Productions, a San Jose theatre he started because his local college had never done a black theatre production and had no intention of doing so. He was to revive People Productions in Los Angeles, which he also did film work with his cousin, Diff’rent Strokes’ Todd Bridges. The remaining connecting links were Edward Lewis Jr. graduating from the University of Utah, and a past student (and actress) of mine visiting the liquor store.

In August we had our first production, James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, and in April—nearly 17 years later—our last was August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Given the paucity of white roles and black actors, Edward and I very quickly fell into a pattern of him acting and me directing. Other company members occasionally directed, but until we settled into a reconverted warehouse in 2014 the 23 People Productions that I helmed might turn up anywhere. Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize winner, A Soldier’s Play, was in an open, still functioning, bar, as was Richard Wesley’s The Mighty Gents. Another Pulitzer Prize winner, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog was in a Ladies Literary Club. Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf was in a night club, but Lonne Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men first saw light in a law school, and David Mamet’s Race in a museum. Ceremonies was a fundraiser for Ethnic Studies, and Amen Corner a fundraiser for an historic black church. Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy raised funds for a hospice for the homeless, and The Exonerated, by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, was performed several times to raise money for the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center, an organization founded to free the unjustly imprisoned. Its production locations ranged from the First Unitarian Church to the Dekker Lake Correctional Institution.

People Productions received a Salt Lake City “Arty Award” in 2006, and Edward Lewis died of pancreatic cancer in 2009. Noticing in the following winter that there were four theatre productions with black themes, Jerry Rapier of Plan-B Theatre suggested that they be grouped under the heading of “The Edward Lewis Theatre Festival.” A few years later the Festival had found a home in the Downtown City Library on a February Sunday afternoon, with four local theatres performing scenes from current, recent, or wished-for productions. Still performing under the People Productions name, our offering in the 2021 was scenes from my American adaptation of David Hare’s play, Knuckle. Another participating group, the Wasatch Theatre Company, liked it and our co-produced full production will be in September, with me in the cast and Nan Weber, PPs long standing film recorder, directing. Meanwhile, the 13^th annual Edward Lewis Festival is in the planning stage.

And so, 53 years after the night of driving across Kansas to the sound of a disastrous political convention, I am back where I started. Twice in the last six years of People Productions, the theatre was taken out of my hands by people with good intentions—who soon dropped it because of its weight. And in my Americanized version of the English Knuckle, the triumvirate of Church, Legislature, and Business continues its unchallenged rule of Utah.

As Curley says at the end of Knuckle: “Back to my guns.”