New leader, new ethos at Lorraine Hansberry Theatre

In an era when the fate of identity-specific theater remains uncertain, the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre’s new interim artistic director Aldo Billingslea has only optimism for the 36-year-old company, which makes work by and for blacks and other people of color.

The Hansberry, he declares, is “back on its feet and back in the ring to fight.”

Still, Billingslea’s term begins as other identity-specific theater companies — such as a Traveling Jewish Theatre (also known as the Jewish Theatre San Francisco) and Asian American Theater Company — have folded, though others such as Bindlestiff Studio and New Conservatory Theatre Center flourish. In the case of the Jewish theater company, Executive Director Sara Schwartz Geller told The Chronicle in 2011 that one factor in the company’s decision to close its doors was the question of “whether there is still a need for a specifically Jewish theater in the Bay Area.”

Billingslea rejects the notion that similar questions apply to the Hansberry. This is despite the fact that the plays of August Wilson — which the company used to produce frequently — now appear regularly on major mainstream stages such as Cal Shakes and Marin Theatre Company. It’s also in spite of the fact that Cal Shakes and Berkeley Rep this year shattered their box office records with shows featuring large all-black or mostly black casts — “Black Odyssey” and “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” respectively.

Yet for Billingslea, the urgency of the Hansberry couldn’t be clearer. In a wide-ranging interview at his office at Santa Clara University, where this actor and director is a professor in the theater department, he cites Wilson’s 1996 speech, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” as one of the best arguments for black theater companies. In that speech, Wilson insisted that “black theater in America is alive, it is vibrant, it is vital. It just isn’t funded” — or it has to fight with myriad other historically oppressed groups for a single slot in a mainstream theater’s season.

Twenty-one years later, this description is “still true,” Billingslea says.

“There are still people who look at black theaters like they look at black history: They think that that’s somebody else’s.” In fact, he says, “black history is American history. And black theater is American theater.”

To help make that case, the company has new weapons in its arsenal, in addition to Billingslea: a playwriting competition designed to spur the creation of new plays with substantial roles for women of color, as well as the addition of an interim executive director position. In that role, Stephanie Shoffner, who started in July and who comes from a business background, plans a wider embrace of digital marketing, recruitment of younger board members and outreach to and development of a diverse audience, a need that’s especially urgent given the exodus of African Americans from city limits.

“We’re rebranding ourselves — that’s the goal,” Shoffner says. “It’s nice that we have a history, but things have changed, and so we have to come more into the 21st century.”

In short, the company shares similar goals with other small theater companies. But that’s a better position to be in than constant crisis mode, which often defined the Hansberry in the past. In 2010, it suffered what Billingslea calls “a devastating body blow” when its two founders, Stanley E. Williams and Quentin Easter, died within months of each other, and just three years after the Hansberry lost its longtime Sutter Street venue, accruing significant debt in the process. Billingslea’s predecessor, Steven Anthony Jones, who stepped down in June, eliminated the debt and kept the company afloat, but its artistic output remains greatly reduced. This season, it will mount just two or possibly three main stage shows, in contrast to the four or five it regularly produced in the early 2000s.

Billingslea stresses, however, that success shouldn’t be measured just by the number of productions but also by their caliber.

Billingslea is well positioned to achieve that metric. At 52, he’s at the top of his career, recently winning 2017 Theatre Bay Area Awards for acting (in Cal Shakes’ “Black Odyssey”) and for directing, (the Hansberry’s “Home”). In person, he combines an imposing figure — he played football in high school in Fort Worth, Texas, and then at Austin College — with a cool, thoughtful manner of speaking punctuated by the occasional jazzy inflection. (When he wants to tell a story about a colorful character from his life, he’ll introduce that person as “this cat.”)

“Everyone I spoke with raised their hand in kind of a fist bump when we heard that Aldo was appointed,” says L. Peter Callender, artistic director of African-American Shakespeare Company, which like the Hansberry is housed in African American Art and Culture Complex. He adds that Billingslea will “set the cornerstone” for hiring a permanent candidate whose name funders would be excited to see on a grant request.

Theatre Bay Area Executive Director Brad Erickson agrees that Billingslea “comes with instant credibility,” an asset the company can use to bolster its fundraising capabilities. He says it’s “not impossible” for an identity-specific theater to thrive in 2017, citing Golden Thread Productions, New Conservatory Theatre Center and Theatre Rhinoceros.

“There is a large enough African American population certainly in the Bay Area” — if not in the city alone — “to support both a Lorraine Hansberry Theatre and African-American Shakespeare Company,” Erickson says. The companies “just need to plug in with that audience … and frankly, with money. It’s difficult for everybody, but where is the support coming from beyond ticket sales?”

Billingslea is realistic about what he can expect to accomplish in his yearlong term. (And he confirms it will last just one year, coinciding with his coming sabbatical from Santa Clara University; joking with fellow professor Kimberly Mohne Hill, Billingslea says of the Hansberry position, “I’ve got an expiration date on my backside.”)

“It’s really sitting in the nest and trying to do a little bit of pruning until the permanent director can come in and make the renovations they want to really make it their own,” he says. To that end, he’s maintaining the company’s traditional holiday gospel concert, “Soulful Christmas,” which plays through Dec. 23 at African American Art and Culture Complex, as well as its nomadic “Bringing the Art to the Audience” staged reading series. For that program, the Hansberry will pursue collaborations with PlayGround, AlterTheater, Cal Shakes, Playwrights Foundation and Cutting Ball Theater, among others.

Billingslea’s one “bold and ambitious step” in the works for the company is the playwriting competition, which will have a prize of $5,000 to $7,000. Its goal is to help counteract the dearth of meaty roles for women, a well-known problem in theater, one that only gets worse when you take age and race into account. “The double standard of gender and age that we have in our business is pretty freaking awful,” Billingslea says. For him, there’s no better place to combat that disparity than at a theater named after Lorraine Hansberry, whose “A Raisin in the Sun” was the first play by a black woman to be performed on Broadway.

Any entry into the competition, which has yet to announce deadlines, “has to pass the Bechdel Test,” Billingslea says. (In other words, it has to feature at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.) Additionally, he says, a submission “must have at least two African American women in it. At least one of those women has to be over 40 years old. And it has to be hysterically funny.”

The Hansberry’s other show for the current season already reflects that ethos. Opening in May, the world premiere of Lisa B. Thompson’s “The Mamalogues” centers on single black mothers in the era of Black Lives Matter. Billingslea, who co-directs with Michileen Oberst, says he hopes the show will instill in audiences “a greater appreciation for what it is not just to be a mother, but to be a black mother in the United States. … The playwright’s vision of reality is that there is struggle — and there is joy, and there can be humor in the struggle.”

“What the Lorraine Hansberry has turned into now is more of a new play venue,” Callender says. That means “discovering the new classics, to see where the new Nambi Kelleys are coming from and the Lynn Nottages and the Suzan-Lori Parks — to create that new series of playwrights that the world will come to know.”

Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak

“Soulful Christmas: A Holiday Gospel Concert”: Directed by Yvonne Cobbs. Dec. 14-23. $10-$30. African American Art and Culture Complex, Buriel Clay Theater, 762 Fulton St., S.F. (415) 474-8800. www.lhtsf.org

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