by Courtenay Nearburg

Boyd Vance is not a huge man; he's rather small, not necessarily imposing at all. He wears large glasses that he re-adjusts constantly to punctuate his sentences. They are not really sentences as much as phrases; he speaks too quickly to be bothered with finishing complete thoughts. His manner is excited, but almost surly; certainly catty in some instances. He unabashedly calls himself the "token black performer at Zach Scott in the '80s" and he is as critical of his own productions as any others. He is the founder and artistic director of Pro-Arts Collective, an African American theater company that recently produced Pill Hill at the Public Domain.

Pill Hill received lukewarm reviews and less-than-stellar attendance, problems Vance attributes to the work ethic and lackadaisical attitude toward theater in the African American community. Vance is also gay, giving him another perspective on the Austin theater scene. He rails on the religious community as profoundly as he describes his vision for Pro-Arts and the revitalization of East Austin.

"I was in a flagrant -- or I was trying to have -- discussion with an African American minister, who is very popular in the community, who spewed out the most blatant, homophobic, negative shit about there wasn't no sissies in his choir, when every major church in this community has gay people on the organ, gay people directing the music, gay women and men who are participating homosexuals and they cannot come together as people. The real deal is if all those sissies quit those choirs and basically stood up and said we're singing together and without you and your bullshit, we could make a major movement happen here. But we don't want to acknowledge that."

A native of Houston, Vance graduated from St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin in 1975. He returned to begin his theater career in 1978, playing major roles in Purlie, Cabaret, and Bubblin' Brown Sugar. He was a featured performer in the acclaimed Esther's Follies for several years, and for seven years toured nationally with Zachary Scott Theatre Center's Project InterAct. In 1984, he began directing and producing, which has led him to direct over 40 mainstage plays and to found two performing arts companies. He is one of the few equity actors working in Austin. He is not shy about his opinions on the black community nor the surrounding white-dominated theater scene in Austin.

"I might be out there doing gay African American stuff. In Austin, shit, we could use it. The African American gay community is so fucked up in their own dysfunction around forming community, or where do they get their empowerment from, how we come together as a people, people that are ours or not ours," he laments, almost bitterly. "The point of Pro-Arts is to address through theater some of this stuff."

"African American people see us with different viewpoints. I come from a different viewpoint. I don't mind doing African American interpretations of white plays because I think that the dramatic structure of lot of white plays allows us to interact and really work out how we act. I think that the way it's written is a little different. But I mean, look at an August Wilson play which is very anecdotal and relies a lot on speeches and a lot of people don't -- black people don't -- know how to tell stories the way they used to, and so his stories, his plays, have these long passages where you tell these stories that have deep inner meaning, but you know, it all has something, means something else, and each one of the characters has a symbolic name, and that's what's important about his work."

Over the summer, Pro-Arts produced three plays: Pill Hill; Lillian Hellman's Little Foxes, a play Vance describes as universal for blacks and whites; and a tribute to James Weldon Johnson, the author of the Negro National Anthem ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). "When you get a play like Lillian Hellman's Little Foxes, which is about a family, one power, and a woman who gots power, and the power that women can't have and working with a family where everybody's greedy, trying to get, you know, and which is African American just like everybody else, then we're gonna let some African American women do this."

Vance wants to appeal to the African American audiences with timely and historically significant works that challenge his company's actors to expand themselves and challenges the community to accept this work as beneficial. He is willing to compromise, incorporating more religious content into their theater season, since he feels this is what the African American community is mostly interested in, due to the strong influence of churches and performance in church, in the neighborhoods.

"We're doing a tribute to James Weldon Johnson, the guy who wrote the Negro National Anthem. There is a collection, a book coming out, a collection of his poetry sermonettes and we're going to do some dancing and stuff. So I try to capitalize on some of this religious stuff that they think that they want."

Pro-Arts walks a fine line, producing works that should invigorate the community, but without actually succeeding in motivating the black populace to come out and support live theater. Vance has launched a comprehensive marketing campaign to address this issue, with billboards and ads on the back of cabs encouraging people to "support African American arts." Of working with the community, providing opportunities for black people to work in theater, he is hopeful, but a little cynical.

"Some of it has to be through trial and error. We do something and then we have to go back and try it again. Two years ago we had several playwrights to town and worked with David Cohen over at UT. We had a workshop for playwrights and I think two people showed up on a Saturday morning. So we gotta get people who are willing to work and do that. And so we went to the Writer's League, and the Writer's League underwrote their value. So we have a commitment to that and, hopefully, that's what this article will do is reach that audience who really wants the profits to happen and wants to learn how. The problem is, some people say they want to be a playwright and the real deal is that they really don't wanna be a playwright."

Vance sees the difficulty in getting artists to let go of their work and allow it to be used by companies and actors who might have different interpretations of their work, and thus, can expand into different contexts and meanings for the audience and the artists producing it. That's the level where he sees Pro-Arts as useful, in that a writer can bring a piece of work to them, and it may not be finished or even marketable as a play, but the group can work together with the creator to finish it or remodel it for commercial use, and all can benefit from the cooperative effort.

Within the last year, Pro-Arts produced two plays and two symposiums, one on technical theater, and one where they invited several agents (white agents, Vance is quick to note) who were committed to helping African American artists find work, and of the seven people who showed up, four of them were black. "So some of it is about where the community is, the other deal is about commercial theater. You have to make that leap. You know, black people have to be prepared to invest in their own careers and in the theater. Most people that go to theater know the people and expect comps. The deal with Pro-Arts, and Boyd Vance is gonna be a meanie, cause I'm gonna say it, how you gonna support the arts? During Pill Hill I didn't use my comps, because I was making a statement. If someone's gonna come see me, they need to pay for it."

"Money has to be invested. It was a good production. You see, black people have to become patrons. They have to become volunteers. They have to become administrators, have to read, and you know, some of this is like doing it in the void. Because you know, we're not gonna be able to go back to college, to the University of Texas drama school. We're gonna have to learn on our own time."

What is the solution, according to Boyd Vance? Drawing on the example of the civil rights movement, where a figure from the church, a major cultural institution in the black community, was able to motivate people as never before, Vance feels that it is time for the modern figures in theater and film to give back to their art form.

"We must go see it, we must support it. We must talk about it, we must be critical of it, we must invest in it, and we must trust in it. And we must learn the process of how to work together again. Some of that is gonna be about community building around the arts. If I am producing arts in the community, I might have to go over to Kealing Junior High and to the churches. I mean, if St. James Episcopal Church is putting on a jazz program, then surely we can produce a theater project by the same people. We have to make a commitment to do that."

Pro-Arts Collective will present To Be Young, Gifted, and Black from November 1 to 22 at the John Henry Faulk Theater, Brazos and Fourth Streets. Performances are at 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and 6 p.m. on Sundays.

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black is a dramatic collage of writings, stories, and remembrances detailing the life of Lorraine Hansberry, a premiere American playwright in the early '60s, who won a Pulitzer Prize for A Raisin in the Sun. The performance will feature Cara Briggs, Curtis Polk, Alan Keith Caldwell, Marla Fulgham, Leslie Mitchell, and others.