A Master Class in Black Theater with Talvin Wilks

For decades, the dramaturge, director, and historian Talvin Wilks has collaborated with legendary names in New York theater and performance art. So what’s he doing in St. Paul?

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In 1978, Talvin Wilks—then a 16-year-old kid from Dayton, Ohio—took a field trip to New York. He and his classmates from his private high school’s theater-appreciation class stepped off the bus and found Broadway in one of its finest hours. Wilks watched shows that have become the stuff of legend: Dracula, A Chorus Line, Gin Game, and for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.

This last, a groundbreaking classic by Ntozake Shange, entranced Wilks with the power of its poetry come to life. He could barely have imagined that just 14 years down the road, he would be directing Shange herself in the world premiere of her genre-bending 1992 work, The Love Space Demands.

Starting not long after that fateful class trip, Wilks began a theatrical career that has won him a national reputation as a director, dramaturge, playwright, professor, historian, archivist, and innovator-at-large. His work has touched three generations of theater in America, and includes collaborations with (and adaptations for) famous writers and performers including Ping Chong, Carl Hancock Rux, Sekou Sundiata, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Wilks has also spent long portions of his career as an archivist and historian of African-American theater.

In this sense, Wilks can claim an unusual role: He’s literally writing the history of African-American theater as he, himself, continues to add new chapters to the art form.

Next month, for example, Wilks will direct Penumbra Theater’s world premiere of Benevolence, the second work in a planned trilogy by playwright Ifa Bayeza. This saga begins with The Ballad of Emmett Till, which Wilks directed at Penumbra in 2014. And it tells the story of Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy who was brutally lynched in 1955. Benevolence explores the aftermath of the trial, in which Till’s murderers were acquitted of their crime.

While Wilks doesn’t often put himself center stage, he gamely agrees to talk about his work. To get to the interview, he takes the Green Line into St. Paul, hops off at Raymond, and heads up to Dogwood Coffee, tucked away on a side street. Wilks considers himself a relative newcomer to the Twin Cities: He came here three years ago to take a theater post at the University of Minnesota. Commuting by light rail, Wilks says, offers him a very rough approximation of New York living.

Soft-spoken, courteous, and reserved, Wilks sits down across from me in the late afternoon. His dark clothes and  wire-rimmed glasses look as if they simply assembled themselves on his person, so he could focus on more important things.

Wilks usually operates behind the scenes. Whether his role on a given project is that of playwright, director, dramaturge, or some combination of those things, he thinks and works collaboratively. When we met last year, Wilks had just finished work as a dramaturge for an adaptation of Coates’s National Book Award–winning memoir, Between the World and Me, for a performance at the Apollo Theater.

Wilks’s approach to his work is deliberate, disciplined, and strategic. He brings an enormous amount of research and knowledge to bear on each new project; he also brings a plan. When we meet, he has brought a notebook containing his directorial plan—a “strategic overview,” he calls it—for Benevolence.

Wilks opens the notebook. Each page appears densely packed with neat, handwritten notes, assorted numerals, sketches, and charts. To the untrained eye, it looks like instructions for building a spaceship.

“Basically,” Wilks explains, “I break down each component of the script. I ask questions—what do I see? What do I understand and not understand? I have an idea about it, but I want help. I want us to work together to think about this in the most creative, imaginative, innovative way that we can. Especially working with an artist like Ifa Bayeza, who has all these ways to tell a story.

“For example, the set,” Wilks continues, turning a page to show me a sketch of a possible design. “There is a state of disarray: chairs, tables, ephemera, pieces of discarded evidence. All suggestive of the time and the place.”

Benevolence, like the first play in the Emmett Till trilogy, is part play, part poem: a collaborative creation of what Wilks calls “a ritual space.” It explores the aftermath of Till’s murder through the stories of two couples—one white, one black—and highlights the stark parallels between the Jim Crow era and the racism at work in America today.

In March of 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was reopening Emmett Till’s case. “Theater exists,” Wilks points out, “in direct conversation with the politics of the time. Benevolence reminds us of the continued harassment and terrorizing of the African-American community to keep it in its place. This is a culture that has existed for centuries. This is the legacy. It’s important for us to fully know and understand that, before we reduce it down into what we believe and what we don’t believe.”

It’s seldom considered a compliment to call someone an academic artist. The term can be a synonym for esoteric or bloodless. But Wilks has been studying or teaching theater not just since high school but since seventh grade. He performed alongside classmate Allison Janney in a melodrama wonderfully titled Fireman, Save My Child! (Audiences may know Janney better for her leading role on The West Wing.) The young Wilks amassed a long list of leading-role credits by the time he graduated from high school, including a turn as Linus in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

His own first play started out as a student assignment, earning him a degree in English lit from Princeton. INCUBUS: An American Dream Play may have been what he now laughingly calls “your typical over-thinking senior thesis,” but it premiered in 1985 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival not long after he graduated. That same year, he joined Crossroads Theatre Company, a major African-American theater institution in New Jersey. It was here that Wilks made his directorial debut, and here that one of his original plays received its world premiere.

Many of the artists Wilks encountered at Crossroads will end up in the history project that has absorbed his attentions for perhaps a dozen years. The title of this book will be Testament: 40 Years of Black Theatre History in the Making—though that’s subject to change. Wilks adds that he “may make it 50 Years, because it’s taking so long.”

Claiming “a penchant for jazz,” but no expertise on the subject, Wilks usually has five or six freelance plates in the air at once. When I ask what he does when he gets stuck, he replies, “‘Creatively stuck’ is not possible for a freelance artist.” For all Wilks’s planning, there’s always an improvisational or unfinished quality to a life in the theater. He responds to an inquiry about his relationship status with the wry remark, “I am a middle-aged gay black man in the Twin Cities. You can fill in the blanks from there.”

Though he’s still settling into the local scene, Wilks expresses a strong connection to Penumbra, to his university students, and to the Twin Cities acting pool. Ultimately, it seems as if Wilks’s theatrical signature ultimately may be that wherever he lands, he keeps making more shows. This goes for Benevolence, too. “If people come into the theater to just affirm their own ideas and opinions, I think they’re there for the wrong reasons,” Wilks says. “You’re meant to wrestle with the idea. But to be open to the wrestling—that’s all that I ask.”

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