Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
Lou and Sarah Bellamy
Lou and Sarah Bellamy
In his 1965 essay “The American Dream and the American Negro,” James Baldwin wrote about the “counterimage” that black people create for themselves. In Baldwin’s reckoning, this counterimage, the thing “the white world does not know” but that Baldwin “thinks he knows,” is “that black people are just like everybody else.” At that point, Baldwin estimated, the counterimage had only been around since WWII. St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre, founded in 1976 by Lou Bellamy within the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center—a leafy little campus cut off from what’s left of Rondo, St. Paul’s historic black neighborhood, by the trench of Highway 94—has been a locus for counterimage production for 40 years now.
A safe place in both a country and a city with a dearth of such places, where a group of black artists—playwrights like August Wilson, actors like Estellene Ball and James Craven, and directors like Claude Purdy and Marion McClinton—could come together to create and develop their own counterimages and share them with both black and white audiences.
In fact, this coming season will be Penumbra’s 41st and the first where Bellamy will carry the honorarium of “emeritus” behind his title. Because this will also be the first year his daughter Sarah will be without the “co-” prefix affixed to hers. The two of them have been sharing the title of artistic director for the last four seasons, and this fall that will no longer be the case. In the late summer, we sat down on the stage of Penumbra’s 255-seat theater and caught up with Lou and Sarah.
There are only a handful of black theaters in the country that have continuously been producing entire seasons’ worth of work. So, Lou, in 1976, why did you found Penumbra in St. Paul?
Lou: Well, so that you understand, there were a group of artists who were already working. I mean, I was directing at TRP [Theatre in the Round], acting at Chimera, and so forth. And we became dissatisfied with the portrayals of African Americans. They weren’t full. They were sort of interlopers in the white landscape. So we wanted a place where we could tell the whole story. And Hallie Q. Brown Community Center had received a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) grant, and they hired me to implement it. And I did. And it’s nothing new. Theater’s been used to organize people in black communities since, you know, the very beginning, since 1821, with the African Grove Theatre. But I sort of followed Booker T. Washington’s advice: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” I was in St. Paul. Why would I go to New York or Chicago to do what I wanted to do?
Sarah: I think anytime there’s black political thought advancing, there’s art that accompanies it. So the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement were one. The Black Power Movement and the Black Arts Movement were sort of spiritually linked. So we were kind of on the tail end of the Black Arts Movement, and one of the tenets that artists were using to kind of organize themselves and their work was to suggest that the art should be created by, for, about, and near the people that it represents. And that’s not new thinking—that comes from W.E.B. Du Bois years prior—but I think that is a real important compass for me to bear in mind. Because this community is and has been the seat of so much black political power for St. Paul. We were the first community to put forth an anti-lynching bill. So it feels important that we keep our roots, but I think that our potential is large, so a lot of the work that we’re doing now is civically engaging the people around us. Being more embedded in this neighborhood.
Would you ever expand beyond this building?
Sarah: Oh certainly, I think Penumbra can grow.
Lou: African American artistic endeavors tend to grow and mature in different ways than majority institutions. It’s not unusual for an artistic institution to operate under the aegis of a church. Or a community center. In fact, when I began this theater we were considered ineligible for state arts funding because they said we were doing social service, not art.
They wanted to fund art for art’s sake?
Lou: Yeah. And patently, the kinds of things we were talking about were not considered art. Art didn’t have anything to do with anger, for instance.
So how has this neighborhood changed? Are we still in Rondo?
Lou: Well, sort of. It’s over there [points southwest]. I remember that freeway coming through here. And I remember people sitting on their porch steps, one old man with a shotgun, saying, “I am not selling my land! This is mine! I’m not gonna move!” So it was traumatic.
Did that trauma linger by the time you opened the theater?
Sarah: That trauma is still present. When you speak with elders like Marvin Anderson, like Mahmoud El-Kati, people who have lived in this neighborhood and knit the neighborhood together, they’re still now trying to talk with the city about putting monuments on the Dale Street bridge when it’s rebuilt, so people remember what this neighborhood was and should continue to be, as it gentrifies very rapidly.
Sarah, what was it like growing up in a theater?
Sarah: Growing up inside of a theater is magical. I wish every kid could have that experience. It is a place where creativity is so embraced and you can actually watch ideas come to life. I also had like an extended family of artists who were my aunties and my uncles.
Lou: All of us had children. I would be directing with Estellene’s son on my hip, you know that kind of stuff.
Sarah: Just understanding the power and the courage and the bravery of what those artists were doing and confronting every night on stage emboldened me to speak truth to power and to be honest about our experience and not to be ashamed about any part of it.
Lou: You’ve worked in all parts of it. You sold concessions.
Sarah: I’ve been working here for over 20 years.
I bet.
Sarah: But I remember being in Fences with you and watching the audience have an experience every night. You know, this emotion that was coming out and seeing that in them and deciding this is what I want. That’s when I decided I wanted to be a writer. And August Wilson encouraged me.
What a show to think about following in your dad’s footsteps: Fences. Lou, you weren’t like Troy, you encouraged it?
Sarah: Sort of? He kind of begged me not to. [Laughs.]
Lou: I encouraged the writing, but I didn’t encourage the artistic directorship. In fact, I tried to talk her out of it.
Sarah: You told me that it was heartbreaking.
Lou: Because your reach always exceeds your grasp. There’s never enough. The way the philanthropic structure is made, we will get a minute amount of money to do all the stuff we’re doing, and you’ll see a major institution get a million or two million dollars to do the same thing.
Lou, one of the things you’ve told your company over and over again is “I don’t have all the answers, but we’ll come up with some questions together.” There’s an academic rigor to the way you’ve investigated the black experience.
Lou: At the bottom of it is faith and love for the culture and the people. If you have that, they will reveal themselves. See, we’re human, and so we got good and bad. If you go in there lookin’ for the bad, that’s what you’re gonna find. You’ll find all the dysfunction, and if that’s where you wanna go, you’re gonna find it there. But if you go into it looking for that beauty and that love and that complicated nature of human beings, it’s there and it opens up.
So that’s why you haven’t done a play on, say, Clarence Thomas or Bill Cosby.
Lou: Well, I had one I was gonna do on Clarence Thomas but it didn’t …
Sarah: I think the other thing that I would add to the mix there is deep scholarship. So Lou is a professor. Claude was, August was—these are people that studied.
That’s what I mean—a systemic investigation.
Sarah: And I am too. I think that rigor is part of why the work is so profound. Because we go so deep. We invest so deeply in it.
One thing I did want to talk about is there’s been so much attention recently, so much argument in the art world, about appropriation. As a for-blacks, by-blacks theater, does this attention to appropriation hinder an artist’s ability to foster empathy?
Sarah: It’s not new. This has been going on since black people got here.
Sure, but the intensity of it feels new.
Sarah: Well, I think what you’re experiencing is a confluence of a couple different things. One, the pervasiveness of media now, the Internet and our ability to connect and have conversations so quickly. But I think you’re also encountering an environment where people of color are sensing and feeling the proportions changing demographically in this country. So things will change.
Lou: Yeah.
Sarah: And personally, we know cultural appropriation exists, it will continue to exist, that is a thing that is constant within the United States. But I also think there’s a way in which what we have to challenge is how white folks are able to monetize their cultural encroachment of black work.
So okay, it’s not just about who gets to say what, it’s how come when I say it I don’t get paid?
Sarah: It’s money.
Lou: And you know, Marx said it. We’ve talked about “border theory.” That stuff doesn’t have monetary value inside the culture. It only begins to pick up that monetary value as it moves towards the border. And then all of a sudden it is monetized, commercialized, and worth something.
Sarah: We have two white theaters that just won an award for diverse casting.
Who?
Sarah: Ten Thousand Things and the Guthrie. Penumbra has been doing diverse casting for 41 years. Theater Mu has been doing diverse casting for 25. Pangea for 22. You see what I’m saying?
Lou: It’s like discovering America.
Sarah: We’re in two different worlds, and I think that’s one of the reasons August Wilson’s work was so powerful. Because he brought the focus to that other narrative, that narrative that runs parallel to the dominant narrative. And so that’s what we’re trying to do, surface those stories that nuance and complicate our American history.
