Jubilee Theatre’s new season kicks off with new artistic director

Becoming an artistic director of an established theater after the founder has died is always tricky. How do you live up to the organization’s legacy and still carve your own path? Even with that challenge, perhaps taking that job more than a decade after said event, and after two others have tried to make their mark, might be even more difficult.

That’s the task facing William “Bill” Earl Ray, who was named the artistic director at Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre in the spring. The shadow of co-founder Rudy Eastman, who died in 2005, looms large, but is probably easier to manage than a number of changes since then and two outsiders who wanted to change things.

The first, seasoned director and leader Ed Smith, resigned after he realized it was a losing battle to fight what he considered too much white involvement — on the board, staff and in the audience — with North Texas’ longest-running African-American theater. He was followed by the young and audacious Tre Garrett, who was charged with child sexual assault in early 2015 and released from Jubilee; he was found guilty and sentenced to 12 years in prison in May 2016.

Ray, who had directed and acted at Jubilee and had about 20 years of experience acting and directing in North Texas, and about 40 in the Pacific Northwest and around the country, was named the new artistic director in February.

He’s not trying to look too much into the past.

“I can’t speak to anyone other than Bill Ray, and to what Bill Ray is and what his experience is,” says Ray, acknowledging that his primary goal is erasing the theater’s debt and building up the coffers again for an organization with a $750,000 annual budget, nearly double what it was when Eastman died. “You have to be stable before you move forward.”

That begins this week with the first title of the 2016-17 season, his first selection for Jubilee Theatre (the 2015-16 season was selected by committee, led by longtime theater matron Sharon Benge). The show is 1977’s Working, A Musical, adapted by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso from Studs Terkel’s collection of interviews with America’s working class, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.

That’s a fitting theme for Ray, who knows that running a successful organization that entertains, educates and enlightens audiences is indeed hard work — as vital as all of the other jobs that keep the American way of life going.

“I’m just someone who’s trying to make this company work,” he says.

Long track record

To make it work, he relying on a long track record of working in theater, beginning when he was stationed with the Army in Seoul at the end of the Vietnam War era. Ray declines to reveal his age.

Having grown up in the Texas Hill Country town of Rockdale, his exposure to the arts was limited, although his mother had been in drama in high school, his uncle Earl “could sing and act,” and his grandmother was a gospel singer who made her own recordings, which were never released commercially.

In Seoul, he saw a production from the American drama club on the base, of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner. (Interestingly, that was the play at which Jubilee founders Rudy and Marian Eastman met as part of Fort Worth’s Sojourner Truth Players in the early 1970s.)

Returning to the States at Fort Lewis, Wash., he auditioned for a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and was cast as George, the buttoned-up suitor of Beneatha. His love affair with the theater had begun. He earned a bachelor’s degree in theater from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

He continued to act and direct around the Northwest and in the 1980s began his own company with a focus on theater about the African-American experience, Ndaba, in Tacoma, Wash. He led it for seven years. Having family in Texas, he eventually found his way to Fort Worth, where his first theater experience was acting in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in 1996.

It was a role that came with some special advice from Wilson himself. Ray was working in Seattle in Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, directed by Wilson’s longtime collaborator, Lloyd Richards.

“I ran into August at a cafe up on a hill in Seattle. You have to listen, for one because you can’t get a word in edgewise with him. The information he gave me was valuable,” says Ray, without divulging what Wilson said.

Since then, Ray has been a fixture in North Texas theater, acting and directing locally at Circle Theatre, Amphibian Stage Productions and Dallas’ African American Repertory Theater, while still working in Portland, Austin (he was in the ZACH Theatre’s 2015 production of All the Way) and elsewhere.

At Jubilee, he acted in Sunset, Baby and directed Wilson’s Seven Guitars, which was when the artistic director job became available. He had spent a few years in Houston taking care of his ailing mother, and after her death, decided to move back.

“Because I’ve been an artistic director before, it’s made it easier for me to step in and have an idea of what I’m doing,” Rays says.

Coming in for criticism

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been challenges already. The announcement of his first season at Jubilee was met with criticism, notably from this writer. That’s because of the six shows on the season — three musicals, three plays — only one is them is by a black writer, Wilson’s Two Trains Running.

The other two plays certainly speak directly of the African-American experience: Thurgood, a one-man play about the first black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, by white writer George Stevens; and Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, which was adapted by white writer Emily Mann, and comes directly from the oral history accounts of the black Delany sisters, both centenarians who lived through most of the 20th century.

The season’s three musicals are by white writers, although they universally speak to all audiences and will have black casts at Jubilee: Working; a musical adaptation of O. Henry’s The Gifts of the Magi; and Beehive, a celebration of ’60s music, including Motown.

It has been labeled a rather safe season, especially in the wake of seasons by Smith and Garrett, who were introducing Jubilee audiences to challenging, contemporary black playwrights such as Nathan Louis Jackson, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Katori Hall and Suzan-Lori Parks. And consider that a number of white professional theaters are introducing their audiences to the likes of Robert O’Hara (Stage West), Kirsten Childs and Branden Jacob-Jenkins (Dallas Theater Center), and Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm (Kitchen Dog Theater).

Although Ray admits there’s a whole crop of younger black playwrights whose work he needs to become familiar with, what’s most important now is to build the audiences back up for plays — Jubilee has no problem selling out its musicals — and that might come with more populist titles.

“I have to think about the company before I think about Bill Ray,” he says. “I believe it’s a great season for Jubilee. The bookends [Working and Beehive] are multicultural, and we will continue to do that.

“I believe we’re in the place where we’re closer to being stable,” he says, referring to a $35,000 deficit from the 2014-15 season that, he says, has been whittled down.

“I think this is a great season that is going to stabilize [the theater]. I’m trying to give back what was given to me. I want to make sure that the African-American who works here will be exposed to the great diversity of who we are as Americans.”

He hopes that while accomplishing that, he also helps the theater to grow. His goal for five years is to take the company to the $1 million budget mark, he says, and to get Jubilee back on the track of national exposure.

As for “safe”?

“Nothing is safe in the theater. Theater is always a risk, no matter what you do,” Ray says. “I’m just looking for the best way to take Jubilee Theatre to that next level, whatever that is. Whatever it takes to get there.”

This story was originally published September 27, 2016 at 2:42 PM with the headline "Jubilee Theatre’s new season kicks off with new artistic director."