Profile spoke with ‘A Lesson Before Dying’ director Kevin E. Jones. New to Profile, Jones has been an actor for more than thirty years, with an extensive list of stage credits in Portland, the Bay area and other regional theaters across the country. He received a Drammy Award for Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role for his performance as Old Joe in ‘Radio Golf’ by August Wilson at Portland Playhouse Theatre, where he most recently directed Wilson’s ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’. Jones is a co-founder of The August Wilson Red Door Project, a project that uses the arts to create a positive change in the racial ecology of Portland.

Were you familiar with the Earnest J. Gaines novel A Lesson Before Dying?

I read the novel fifteen-eighteen years ago when it first came out and was deeply touched by it. I saw Gaines interviewed on Oprah, and I was living in the Bay area at the time and he came and spoke at San Francisco State. So I kind of followed him, and every now and then I would mention the book to someone who I thought would get something out of it.

Were you drawn to directing Lesson?

A part of me wants to believe that I have evolved past the issues of oppression and slavery. I think a lot of us in the African American community want to leave that history because it’s so painful. I want to believe that I have as many opportunities as anyone else and that I’m not being held back by my history or by my ancestors’ history. But as much as I wanted to believe that and tried to believe that, I think it’s evident that the story that is in Lesson Before Dying – which is so beautifully told around internalized oppression and how we internalize the beliefs of our culture – I still live with that today. It runs deep. When I got in touch with that, I realized this was a story I really wanted to tell and want the community at large to witness.

When I first read the play, I remember crying at the end – when I read the novel, I remember getting teary – and every time I read the play, I would get teary. And then in rehearsal, I was getting teary all the time. It was like, what is it about this play that is touching me on such a deep level emotionally? And I think what (Romulus) Linney has done is structured a story,  in a powerful way, that’s hitting on very symbolic, emotional archetypes that live in us.

Yes, we did a great job putting the play together and the casting and all – but it’s a lot to do with the way the play is structured, and the connections that it makes with what’s relevant in our time today.

What to you is the overall driving theme of this play?

Regardless of whether you are going to live for a hundred years or die tomorrow, you have the opportunity to free yourself of the chains – emotional and social – that bind you. And in doing that, not only do you free yourself, but you provide a little, if not a monumental amount, of freedom for the people around you who love and care for you. There is always that opportunity – and I think that’s what makes people cry seeing this show.

The world does not give up on you, only you give up on you. And freedom can only come from someone helping you, and taking the journey with you. You don’t enter this alone. And in that journey you realize that not only are you reaching out to the other person, but you’re also reaching out to yourself. That’s what it is all about for human beings, giving each other a hand rather than judging – as Grant does at the beginning of the play. He looks at Jefferson and says, “you’re worthless, you should be dead, you deserve what you got.”

Someone told me once, “Find yourself in the other and when you do, be kind.” That was a theme I tried to not only get the actors to see in themselves and each other, but also for me as a director.

We’re in a recession. People emotionally are feeling a little hopeless, feeling a little depressed, feeling a little let down. The economy is doing what it’s doing, we’ve got wars going on. There aren’t a whole lot of answers out there. I think that when that happens, a story like this is just what the doctor ordered. I heard a woman start sniffling when Jefferson’s face is lit, because that face, it gives one a sense of powerlessness, of hope, of unfulfilled desires and dreams, of childlike innocence, and all those images look deep in us.

Those kind of images and archetypes run deep in us, especially now because of what we’re feeling as a culture emotionally.

One audience member shared that, after almost 30 years, she now has a definitive view of the death penalty having seen the show.

The whole death penalty thing is also very powerful.

One of the things people don’t realize is that during the Jim Crow period and before that, from the turn of the 20^th century into the 1960’s, the states that had the most lynchings were the first to adopt the electric chair. There was a direct correlation between lynching and electrocution.

Whether you kill someone because they committed a crime or you kill someone because you hate them, the process is still the same. You still have to dehumanize the person first. So the states that already had a process for dehumanizing the human being were the states able to readily adopt a capital punishment law.

There are a lot of people on death row right now. In rehearsal I was working with Harold Warren, playing Jefferson, and asked him to do some research, to “feel” in to it – what it means to be on death row, not knowing when you’re going to be killed, how is that going to happen, how is that going to feel to be executed. I think the whole thing is just horrible.

The images that are used during the execution are very powerful. Was that your idea as director?

A lot of people have commented on that scene and the montage of photographs that go on during the execution.

I met with Kristeen (Willis Crosser – Scenic/Lighting Designer), and said I want to use the medium of video, I want images to tell the story. One of the things I wanted people to get was that this was a black community. Even though it’s small town, back then everything was segregated. Grant and Miss Emma and Jefferson and Vivian live in a segregated community that is predominantly black. So I wanted to drop Portland into that community by just bombarding them with images of black people living normal lives. It’s hard to imagine that – even for black people. In a talkback I said “when was the last time you walked into a coffee shop and saw a group of black people sitting in Starbucks, talking. You just don’t see it”.

I asked Kristeen to find as many images as she could of black people just living normal lives – working on the plantation, teaching in schools, having a life. A day in the life of a black family. I found a few myself. It was definitely a collaborative thing.

With the electric chair montage, I was really scared that I was going to bombard people and it was going to be too much – enough already, we get it. But at the same time, I really wanted people to have a visceral experience of what it means and feels like and looks like. Of course, in the script, a chair rises from the floor, there are lots of sparks. I wanted people to have an emotional reaction. I wanted the combination of the images of lynchings and people being electrocuted, as well as white people and black people so that you can see that it’s not just a white against black thing. As Martin Luther King said, “Man’s inhumanity to man.”

Harold Warren who plays Jefferson had not been on stage before and his work is terrific. What was that experience like for you as a director. Was your process working with him any different?

When we auditioned him he had a resume that showed the work he’d done was in film.

But he’s got good instincts. We worked with him. And then it was really about just giving him the background tools, like warm-ups – understanding the value of vocal warm-ups and getting your body ready – and just helping him embrace the craft of acting as opposed to “let me show you how to do this and let me show you how to do that”. He was very, very, very receptive.

What also helped him is that he’s an athlete; he understands the idea of training, and the value of that. I told him treat this like a sport, like you’re getting ready for the big game and I’m your coach. That’s what he came to call me during rehearsal, he called me coach.

What do you bring to the table as a director being an actor yourself? Do you feel you bring something unique to the experience?

I love actors, first of all. I love the process of acting, and I know how hard it is to be an actor. To be in a room for “x” number of weeks – and give your soul up and your ego, and try to give this performance and do this work. No matter how much training and how much craft you have, I think it’s a gift to have people say “OK, direct me”.

As an actor I’ve had many bad directors in my life – and I’ve been acting for thirty years. And what makes them bad, I think, is just their inability to see where the actor needs help. A lot of directors direct from their frustration. You’re not giving me this, give me that, this is what I want. As opposed to seeing that the actor is more invested in giving you what you want than you are – they have nothing to gain by fighting with you, though that’s sometimes their only recourse because they aren’t able to communicate.

I think I bring that understanding and awareness. And one of the things I do is meet with every actor before rehearsal, one on one. We have coffee, we get to know each other. So we start right off from day one with a language, a “shorthand” for communicating – I don’t have to mince my words or be careful of what I say. They get it and we can go right into shorthand and they know what I’m about.

And then I do a debrief after the show closes. I meet with the actors, I ask them what worked for you, what didn’t work, how was the process. So it’s a process of self-correction for me – I’m learning as I go along. That is something I think that helps me.

Do you want to do more directing?

I’d love to do a comedy. I’d love to direct a group of white actors or something that’s not an African American play. I don’t want to be labeled as the guy who directs black shows. So, I don’t know what my future as a director will be. There are a lot of people who direct in Portland. We’ll see.

Tell us about The August Wilson Red Door Project.

As an African American actor in Portland, seeing the shows that I was involved in – specifically the August Wilson shows – and knowing the kinds of conversations and collaborations that evolved from those shows and from those talkbacks, I thought, wow, this has stickiness, it can stick. People want to continue to do this, they want to have stories told to them that have meaning to them from which they can then take some kind of action.

So I started talking to different theaters, and spoke to people at the Portland Historical Society and OMSI. And what we found in talking to all these different institutions, arts and science organizations alike, was that they were all saying the same thing – we want to be more engaged in the community, we want to be more engaged in those marginalized communities, and we think that what you’re doing, and the way you’re doing it through art, is a good thing.

So we formed The August Wilson Red Door Project as a way to partner with arts organizations and venues around Portland to promote high quality art, theater and musical events that showcase the works of marginalized groups or people of color. We host professionally facilitated community conversations to provide Portlanders with opportunities for transformational dialogue about issues of race and other social issues.

We want to create a community, or an opportunity, for artists of color to fly. And a very important aspect of it is to create a larger representation of audience. There are people who are not going to theater now who would be, if the issues of the plays, of the stories that were being told, were relevant to them.

3/16/2012

Actress Ana Reiselman on Great Falls

I love Lee Blessing. I worked on and watched many scenes from his plays when I was studying acting at NYU. They were always rich, complex, and surprising. Another reason I wanted to work on this play was Tim True! He has been my coach since last fall, and I think it is every actor’s dream to work on stage with their mentor, let alone playing opposite them in an intimate two person play!

There have been some super silly moments in the rehearsal process, which are especially welcome in this difficult play. I am not a great burper, and my character is, so I have been just burping whenever I possibly can, like during notes or breaks or costume fittings. It’s hysterical to do something inappropriate like that and have your SM, director, and co-actor all say “Nice one!”

It’s no secret that I play teenagers very often here in the Portland Theatre Community, and often damaged ones. Thankfully, I have not endured even close to the level of abuse or abandonment that my characters have. However, I was definitely a loner in high school, growing up in an insulated community that I didn’t understand and that didn’t understand me. I felt very angry and alone through most of my adolescence, despite supportive parents and some very good close friends. Theatre was the only vehicle I had to vent my extreme emotions that rebelled against my suburban high school and middle class conservative town. It wasn’t until I moved to New York City when I was 18 that I began to blossom, ever so slowly, into a happier, more well-balanced person. I’m sure the fact that I was surrounded by thousands of people who were infinitely weirder than me helped more than I can ever know!