Ekundayo Bandele

Ekundayo Bandele, Hattiloo Theatre’s founder and executive producer, thinks the time for conversations about equity in arts and culture is over. “It’s time to stop talking and start acting,” he says, explaining why he has trouble talking exclusively about the lively art his organization is built around, without considering the broader spectrum of black cultural institutions.

“When you just talk about theater you shrink the conversation down. You silo it,” Bandele says. He compares Memphis’ traditional cultural assets to a second, considerably shorter list that can be identified as being historically black. “On one side you have the Brooks Museum of Art, Playhouse on the Square, Theater Memphis, Ballet Memphis, New Ballet Ensemble, the Metal Museum, the Dixon Gallery, the Symphony, Iris, Voices of the South, boom, boom, boom,” he says, indicating an ability to go on like this indefinitely. “Then, when you look at black assets there’s Hattiloo. There’s Collage dance. There’s the Memphis Black Arts Alliance. And that’s about it.

“Needless to say,” Bandele concludes, “in a city that’s predominantly black there is a great imbalance.”

Bandele grew up splitting time between New York and North Memphis, before putting down permanent roots in Midtown in 2004. He’s proud of how far his small but mighty playhouse has come in its 14 years of existence. But the man who created Hattiloo in a transitional neighborhood near Sun Studio in 2006 then moved it, note-free, into a custom-built house on Overton Square, right next door to Circuit Playhouse, isn’t comfortable bragging.

“There are only four free-standing black theaters in the country and we have one,” Bandele says. “We have a paid-for building. We have an endowment. We have all these things. So we could beat our chest as a city and say, ‘Look at what we've done here!’ But when you look at the landscape, there’s a long way to go. Like Malcolm X said — and I’m quoting him incorrectly, but — ‘If one black person hurts we all hurt.’ So that's why I say I can’t just talk about theater. But maybe we can use that as the microcosm for a macrocosmic conversation.”

Bandele’s concerns with black theater and culture echo historic narratives about the commodification of black success in America and its regular transformation into white wealth. “Right now we have so many great black playwrights,” he says, naming The House That Will Not Stand author Marcus Gardley, Moonlight co-writer Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Tony winner Danai Gurira, better known for playing strong characters like the katana-wielding Michonne in The Walking Dead.

“Katori Hall’s in London right now opening Tina [a jukebox musical about Tina Turner],” Bandele says, referencing Memphis’ best known contemporary playwright. “I don’t remember a time in our history outside the Harlem Renaissance when we’ve had so many accomplished, noteworthy, award-winning black playwrights,” he says. “But there was this verdant cultural landscape of black theaters in the 1980s and 1990s, and now there are only four of us. How can it be that we’ve arrived at this moment when we have all these incredible black playwrights doing great work, but then you have almost no black theaters available to produce the work they’re doing?

“The answer is integration,” Bandele continues. “I hate to say it. But larger white theaters open their doors to black playwrights and say, ‘They [the black theaters] can’t give you a $20,000 commission but we can. They can't give you 200 lights but we can. They can’t give you a list of dramaturgs, but we can.’ So that’s where the black playwrights go, and understandably so.

Bandale once spoke at a conference about ‘equity,’ and how that word has “become the big catchphrase. It's all over the place. Some of the larger white theaters want to know how they can support black theaters.”

He believes the best way is to “to let us be the authority on black theater. If you are a big theater producing a show by August Wilson, or something big like Suzan-Lori Parks’ Porgy and Bess, you need to go to [and partner with] a black theater. If white theaters would only recognize black theaters as the authority and work with us when they produce plays by black playwrights, we’d get so many more benefits than just a share of the ticket sales. We’d get peer-to-peer training. We’d get a look behind the curtains at how the bigger theaters run their auditions, get resident interns, get their grants and sponsors or engage the millennial working-class.”

While bigger casts may be ever more integrated, casting at Memphis theaters trends toward the traditional, with few leading or even supporting roles not expressly written for non-white actors going to non-white actors. Things get even whiter behind the scenes in positions relating to design, development, stage direction, marketing, and executive management.

“It’s a little of what Jesse Jackson said,” Bandele suggests. “You’ve got to see it to be it.”

Hattiloo was created to correct a problem evident to anyone paying attention to Memphis’ cultural scene. Theater-loving members of the city’s large African-American majority regularly waited in the wings for a chance to audition for (or buy tickets to) black-themed shows, which are still produced infrequently by most regional theaters. Nevertheless Bandele isn’t convinced more theaters are the answer.

“We don’t need more theaters like Hattiloo,” he says, staking his claim on established plays and musicals that fall into a specific kind of literary tradition. “Now, do we need a hip-hop theater, maybe? Or a theater that specializes in new work like what’s being done by [Memphis playwright] Ruby O’Gray?” he asks. “Yes.”