photograph by jon w. sparks
Julia “Cookie” Ewing at home.
Sometimes, Cookie Ewing is just plain wrong.
It is no exaggeration to say that she has had a lifetime of being in theater. She was a pre-schooler in 1949 when her mother started the Memphis Children’s Theatre and made sure her daughter was part of it.
Later on, Ewing would spend some four decades devoted to teaching theater at Rhodes College. She has directed countless productions at the school’s McCoy Theatre, acted in several others, and inspired young thespians. In 2007 she got a super-Ostrander honor when she received the Eugart Yerian Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Memphis Theater Awards.
When she retired from Rhodes in 2016, Chris Davis, then the theater critic for the Memphis Flyer, wrote a remembrance from his college days when Ewing was his professor and faculty adviser: “She’s always had a switchblade edge, zero tolerance for malarkey, and a reputation for gentleness and generosity, in addition to an uncanny ability to shut out the whole world and devote her full attention to whoever she might be talking to.”
photograph courtesy Rhodes College
Ewing (in background) directs stage exercises with students at Rhodes College’s McCoy Theatre.
She has earned honors throughout her career as well as appreciation and respect from her students. So, when she says, “There’s nothing about me that’s interesting in any form at all. I’m a regular, old human being out here doing what I think I can do,” then you could not be blamed for shaking your head and saying, “You’re just plain wrong about that, Cookie.”
It would be correct to say that Julia “Cookie” Ewing (she loved eating cookies when she was little and adults kept telling her she’d turn into one) is self-deprecating. But if she’s disinclined to boast, she will speak with passion about her love of teaching, of theater, and of finding and exploring the humanity in life.
Ewing at her retirement party in 2016.
Her mother was a considerable force in the community as a champion of children’s theater. Lucile Ewing was a strong salesperson and had skills in political persuasion. So when she decided Memphis needed a children’s theater, she focused on the Memphis Recreation Department, which operated under the Memphis Park Commission. She convinced them that kids needed more than physical exercise, that they had to have their imaginations challenged. It was first located in the Little Theatre (now Theatre Memphis) that was then housed at the Pink Palace Museum. Eventually it ended up on Avery Street and was renamed the Lucile Ewing Children’s Theater, but was wrecked by the infamous Hurricane Elvis in 2003. It was torn down, and the institution ended after 55 years. But in the meantime, youngsters who had attended grew up and kept the lessons they learned.
While her mother was clearly a major influence, Ewing says one has to go back to a great aunt of hers to see where she’s coming from. “They were building something behind her house, behind the fence, and they were digging holes where they were going to put poles in,” she says. “My great aunt didn’t want them there, so she sat in one of the holes and would not get out. This was in what, the late 1800s, early 1900s? A gentleman would not pick her up to move her, so she sat there — and that is a kind of woman that I come from.”
It is that quest for discovering the humanity around us that motivates Ewing.
Whoever imagines studying drama will be an easy course will find disappointment. “To just go in when you feel like it, that’s not doing theater,” Ewing says. “That’s doing something else. It’s not what I taught.
“That has been my driving factor forever,” she says. “That has been an anthropological view of things. What does it mean to be human? Find out when you’re young and find out the expanse that humanity has and not the narrow version. It doesn’t mean just checking off boxes and making money. It means there’s a person sitting next to you — can you smile at them or do you ignore them? All of that comes back to our humanity, it really does. Do we care about what’s coming tomorrow? Do we only care about now?”
Ewing’s education was both traditional and innovative. She attended White Station High School, where she learned from the legendary drama teacher and director Gene Crain. For his obituary in The Commercial Appeal, she said, “He helped me find my soul as an actor.”
Her collegiate studies were rich and varied. “My undergraduate degree was split between schools in St. Louis and schools here, both the University of Memphis and Siena College,” she says. “But I really say my education came from New York when I was there with my aunt. That was really the education, doing theater there, travel, whatever — just doing it.”
Ewing’s passion for finding humanity was kindled by performances she saw in Memphis. One actor who found a way to connect was Jay Ehrlicher — also a designer and artistic director at Theatre Memphis — who was in Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana. “He could move me because he had that heart,” she says. She cites other actors who found the essence of humanity in their roles, including Bennett Wood, Karen Riss, and the late Jerry Chipman. She saw Chipman when he was in college doing the play Five Finger Exercise. “There was a scene where he was going up some stairs and had kind of an emotional explosion. And I knew that’s what it was.”
photograph by jon w. sparks
Ewing displays some of the clown figurines collected by Professor Ray Hill.
Ray Hill was another influence — Ewing refers to him as a mentor and she credits him with starting the theater program at Rhodes. In high school, she went to a summer program Hill had and he gave her the role of Uncle Ted in an absurdist play. “I had more friggin’ fun playing Uncle Ted than I have ever had,” she says. “He saw it and would encourage me. He just saw beyond.”
And Hill exemplified the humanity she so prizes. Ewing points to a painting of him as a clown and a collection of clown figurines in her home. He often played a character called Tiny the Clown on television, where he co-hosted with Trent Wood the popular Memphis kiddie show Looney Zoo, and, she says, “every clown you see up there was Ray’s.”
Hill was far from the boisterous clown persona (Bozo comes to mind) and instead would “just sit and the kids would come up to him and sit down next to him and he would just talk to them quietly and they would talk to him quietly,” she says. “He was the quiet clown, the clown that was lonely.” The one with humanity.
Theater at Rhodes College can trace its leadership from Hill to Tony Lee Garner — who saw to the creation of the McCoy Theatre — to Cookie Ewing, who worked with and admired both of them. She took retirement in 2016 and was succeeded by Kevin Collier who became managing director at McCoy Theatre. The era, however, has come to an end. Last year, the school announced it would phase out its theater major. The department had a great run with inspiring teachers, numerous Ostrander Awards, and a string of critically acclaimed productions. There’s still some activity, though: The student-run Rhodes Theatre Guild has scheduled a staging of the musical version of Little Women for early April this year.
A scene from One Came Home.
She has performed on stage and screen, but Ewing will tell you that “performing is not my gig.” She chuckles when she says, “I just can’t do it anymore. It’s too scary.” But in the days she acted in productions, the part she loved most were the rehearsals. “That’s exploring! It’s humanity, your own and the characters and the writers and the director and this actor.”
photograph by willy bearden
Ewing gets wired for sound before a scene.
All that, of course, informed her teaching. When she was at Rhodes, the notion of collaboration was something of a prerequisite for everything. “I cannot do it without it being that way,” she declares. Ewing cites a time when there was a staging of Hamlet and the group of students discussed what it was that pulled audiences in. “What did people need? We talked for three or four weeks before we even got on the stage and had already talked about and worked things out. And they did it. I just happened to be there to say, something like ‘I can’t see you — move this way.’ They did it together and you could see it. I will forever be amazed at those kids.”
Willy Bearden’s 2010 film One Came Home featured a Mem- phis cast. It starred Cookie Ewing with (from left) Hailey Giles, Savannah Bearden, and Corey Parker.
Ewing says even one-person shows require collaboration. “I did Amelia Earhart out at Collierville in 1991,” she says. “Amelia Lives had only one person on the stage, but there was a sound person and a light person, all those people. And if they were not there, there’s nothing going to happen out there on that stage, I’m sorry. It was one of the most collaborative pieces I think I have ever done as a performer.”
We can go back to Ewing’s mother and the Memphis Children’s Theatre to find the origins of her embrace of collaboration. “Mom wanted to get as many kids as possible,” Ewing says. “And she built that children’s theater on the same principle as the Little Theater at the time. You had to be in the fourth grade, and you had to serve backstage at least once. You never had to be on stage, but you could never just be on stage. There was a board of directors [composed of children]. You had to work backstage, and you had to be there for at least two years before you could be on the board.”
Lucile Ewing’s daughter also carried on the priceless lessons learned in children’s theater, turning them into a way of teaching theater to college students. She discusses her approach by first saying, “I listen.” It gets the attention of those who are ready to learn. “It’s discipline when you love what you do, because you want to do it,” she says. “You want to learn your lines. You want to be in rehearsal. You want to know who that character is. You want to know what they want. You want to know why they act that way. You want to know what made them angry. You want to know those things. That’s discipline.”
photograph by Jon w. sparks
Cookie Ewing
Whoever imagines studying drama will be an easy course will find disappointment. “To just go in when you feel like it, that’s not doing theater,” Ewing says. “That’s doing something else. It’s not what I taught. You do the work and when you do it, you find the love of doing it. You’re here for a limited time. You’re in a college class for how many hours out of your life? So what can you get in that time? What can you find? What can you find about yourself? You know, how do you relate to that character? How do you relate to the playwright? Why is this play even being done? Why has it survived?”
She is also insistent about who gets to be a star: “It’s not about being a star. It never has been. It’s not about being lauded. It never has been.”
What it is about is finding a connection to humanity. “All sorts of weird stuff happens, but the weird stuff makes you think, ‘Was that just to be weird or am I missing something?’ You’re thinking and that helps to develop an individual. That’s my push for theater.”
As for Ewing, ending her time at Rhodes was an opportunity to close the door and take time to ponder the ways of the world. She’s eager to get back to going to see plays. And she has grandchildren to dote on but worries how they’ll fare in a world with climate change, homelessness, and global tensions. “I had to get away,” she says of her retirement. “I had to just close it and find out who I had become because there’s so much that you do and then, who am I now? And where am I going now? What do I have to offer?”
The answer, of course, applies to everything and everyone she cares about.
It is humanity.
