Parting the Curtain in the ’80s with Penumbra Theatre’s Lou Bellamy

Part of a series of As Told To conversations in honor of Mpls.St.Paul’s 50th anniversary, here is Lou Bellamy, in his own words.

A Raisin in the Sun sort of did that for white America when it appeared on Broadway. White America had never been inside of a Black home before.

So, coming into the Black community in the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center offers a kind of a context for the work that deepens it and gives it power and resonance. The style for which we’ve become renowned confronts the audience. African American audiences learned to be in that communal space from church, so they frequently speak back and talk out and interact with you. It gives the drama a life that it doesn’t have in other kinds of settings. So, when we presented a space where that could happen, word started to get out.

Actors know where the hot spot is. And they go there if they want to learn to do that work—to be around it, to be near it. They were coming from all over the country to be here. Abdul Salaam El Razzac, Lester Purry. Abdul was by then a Minnesotan. Lester came from North Carolina. William Byrd Wilkins, Chicago. They came from everywhere to be part of this because we were doing the work that they couldn’t do in other places. And if they weren’t good enough to be on the stage, I would tell them, “You should go here, here, and here. These people will hire you, but you are not ready for the work we are doing yet. But get that stage time and experience.” And they did.

We all worked together and knew each other and would all rehearse together until we got too tired. We had no idea what we were doing or that it was going to have the national impact that it has.

August came here in ’77 or ’78 to see our first main stage production, a play called Eden. I played the lead in it. He came because he was invited by a director in our company, Claude Purdy.

I heard him say in a speech once that he remembers sitting in that theater wondering if he’d ever write a play good enough to show up on that stage. He’d never seen a Black theater with real sets and assigned seating and high production values. He had just seen a hodgepodge of things sort of thrown together, and it was called theater. When he saw that kind of production, he just said, “I want to be around this.” So, he moved here and started writing.

August had an apartment off Selby, kitty-corner from where Claude lived. It was all walkable. In fact, August didn’t drive, so he walked everywhere or took a bus. He said that the voices came to him clearer in Minnesota than they did in Pittsburgh. He wrote in bars and cafés.

We produced his first professional show, Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, in ’82. He saw in Penumbra a space where professional people were willing to put their efforts and lives into building the work. It was that body of people and brain trust that was available to him to bounce his ideas off.

A lot of those plays and monologues, I’ve heard him doing for me in the hall at Penumbra.  I remember when he first wrote Levee’s monologue for Ma Rainey. I told him—I said, “August, man, you can’t say stuff like that. You can’t do that.” And he said, “I’m going to do it, man. I’m going to do it.” Well, he did.

All his work had the ring of truth because he came from that. He was writing about our uncles, our fathers, our aunts—not some abstract thing where one Black character represents the whole world, you know what I mean?

When I was doing Fences and playing Troy—I think I played that role for about eight months—I would get people coming up to me—Japanese people, Swedes, you name it—coming up, hugging me, saying, “That’s my father.” You cannot confront or embody this work without being changed by it. So, I always say that I became a man—I came to artistic maturity by doing that work inside of that work. You read it and you find something and you go, “Oh, my God. That’s my dad,” or, “That’s what they were going through,” or, “That’s why I never could jump over that hurdle—because this was stopping me.”

After August hit, people were really wondering, Well, where did this guy come from? They don’t just grow like a mushroom in the dark. They happen because there are the pieces to put together to do the work.