Penumbra Theatre founder Lou Bellamy likes to say that he’s ‘paid to be black,’ but it’s a more serious responsibility than you might think

By Andrea Jenkins
I caught up with Lou Bellamy, director, actor, University of Minnesota professor, and founder of Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, on one of those spectacular fall mornings in October. He had just returned from Pittsburgh where he attended funeral services for playwright August Wilson. Bellamy, who was clad in faded jeans, a tattered denim shirt bearing the Penumbra logo, a desert-colored Carhartt jacket and cap, looked more like a construction site supervisor than the director of a world-class black theater company, and described the services as a “New Orleans–style” home going, complete with Wynton Marsalis providing the musical accompaniments. Of Wilson’s passing, Bellamy said, “he left us with enough material to mine for the next two decades.”

We met at the Golden Thyme Café on Selby Avenue, surrounded by vivid images of jazz musicians, neighborhood regulars, and the smell of fresh espresso. I asked him about the theater, Wilson’s impact on it, and what the future of the company looked like.

I want to start by asking about the impact that August Wilson had on Penumbra.
Well, the impact can’t be measured really. We’ve done more of his plays than any theater in the world. Black Bart, Malcolm X, and all that. But more importantly, his literature shaped our aesthetic. You can’t be around great literature like that and not have it change your life. It gets you thinking about things that you probably hadn’t thought about.

August came into his maturity as a writer here at the theater. It’s not that he wasn’t a poet and a writer before coming here, but the act of getting away from home provided him some perspective that allowed him to look back and gather all those stories. He has told me and told audiences that when he came here and saw our Piano Lesson that that was the definitive production of that play for him, and that all of our productions defined his work in a way that other theaters couldn’t match. He was so impressed with a professional black theater company; even today many of our early company members are tapped by national theater companies to come and act, produce, and direct plays because of our early association with Wilson. There is a brain trust here that is recognized and counted upon to continue his legacy in many ways.

What has been the impact on your directing skills away from Wilson’s work?
You grow and learn. What an artistic director does is try to live life, and I don’t mean prophylacticly; I mean really live life to the fullest. I want to live life and feel it and touch it. What happens is, you get something artistic out of that experience. There is a tremendous amount of craft in what I do, I mean I have dedicated my life to this medium, I’ve studied it, I do it, I teach it to graduate students at the University of Minnesota. But more importantly, to do this well you’ve got to know and love black people. And, as you know, getting to know black people is tricky. They have been dealing with in-direction for a very long time, and even digging through history, it is difficult to find the soul of black folks unless you love them.

Just look at that brother down in New Orleans who got beat up by the police over the weekend. Now, if you know and love black people, you know that there was more going on in that situation than what the police were telling us. Understanding ourselves is pretty tricky, especially when you’re using a media that is controlled by white people, unless you’re really educated—and I don’t mean in the academy; I mean like Malcolm or like August, myself to some extent, people who have learned about themselves through self study outside of the academy.

When I was in graduate school I would write all my papers about black folks. One day they came to me and said, “Mr. Bellamy, you’re writing all these papers about black folks, but you’re going to be held accountable for this European body of work. We’re going to be testing your ass on this body of work.”

So I had to go outside of that structure and learn about myself, and it is interesting that they are paying me to come back and teach the exact thing that they wouldn’t sanction when I was in school. So it is those three things—craft, knowing black people, loving black people—that shapes a production or a depiction of what is black that has depth and power and is intellectually stimulating, so that anybody from this neighborhood can look and see: “Yeah, that’s it. That’s black people.”

It’s got to be on all those levels, and you can see all of those levels in black people. We’ve been duped into believing that you can only see that depth of what it means to be human when you go to Shakespeare or Chekhov. Well that’s bullshit. If you’re black and you’re a person, you can feel the same experiences that all people feel and my story, our story, is just as valid as anyone’s.

What would you say are two things that you have learned about black people that are universal about black people?
There are just so many things that are evident when you steep yourself in the culture. You see black is not a color, it’s a culture. You got to live it; you can’t be black and not be a part of the culture, it doesn’t work that way. So when you understand the culture there are some cornerstones of it that you can see, there is a rhythm to it evidenced by the music, it manifests itself in the way people talk, and walk, the way they do sports. It’s called style.
It’s like Paul Carter Harrison says, “A brother has got to keep the drumbeat in his heart because if he doesn’t he will lose the rhythm and miss the “A train” and miss the ride home.”

This is basic to who we are. There are fundamental differences in the way cultures relate to each other, react inside of the culture. I notice, for example, that when black males get angry, instead of going low in register, they go high in register, that when someone tells a joke, black people will fall away from the point of the joke instead of inside of the joke, then come back in when they laugh. Those are just a few little examples that when we bring them all together and allow them to breathe and love them then something gorgeous emerges.

But you can’t do it when you try to hide it. I found out more than anything, there is no feeling, no thought that can’t be encompassed inside of the black experience. I thank my lucky stars that I have been able to make a relatively decent living and garner national and international attention without leaving my community. I never left here; I am here to know what I know. I see a lot of friends that used to be a part of Penumbra, who are now working in other places, and they would give anything to be doing what I’m doing and get paid to be black.

So you’re a “professional” black man? Is that what you’re saying?
Yeah, yeah, I’m the blackbone, you know. But to study black people to relish them, to celebrate them, know them and love them and make a living at it, can you believe that? You can’t ask for nothing better than that, you know. I just love it, really. To see them on stage, they’re all those different colors, my cup just runneth over from it.

Tell me about this new production, Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers
It was written by William S. Yellow Robe Jr., a Native American with black ancestry, about one family. It’s about mixed race, native and black, native and African really. He is writing from his own experience, from inside the culture. He’s Assiniboine from Fort Peck, Montana. A few black folks have written about black Indians, but not many natives have, and it’s becoming more of an issue for them. You see, the government determines the black quotient of their blood.

In terms of property rights…?
Oh yeah, and many other things like tribal affiliations, and so you see, when someone is honest about writing about it from inside the culture like Bill does, you see that the same sort of self-hate and result of racism from the dominant European culture has crept into their dealings with each other like ours has. You start to see differentiations in terms of skin color and hair texture—all them kind of things—and it trips you right out when you see it.

He’s got a character in there who straightens his hair, you know what I mean, because white folks define what an Indian is, how they should look. These are Native people by culture, and they are trying to deal with the way they look biologically. Again, it’s a play about one family and Bill is very careful to say that. It’s not the quintessential tale about Indians, just like I couldn’t make the quintessential black statement. But if you look at that one family, they’ve got Native and Mexican, Native and white, and now they have language to help them deal with it.

We’ve got a Web site (www.penumbratheatre.org) that really studies the issue with a wonderful essay called “Your Blood Ain’t Redder Than Mine,” that my daughter [Sarah Bellamy] wrote, and there is a whole educational package.

So it’s a touring play? Tell me a little about that.
That’s right, it actually close[d] here on Saturday (October 15), then it goes to Sisseton, South Dakota, and Sioux Falls, and Kansas. Many of these are Indian reservations. You check the schedule at the Web site www.buffalosoldierstour.org. But they go all along the Eastern Seaboard, and I’m on sabbatical so I get to go with them and lecture at universities, teach classes and workshops. They’ll play at Trinity Rep, a major regional theater in Rhode Island that we’re co-producing this play with, and Dartmouth.

Are you directing this production?
Yes I’m directing it, so I’ll be there for that as well.

So does this mean there’ll be more touring productions from Penumbra?
Lord only knows. I think the significance is, it shows what happens when the right people get the money. Now the National Endowment for the Arts decided that they were going to fund touring two years ago. they gave the money to places like the Guthrie, who put together a production of Othello and toured the country with it.

That was a slap in the face to American writers; it was a horrible thing to do. Why would they feature a European writer on the first time out? It just doesn’t make any sense. Now, what I’m proud of is that we got the money and we went and found us a real American, I mean a flat-out American, you know.

I think that what this signifies is that those resources must be channeled to the right individuals who know what to do with it, rather than because someone has demonstrated their expertise in a European genre and expect them to answer all questions for us. It’s unfair to ask them to do it and it robs us of our own responsibility to do it. We need to allow ourselves to grow, you know. We’ve got to protect our own literature. You can’t get strong by allowing someone to do your work, and they invite you in to help out. You got to do it yourself.

I know you’re on a tight schedule here, but I saw the production of Stage Direction, a play about homophobia in the black theater community.
Yeah, I directed that too.

I’m always amazed at Penumbra’s willingness to tackle issues that we in the black community don’t want to deal with.
That’s the worth of Penumbra. See Penumbra is a professional theater, a high-quality theater within a community. That’s a really special responsibility, so it’s our job to pull the community’s coat, to say, “Think about this.”

I’d been wanting to do something like that for a long time, but I wanted something good, and everything I had read up to that point was too campy. We don’t do it enough to play around with it. So Stage Directions was a wonderful example.

It’s interesting the way the press reacted to it. They reacted the same way they react when a black person talks about racism: “They’re being angry.” So when these black gay men were on stage, they said they were proselytizing, preaching. But you saw, it was balanced, it was honest, it was all of those things. That is what a professional theater company inside of the community has to do, make us think about those things.