Ron Himes stands next to a photographer at the back of Harris-Stowe State University’s Emerson Performance Center. A social-media consultant and Harris-Stowe’s facilities manager look on as the photographer snaps pictures. The venue is significantly smaller than the 470-seat Grandel Theatre, where his theater company, The Black Rep, performed for two decades. Here, shows are scheduled around basketball games and other events, so the photographer tries to work quickly.
Earlier in the day, Himes had announced that The Black Rep would be presenting its 37th season at the theater. In the pictures accompanying the announcement, a grinning Himes posed with university president Constance Gully. Now, though, Himes is more serious and subdued, wearing a newsboy cap and a gray sweater. As the photographer shoots, a theater professor peeks in. Her class is starting soon, so the group will need to come back in an hour. It’s another reminder for Himes that times have changed.
Himes wasn’t always interested in acting. At Washington University, he majored in accounting. It wasn’t until his junior year that he boasted to a theater friend that he too could act. When a dare followed, Himes promptly tried out for the student production of No Place to Be Somebody—and landed a role. That play and those that followed had political messages that made Himes begin to think of theater as “an agent of change,” he says.
Eventually, Himes started his own student-theater group, Phoenix, focusing on African-American plays. At the time, there was a burgeoning black arts movement across the U.S., and other black arts and theater groups were springing up, including St. Louis’ renowned Black Artists Group. “As graduation neared, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do,” Himes says, “and it got to the point where I was more excited by acting than accounting.”
After graduation, Himes took a job with the Theatre Project Company. “Ron was an exciting actor,” recalls the group’s founder, Fontaine Syer. Himes worked for the Theatre Project Company’s touring group, putting on plays in schools across Missouri, traveling in a van full of actors and living on fast food. Despite the grueling work, “Ron was very enthusiastic about it, I think partially because of his rapport with the kids,” says Syer. “He has enormous energy and vitality and imagination.”
In his spare time, Himes ran a nonprofit theater troupe, incorporated as The St. Louis Black Repertory Company. Syer remembers talking to Ron about the company years ago. “When somebody says, ‘I’ll do anything to make this happen,’ people who are starting theaters live that literally,” she says. “It takes a certain kind of determination, and Ron was determined.”
In 1979, Himes left the Theatre Project Company to work full-time as The Black Rep’s producing director. The itinerant group had performed at festivals, churches, and community centers, but it couldn’t afford a permanent home. That changed, however, after a production of Charles Fuller’s The Brownsville Raid, when Claude and Eddie Guinn approached Himes. The Guinns ran the Greeley Community Center, which neighbored a church at 23rd Street and St. Louis Avenue. “They offered us the space in exchange for us teaching classes and workshops to the kids in the community,” he says.
Himes now refers to The Black Rep’s 10-year stay at the 23rd Street Theatre as the “Hallelujah” era. “We were an African-American company with a home,” he says. “We were able to produce a season, able to build a subscriber base, and able to expand our core audience.” At the time, the audience was typically 75 percent African-American.
“I remember seeing a production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at 23rd Street, and I was one of six white people,” recalls Syer. “Ron played the lead, and the audience was so vital and so participatory in their response—it was one of the more thrilling experiences I’ve ever had in theater.”
By 1991, The Black Rep was thriving. That’s when the nonprofit Grand Center Inc. offered Himes the Grandel Theatre rent-free, hoping to bring more arts organizations to the area. Over time, the troupe staged a funk-inspired Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tennessee Williams’ Kingdom of Earth, and August Wilson’s entire canon there. Himes also organized the Show-Me Festival for Young Audiences, devoted to storytelling and plays.
“I guess we could call that era ‘Movin’ On Up,’” Himes says.
After the photo shoot at Harris-Stowe, Himes sits down, resting his newsboy cap beside him. Asked whether there was a moment after leaving the Grandel Theatre last summer that he despaired about The Black Rep’s future, he smiles ruefully and replies, “I’m still despairing.”
For years, he explains, the venue was a good home for The Black Rep. “It was a much more comfortable and beautiful facility for our audiences,” Himes says. “Frankly, we had become the envy of many African-American theater companies across the nation… Artists came from all over the country to work at The Black Rep while we were there.”
In fact, in October 2012, he’d celebrated the fact that The Black Rep had been at the Grandel for 20 years with the play Anne & Emmett, in which Anne Frank and Emmett Till meet. The following July, when an extended run of The Wiz closed, Himes headed to Indiana to star in August Wilson’s play Fences.
While he was out of town, however, Himes says he received an email informing him that the theater had been sold, and all of the tenants were asked to clear out by the end of August. Donna Northcott, artistic director of St. Louis Shakespeare, says she too was surprised by the news, after performing at the theater for 18 years. “It would have been much less stressful if they could have let us know sooner,” she says.
Grand Center Inc. maintains that it had notified The Black Rep earlier that 2013 would be its last season at the Grandel Theatre. “They were informed over a year ago that we had an intention to sell the building and they needed to plan on summer 2013 being the last season,” Grand Center Inc. spokesperson Michelle Stevens told the St. Louis Beacon in August.
For years, Grand Center Inc. had subsidized the Grandel. Then, in the mid-2000s, the subsidies slowly decreased, causing The Black Rep’s rent to go up every year. Following the economic downturn in 2008, audiences shrank, with the theater often less than half full. In 2012, Himes told the St. Louis Beacon he was looking for a “drum major” to help inspire and elicit support from would-be local donors and civic leaders.
With only five staff members, board member Barb Feiner says, it’s difficult for the company to do paperwork, host events, and raise funds while staging the same number of productions as companies with 10 times the number of staff members. Yet somehow, The Black Rep’s always found a way.
“We are way, way behind,” Himes admitted in October. “But we are moving as fast as we can to be able to open the season on time.”
“The Black Rep is an artistic triumph,” says Joe Hanrahan, who worked as The Black Rep’s director of marketing in 2011. But, he says, “It’s organizationally challenged. I don’t think they’ve gotten anywhere near the support—civic, public, or even corporate—that they really deserve.”
Hanrahan thinks the region’s attitude to-ward the arts is part of the problem. “I say it all the time: There is great support for the arts in St. Louis, but there’s minimal support for the arts of St. Louis.”
He also believes race plays some role: “I think there are a lot of intelligent, artistic-ally interested white people who don’t even think they should go to The Black Rep.” In 2012, Hanrahan directed The Black Rep’s one-woman show No Child…, about the challenges of teaching children in the Bronx. When the show came to an area school, only a small group of African-American students attended the performance.
“We say we’re doing this for the community—‘community’ being a code word for black people,” says Robert Powell, founder and executive director of Portfolio Gallery & Education Center. But, he believes, many African-Americans are visiting larger institutions, which also offer programs dealing with minority issues, rather than supporting smaller black arts organizations.
Powell would like to add a group of African-American arts institutions, such as The Griot Museum of Black History and the Juneteenth Heritage and Jazz Festival, to the Zoo-Museum District, where he’s a board member. Doing so would provide access to public funding for the organizations. But that would require taxpayers to vote on it, and Powell says many of the institutions don’t have the resources to campaign.
As for The Black Rep’s future, Himes has discussed moving the troupe to a theater on Washington University’s campus. (He’s worked as an adjunct professor at Wash. U. since the 1980s.) On that front, nothing is definite yet. But what is clear is that Himes has entered a new era, one of both uncertainty and hope. “I’m calling it ‘the new Renaissance,’” says Himes. This past fall, both World Wide Technology and Centene Corporation committed $100,000 each to The Black Rep.
“We’re beginning to look at the future and institutionalizing the company,” says Himes, “trying to lay the foundation for its growth beyond its founder.” For some black arts organizations, when the founder retires or dies, the organization goes with him or her. Ronald Jackson, a consultant for the Griot Museum and a member of the St. Louis Black Leadership Roundtable, calls it founder’s syndrome. “The founder becomes the focus of the organization,” he explains. “When you’ve done everything—when you’re used to doing everything—it’s sometimes difficult for people to get to the point that they understand the need to create a plan for transitioning.”
Though Himes has expressed concern about this season and the future, those who know him aren’t worried. “No matter what, The Black Rep is going to survive,” says Hanrahan. “Ron is a survivor.”
This month, The Black Rep performs The Meeting January 8 through 26, and For Colored Girls… January 30 through February 9. For details, visit theblackrep.org.
