Departments
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Week of 24 April 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 29 |
Feature Article
His New African Company celebrates its 30th anniversary
Driven by injustice, slave's descendant and SFA prof wins new honors
by Cliff Bernard
"We'd just come into the room and Imanu Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones, African-American poet] was sitting at a table reading the New York Times. He turned to us and held it up. 'Did you see this?' he asked. On the front page of the newspaper, special edition, February 21, 1965, was a picture of Malcolm X dying, and part of the caption read: 'Ex-dope peddler shot in Harlem.'"
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SFA Associate
Professor of Theater Arts James Spruill |
Spruill will be honored by the African Repertory Troupe at the Boston Center for the Arts on May 3 for his work in founding and building the New African Company. After libations, the African Repertory Troupe will stage a performance of Drink the Contents of This Vial, a two-act play by Lynda Patton.
Recalling the Malcolm X assassination and the odious NYT headline, Spruill explains, "I'd already experienced the denuding of Paul Robeson, and I thought to myself that it was happening again. I knew we had to make some kind of articulate statement, to bind and strengthen the people."
Spruill, now an SFA associate professor of theater arts and a veteran actor and director, speaks with great energy and is certainly articulate, with clear, resonant diction. His face and head are dramatically framed by a wiry black-and-gray beard and hair. His eyes, coal-black and wide-set, are alternately merry and serious as he recalls the events that led him into a life of acting and teaching.
Several years after the death of Malcolm X, a family loss led Spruill to Boston. "When my father died, I was pretty torn up. I'd come up to Massachusetts to hang out and clear my head," he says, "and I liked it." He stops to collect his thoughts, his eyes momentarily unfocused. "David Wheeler got me a job with the Theater Company of Boston." Spruill grins broadly. "But I knew I wasn't going to Hollywood to make black exploitation movies, so I decided I needed a teaching credential, and I enrolled in a MFA course at Boston University."
In 1968, along with Gustave Johnson, Spruill founded the New African Company, which has since mounted many improvisational theater programs in schools, youth centers, colleges, prisons, and mental hospitals. The motivation, Spruill explains, was partly to give black actors a reliable outlet and make them less dependent on the bit parts thrown out occasionally by mainstream producers.
The New African Company is not the first black theater group in Boston, Spruill says. The first was founded in 1759, and another rose briefly during the Depression. But they were ignored by the mainstream theater and film industry and could not in the end support themselves. Other black theater groups throughout the United States, says Spruill, have collapsed for a variety of reasons. Political divisions and religious intolerance are two. Dramatizing a typically intolerant attitude, Spruill leans forward menacingly in his chair. "Anyone who doesn't believe what I believe," he says in a Machiavellian baritone, reaching inside his coat as if for a gun, "is a faggot."
Since moving to Boston, Spruill has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as actor, producer, and teacher, winning several awards, including the Eliot Norton Award (Special Honors), the Vernon Blackman Drama Award, and the Ohio State Radio Drama Award. In 1997 he was nominated for a Commonwealth Award. Spruill recently appeared in Amistad, directed by Steven Spielberg, and in Squeeze and Body Count, directed by his son, Robert Patton-Spruill.
Spruill's career, like that of so many other African-American actors and directors, sprang in part from the history of his people in America. He is here today, he says, because a 19th-century North Carolina farmer, one Josiah Collins, needed skilled slaves to work his rice fields and because a Scottish overseer named Spruill bought the property from Collins when it began to decline and fathered children with one of the former slaves. Spruill's great-grandfather grew up a free black man with a Scottish name.
It is the history of injustice to a people who helped build America's prosperity without sharing in the wealth, Spruill says, that drives him. And this aspect of the injustice, he asserts, manifestly remains unredressed.
With the celebratory performance of Drink the Contents of This Vial, the history of the New African Company and of its founding luminaries comes full circle. The director, Ed Bullins, playwright and Northeastern University professor of theater, wrote the inaugural play for the New African Company, Four by Bullins.
The first production of Drink the Contents of This Vial at Northeastern University was directed by Spruill, who will bring his vast experience and his particular knowledge of the play to the dramaturgy.
The 30th anniversary social event, at 539 Tremont St., Boston, at 5 p.m., is free and open to the public. The benefit performance of Drink the Contents of This Vial that follows at 7 p.m. is $30. Regular performances of the play will begin April 24 and run through May 16.