A framed black-and-white photo of Paul Robeson dressed as Othello hangs on the wall in Bennet Guillory’s office at the New LATC.

The portrait, just to the left of his desk, serves as a reminder of the man for whom Guillory and film actor Danny Glover named their Robey Theatre Company. The company, which produces one or two plays a year while offering training for playwrights and educational outreach for at-risk youth, opens its 10th production, Thomas Gibbons’ A House With No Walls, on Friday, May 9.

Darin Dahms, Toyin Moses, Jonathan Palmer and Maurice McRae star in the West Coast premiere of A House With No Walls, part of a trilogy by Thomas Gibbons. The production opens Friday, May 9, and runs through June 15 at the New LATC. Photo by Ed Krieger.

Since the Robey Theatre Company’s focus is “the black experience,” Robeson is the perfect muse. In 1930, he became the first black man to play the tragic Moor in an otherwise all-white cast in London. When he finally performed the part with Uta Hagen in New York in 1943, that show became the longest running Shakespeare production in Broadway’s history.

Robeson also proved to be a history maker beyond the theater world. Guillory, the company’s artistic director, talked at length about the “Renaissance man of the 20th century,” whose accomplishments still seem to overwhelm him.

Robeson (1898-1976) was the first All-American football player at Rutgers University (where his nickname was Robey), graduated from Columbia University Law School and worked as a lawyer in a prestigious New York firm in the 1920s when the American Bar Association excluded blacks.

He was also an activist who spoke out against racism and fascism and performed benefits worldwide for social justice. “He said a lot of the things people in the ‘60s movement were saying before they said them. He was saying this in the ‘30s and ‘40s,” Guillory said. “He’s really a source of inspiration and integrity.”

Lack of Diversity

Guillory and Glover grew up together in San Francisco and both enrolled in the Black Actors Workshop at the American Conservatory Theater in the late ‘70s. Working together on productions like Blood Knot, by South African playwright Athol Fugard, sparked an interest in works with “a social consciousness.” They talked about starting a theater after their careers took off.

“We wanted to do a certain kind of work, a certain kind of aesthetic, and provide a place where artists of color could have their experience first on the agenda, as opposed to being an occasional thought in an artistic director’s or a company’s mind,” Guillory said.

When film and television work brought them to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, the paucity of theaters devoted to any kind of minority culture rekindled the idea.

“There weren’t any real theaters of color, black or otherwise. There was East West Players, which had been around for a long time - 40 years now,” he said, referring to the Asian-American company based in Little Tokyo. “There was the Inglewood Playhouse, which was basically a community theater in a park that flooded out if it rained. That was the only black theater that was consistently doing work.”

The actors launched the Robey Theatre Company in 1994, starting with readings. They mounted their first production in 1996, Patrick Sheane Duncan’s Souls on Fire. Almost two years ago, the company took up residence at the New LATC in Downtown Los Angeles, with five other culturally diverse performance groups. Guillory pointed out that the company (Don Cheadle, Delroy Lindo and Blair Underwood are on the board) is still one of only four in the L.A. area devoted to the black experience.

‘The Problem of the 20th Century’

A House With No Walls is the final play in a trilogy about race relations in America. The Robey Theatre Company also staged Gibbons’ Bee-Luther-Hatchee in 1999 and Permanent Collection in 2005 (which moved on to the Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre the following year).

Guillory, who will direct and act, said the plays have a similar theme: “Who has the power? Who has the power to make decisions that impact all of our lives?”

A House With No Walls is based on the real controversy that erupted in Philadelphia in 2002 when it was discovered that a new pavilion for the Liberty Bell was being planned on the site where George Washington’s slaves once lived. The center of the conflict is the question of who gets to write or rewrite history.

“What’s being said in this play is going to cause some grumbling, and that’s exactly as it should be,” Guillory said. “I’m not really interested in comfortable theater.”

Gibbons, the playwright in residence at InterAct Theatre Company in the City of Brotherly Love, said of the trilogy: “The central issue is the contemporary repercussions of the racial divide stemming from slavery in America.”

Because Gibbons is white, he has had to answer harsh questions from critics, who he said have asked, “What gives you the right?”

His response was Bee-Luther-Hatchee, the story of a black editor who discovers that the author of an autobiography she published is not a 72-year-old black woman, but a white man. “It is very much about the whole question of who has the right to tell a story,” the playwright said.

Guillory agrees that it is possible for someone of another race to tell these stories. He seemed noticeably perturbed that anyone would question Gibbons’ choice of subject matter. “W. E. B. Dubois said the problem of the 20th century is the color line. He was right. It’s a problem of the 21st century, and it’s going to be a problem of the 22nd century, at least in this country.

“This theater in many ways is a reaction to that. Often I worked in mainstream theater and I was the only black actor, and they didn’t know what to do with a 6-foot-3 black guy. How inappropriate to not have the vision to look past all of that? The leaders of those theaters often did not look past that the same way they don’t look past gender or age or physical impairment. It’s not exclusive to African Americans.

“That means we found the need for a theater that specifically has an agenda and a mission statement that is about the black experience, but the black experience encompasses everything,” Guillory said.

Given the universality of the human condition, he added that he wasn’t surprised at all that Gibbons could so effectively portray the black experience.

“He’s gifted that’s he able to articulate it dramatically for the theater,” Guillory said. “He’s a dramatist and a force of intellect. He’s very thoughtful, very intellectual and very unafraid. Extremely unafraid.”

A House With No Walls opens May 9 and runs through June 15. The New LATC, 514 S. Spring St., (213) 489-7402 or robeytheatrecompany.com.

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