Lance Raikes and the cast of Theatre Memphis’ Hairspray performed a high-energy number at the Ostrander Awards in August. The production won four of the trophies. Photograph by Don Perry.
The Memphis Theater Awards took its first bow at the Old Daisy Theatre in June 1984. It came about because, well, that's what cities did when they had vibrant performance communities. I was felt, with some justification, that if New York could have its Tony and Obie Awards, and Chicago its Jeff ceremonies, they why couldn't Memphis reward its own stage folks?
At the time, there was a restlessness among the theater people. Robert Jennings of The Commercial Appeal and Edwin Howard at the Memphis Press-Scimitar were the town’s theater critics and were fiercely competitive. Sally Thomason, who then headed the Greater Memphis Arts Council (now ArtsMemphis), felt there should be something the performing arts community could rally around, something they could all participate in other than grumbling about what the critics were writing. She got together with Bob Towery and Kenneth Neill, then the publisher and editor of Memphis magazine, respectively, to come up with something.
Ostrander director Elizabeth Perkins presiding at the 2019 awards ceremony. Photograph by Don Perry.
The idea of an annual competition and celebration seemed the natural thing to do with the combined support of the Arts Council and Memphis magazine. The Arts Council took the job of wrangling a panel of judges and, in that first year, a group of conscientious theater lovers were called to pass judgment: Walter Armstrong, Gene Crain, Amy Dietrich, Levi Frazier Jr., Stephen Haley, Emily Ruch, C. Lamar Wallis, and Miriam DeCosta-Willis (see our "Local Treasure" story).
That first ceremony was basic — largely an announcement of the winners accompanied by the sipping of wine. A special award for lifetime achievement went to Eugart Yerian, described as “an aesthete and adventurer” who was director of the Memphis Little Theatre from 1929 to 1961. The award would thereafter be named for Yerian and the next year, Jackie Nichols took home the prize. It has been presented to local theater luminaries ever since, the most recent being Christina Wellford Scott.
“Jim Ostrander was a consummate performer, one that I greatly admired, with enormous energy.” — Levi Frazier
The awards themselves are now called the Ostranders, named in honor of Jim Ostrander, one of the city’s most popular actors, who died of cancer in 2002 at age 53. Ostrander was a powerful presence on local stages from the time he came to Christian Brothers College in 1967, where he studied drama and music while involving himself in productions in the area.
Frazier is a playwright, actor, director, and professor at Southwest Tennessee Community College who has been deeply involved in local theater since high school. He was one of the first judges of the awards and knew Ostrander well, having done voiceover work for him and once losing out to him in an audition.
“Jim was a consummate performer — one that I greatly admired,” Frazier says. “I constantly bring up his name when I speak to my Intro to Theater classes as well as my acting classes because of his extraordinary talent. He had this enormous energy that he’d bring to the stage. And he knew everybody’s lines. So if you ever dropped a line, he worked it out and got you back on course.”
Frazier has earned a couple of Ostrander Awards along the way: “Years ago when I was teaching at the University of Memphis, my play, For Our Children, won an Ostrander for Best Scenic Design. And two years ago, I won a Best Original Play Ostrander for When It Rains, so as you can see, I will always have a certain connection to Jim.”
It was about three years into the existence of the awards that the Arts Council decided to hand over the duties of running the show to Janie McCrary, who dealt with marketing for the council.
She would coordinate the event for some 25 years and from the very start recognized that the judging was at the core of the awards. She sought to get the most qualified people on the panels and looked for those with degrees, who were directors, knowledgeable about plays and musicals, and who were involved but not so close to the theater community that they couldn’t be impartial.
“One thing I did,” McCrary says, “was to get professionals in the field to give me definitions of the categories, like lighting and design, and tell us what we should look for in excellence. And there was always a question about who has the major role and who has the supporting role. The definitions really helped the judges look at the right things when they were judging. It was all a process and fortunately I had 25 years to refine it, and now they’ve taken it on to new heights.”
Over time, more special awards were added on top of the Eugart Yerian Award.
• In 1994, the Larry Riley Rising Star Award was started to acknowledge and benefit — with a $500 stipend — promising young talent. Memphis-born Riley had studied drama at Memphis State University and would go on to national acclaim for his stage, film, and television work before his death in 1992 at age 39.
• The Behind the Scenes Award was first given out in 2006 to acknowledge contributions by those who weren’t in the typical categories, including stage managers, volunteers, patrons, donors, and the like.
• The Putting It Together Award was first given in 2011 to McCrary to mark her contributions to theater and the arts. Subsequent awards, which bear her name, have been given to those who have been instrumental in managing theater companies.
• In 2013, the Gypsy Award was established to honor those who appeared frequently in ensembles or choruses.
The first awards shows were simple affairs where winners were announced and toasted. “They gave out awards and everybody went home,” McCrary says, realizing that the presentations needed to become more entertaining. “We got a musical presentation from each of the nominated musicals,” she says. And for a few years there was Sister Myotis, the hyper-righteous church lady created by Steve Swift, as emcee.
Veteran actor Curtis C. Jackson (left) with Karl Robinson, winner of the 2019 Larry Riley Rising Star Award. Photograph by Jon W. Sparks.
Randall Hartzog is now the director of marketing and communications at Theatre Memphis and remembers going to that first ceremony and many subsequent ones. “It was always like our own Oscars or Tonys type thing and there was always a sense of excitement,” he says. “People would get so wound up about what to wear — and it’s still that way. I still have no clue what to wear.”
While it was and is a competition, the overarching feeling, he feels, is that there is recognition for the people in theater. He also remembers the notorious Losers Awards, largely populated by those who did not take home a trophy and felt the need to compensate in a theatrical fashion.
“I believe it was Deborah Harrison and Brian Mott who were behind it,” Hartzog says. “There were people off in the corner of the P&H Cafe, pissed off about not winning an award, and they started making up their own awards. It may, at one point, have been more popular than the Ostranders. The P&H would be absolutely packed. It was rowdy and obnoxious and great fun. Sometimes we’d have certificates with stupid stickers on them. Some people even got upset that they didn’t get a Loser Award. That’s how weird it was.”
Hartzog didn’t acknowledge if he won any of the Losers Awards, but he did win three acting Ostranders for his work in Love! Valor! Compassion! at Circuit Playhouse, Ruthless! The Musical at Theatre Memphis’ Next Stage, and The Lisbon Traviata also at Theatre Memphis’ Next Stage.
Over time, the ceremonies were held in various places, including the McCoy Theatre at Rhodes College, Memphis Botanic Garden, The Peabody, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and one year at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
The 2011 Ostranders were the last helmed by McCrary. “I decided I had done all I could do and that they needed younger blood,” she says. “We were getting more and more theaters wanting to be involved and that meant a total reshuffling of the way the judges did their work. And I had gotten some models from other cities that I showed Lindsey Roberts, so she took the show to the Orpheum.”
Roberts had been understudying the role for a few years and in 2013 moved the Ostranders to the Orpheum, which became a sponsor. She overhauled the judging system and raised the bar for the ceremonies and the process. Two years ago, she turned the operation over to Elizabeth Perkins, who is putting her own mark on the Ostranders.
Elizabeth Perkins says there’s a lot of opportunity with the Ostranders to really step back and say, “Where do we want to go, and what do we want to do?”
Perkins, looking back, says that when Roberts took over, “she had this crazy idea that she wanted to expand the number of shows that were being seen.” There were newer companies that wanted Ostrander consideration, and that meant increasing the number of judges. But as Roberts worked with McCrary before taking over, she realized she would need someone to assist and eventually take over from her. So Perkins, whose theater background is in stage management, came aboard.
“We recruited 18 extra judges that first year with Lindsey,” Perkins recalls, “and were able to add some of those companies like New Moon, Hattiloo, Voices of the South, and the Harrell Theatre.” The judging process is now a complicated thing but always operates with a priority of fairness.
Perkins says with these changes and the dynamic state of Memphis theater, “there’s a lot of opportunity to really step back and say, where do we want to go and what do we want to do?”
One such challenge Perkins acknowledges is this: “There’s a lot of awesome theater that’s happening that’s not part of the Ostrander community, for whatever reason. Some of that is [because] we’ve had in place guidelines that left them out.” To be considered for the awards, a company has to have three productions a year, but you’ll find some, like Quark Theatre, have only two. But the two they do are dynamite. So Perkins is looking at ways to bring them into the fold.
One way, she says, could be with another category of independent productions. The Ostranders has always had the community division and the collegiate division. If it added an indie division, it might be able to include Quark, Cloud9 Memphis, and other companies that currently aren’t eligible for consideration.
This is all happening as the Ostranders organization is contemplating making a big leap by becoming an official 501(c)3 nonprofit, a move that Perkins announced at this year’s ceremonies. “It’s a scary deal,” she says. “We have been very lovingly hosted under ArtsMemphis for 36 years, but it was born out of convenience. And they don’t do an awards ceremony for any other arts in Memphis.”
“After years of research, we decided it was time to pull off the Band-Aid and become our own entity.” — Perkins
In this year’s Ostranders, Ariona Campbell won Best Supporting Actress in a Drama in the collegiate division for Crumbs from the Table of Joy at Southwest Tennessee Community College. With her is her daughter, London. Photograph by Jon W. Sparks.
It’s more than that. Perkins says the financial structure is such that the Orpheum writes off a certain amount of the production cost and Contemporary Media, Inc. (publisher of Memphis magazine) covers some. But some of the support is in-kind and some, as she says, “they just kind of do for us.” She says that she wanted to add a house band last year but there was nowhere that the money could come from and they couldn’t raise funds since potential donors couldn’t get a tax deduction. She ended up paying for it herself.
“So, after years of research, we’ve decided it’s time to pull off the Band-Aid and become our own entity,” Perkins says. “That way we can fund-raise, we can better serve the community, and we can put some measures in place so that if any one of our three sponsors has to bow out for whatever reason, we won’t fold. Hopefully we’ll still have the generous support from those three organizations, but we can expand if we want to and do greater things.”
