TDF Stages

Four decades ago she started her career as an actor, singer and dancer. A few years back, she started producing. Now she's adding director to her résumé.

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The mononymous LaChanze may have come to fame as a Broadway star, earning accolades and awards for her performances in Once on This Island, Summer and her Tony-winning turn in The Color Purple. But since the pandemic, she's been making her mark beyond the stage, too, as both an activist—she cofounded and currently serves as President for Black Theatre United, which advocates for justice and equality in the industry—and a Broadway producer. In fact, with just three years of producing under her belt, she's already picked up three Tony Awards for backing Best Musicals The Outsiders and Kimberly Akimbo, and Best Revival of a Play winner Topdog/Underdog. No wonder the tagline for her eponymous production company is "making Broadway cool."

And this month, she's pulling off an impressive trifecta: opening two new shows on Broadway as a producer, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' acclaimed play Purpose and the jubilant musical Buena Vista Social Club™, and making her professional directing debut with Alice Childress' Wine in the Wilderness at Classic Stage Company. Written in 1969, the play is set against the backdrop of the Harlem riot of 1964 as an artist (Grantham Coleman) is forced to confront his own misogynoir in his interactions with his new model (Olivia Washington).

After her work was almost lost to history, Childress' plays are back in the spotlight thanks in part to LaChanze. In fall 2021, she headlined the belated Broadway debut of Childress' 1955 drama Trouble in Mind, a prescient examination of racism in the theatre industry that had been slated to run on the Main Stem in 1957 until the playwright refused to make changes to appease white producers. Now as director, LaChanze is thrilled to be introducing audiences to one of Childress' other undersung works. TDF Stages spoke with LaChanze about why she feels a special kinship with Childress, how she's fighting against the erasure of Black history and what connects Wine in the Wilderness to her producing projects.

Douglas Corzine: How did your acting career prepare you to direct Wine in the Wilderness?

LaChanze: I think some of the best directors are actors because we experience theatre from the inside. We're the ones who interpret the words and imagine the complexity and all the elements of the character. It's the actor's job to find the voice, and then it's the director's job to make sure that voice is in the same world with all the others.

I approach directing from an actor's point of view first, and I like to create a collaborative experience in the room. Anyone who has a creative stake in the play, I want to hear from them because we create this world together. My job as a director is to keep us all in that space and to be sensitive enough to know when something is out of the world that we're building together. It's exciting because as an actor, I enjoy the building and discovery of these characters from my brilliant cast. But from the outside looking in, I can also see where the tweaks need to happen.

Corzine: The characters in Wine in the Wilderness have such strong and distinctive personalities. How do you ensure all the performances are in the same world?

LaChanze: Well, it happens in stages. In the first few days of rehearsal, all we did was sit and read and talk about the play and the time period. I was fortunate to have a brilliant dramaturg, Arminda Thomas, who brought in a packet full of articles, images and historical information from the period. From there, we got off the table and on our feet and started to explore how these people moved in the space, their voices, were they introverts or extroverts, all the specificity about them.

Once I let the actors play and find their interpretations, I then dropped in very specific notes that might shift what they were doing. For instance, if I thought a moment required laughter, instead of saying, "I need you to laugh here," I'd ask them questions about what was funny about the situation, so they found a natural, intuitive, honest and truthful way of laughing. This is my New York City directorial debut and I could not be better prepared because I have the most willing, talented, intelligent group of actors. I feel honored to work with this group, these five extremely talented actors who create this world.

Corzine: You discovered Alice Childress' work as a student at Morgan State University in the 1980s. What drew you to her plays?

LaChanze: When you're in a historically Black college or university [HBCU] like Morgan State, the curriculum is centered on Black culture and Black history and knowledge that would never even be considered in a predominantly white institution. This is why these schools exist, because the erasure of our history is happening in so many different places. But at an HBCU, it's not only part of the curriculum, it's celebrated. When I was studying theatre at Morgan State, I was introduced to Amiri Baraka, Alice Childress, Margaret Walker—playwrights who were not considered part of the American canon of theatre.

Alice's work spoke to me because oftentimes, the Black playwrights we know of are men. The only Black female playwright that is part of the canon is Lorraine Hansberry. Everyone knows A Raisin in the Sun, but can you name another Black female playwright you know well, whose work you've known for decades? Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks—these are women of my generation. When you looked at the classics in the '80s, there were very few women. Alice was not discussed in conversations about the great American playwrights. I was drawn to the unapologetic way she speaks truth to power. At that time in my life, it was a badge of honor to be able to say, "I'm doing an Alice Childress monologue." Her words are empowering and speak from the truth of Black women. She exposes her characters' vulnerability and puts into words what they're really thinking, and she does it in a way that is informative and educating and exciting.

Corzine: At a time when states are banning books by Black authors and multiple federal agencies have stopped observing Black History Month, how do Childress' plays speak to the importance of Black history?

LaChanze: I think now more than ever, Alice Childress' work is needed as a reminder that this isn't new. I can honestly say, as a Black person, this is not new. We've been fighting the system since we were stolen from our homeland. My great, great, great grandparents were dealing with it. My grandparents were part of Jim Crow. My mother was sitting at one of those lunch counters at 15 and was hosed down. Resistance is not new to us, so we are ready. I mean, if there's any group of people that's aware of what's happening and ready to deal with it, it's us.

Everyone talks about how this is just awful, that we're going back in time and trying to erase the arts and erase our significance and make our country monolithic. If there is any kind of silver lining in all of this, it's that it has forced communities to come together in an act of solidarity to preserve our history and to be deliberate about every opportunity to share it, to highlight it, to teach it, to remind each other that this is important. So while there may be this movement to erase Black history or women's history, we are coming closer together to fight against it. And I think the work of Alice Childress is still relevant because we are experiencing it again, and we've never stopped experiencing it.

Corzine: You starred in the first Broadway production of Childress' 1955 play Trouble in Mind about an actress confronting racism in the theatre industry. Wine in the Wilderness examines how people within the Black community see and treat each other. How do these shows intersect with your work as the President of Black Theatre United (BTU), which you cofounded with Audra McDonald, Norm Lewis, Billy Porter, Vanessa Williams and others?

LaChanze: One reason we founded BTU was because typically there is this belief that Black people, or any marginalized community, are waiting for a handout or waiting for someone to give us what we deserve. Young Black artists were not being brought into marketing meetings or being invited to be designers or stage managers. Actors, yes. But the creative teams? We were not in those spaces. After the murder of George Floyd, I put out a tweet that Audra saw and retweeted saying, "Where is my theatre community? We're suffering! We need to hear from our community." It was so hard that we didn't see any posts from our unions, our advocacy organizations, our producers. So we got together and said, "Let's be the change we want instead of waiting for someone to do it for us."

We called on our allies, people like [producers] David Stone and Marc Platt and James Nederlander, and said, "We will lead it—will you help support us so that we can create a pipeline for legions of young Black theatre professionals to be brought into this space?" The fact that Alice Childress was not in the canon is evidence of the racism, the sexism, the misogyny she had to deal with. She was such a true artist and truth teller, and I believe that it is incumbent on people like me to bring her work back to life so that audiences can see that this voice was out there, but the decision-makers who produced the plays would not give her an opportunity. Take Trouble in Mind: She was given the opportunity to have it produced on Broadway if she changed the end, but she never changed her words, so it didn't reach Broadway until I did it in 2021, 66 years after it was written.

Corzine: You mentioned David Stone, whom you've called a mentor. Purpose, which recently opened on Broadway, is your third collaboration as producers. How would you describe the importance of mentorship as you've expanded your work behind the scenes?

LaChanze: Let me go back a bit. In 2009, I saw a play that I loved at the International Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and I thought: If anyone's going to get this play in New York, it's going to be me. So I'm going to advocate for it. It was a whodunnit centering on a group of African-American senior citizens, and I thought it was hysterical. So I went to the writer, Celeste Bedford Walker, and asked for the option, and she gave it to me. Five years later, I was back in New York doing If/Then. David was a producer on that, and I told him, "I have this play. I'm going to do a reading." I hired a director, rented a space, hired actors, invited all my fancy friends, and no one wanted it.

Fast-forward to 2020 when we were forming BTU, David approached me and said, "I think you're a producer, LaChanze. It's time for you to let me teach you the ropes." I would go to his home and we would sit outside because it was during COVID, and he went through all the shows he'd produced and talked me through the basics, and then invited me to be a coproducer with him on Kimberly Akimbo and Topdog/Underdog. David continues to be a huge inspiration to me. He really is one of our most brilliant commercial theatre producers. So to be on Purpose with him is a thrill. He trusts me, and the fact that he respects what I bring to the table makes me want to show up in a way that could really help grow the shows we work on.

I like to call myself a creative producer because I am not only helping to raise money and pick shows, I'm also very invested in audience development and inclusion and making Broadway cool for these 30- and 40-year-olds who will spend $1,500 on a Beyoncé concert but don't feel that Broadway is for them. Part of my mission as a producer is to show how cool Broadway is. I also have a voice about how we can get audience members that may not know that they can be in this space into the space—I'm very much about growing audiences.

Corzine: You're also a producer on Broadway's Buena Vista Social Club™. Do you see any connections between your two current Broadway projects and Wine in the Wilderness?

LaChanze: All three are exciting crowd-pleasers, and they're revelatory, meaning you walk into the theatre one way, and you leave differently. Sometimes you leave a show and you can't stop talking about it, or you wake up the next day and say, "Guess what I saw last night? You have to go see this." That's our job as theatre-makers, to affect society—to reflect it and have an effect. You want people to leave moved, and that's the thread I have with all the shows that I attach my name to, that they really are going to affect change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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TDF MEMBERS: At press time, discount tickets were available for Wine in the Wilderness. Go here to browse our latest discounts for dance, theatre and concerts.