In January of this year, The Black Rep announced that Dontrell, Who Kissed The Sea, playwright Nathan Alan Davis’ modern-day hero’s quest about a young man searching for an ancestor lost during the Middle Passage, would be postponed due to the winter omicron spike.
Well, July is here, and with it comes the return of Dontrell. Running July 6-23 at Washington University’s Edison Theatre, the production has reemerged with the majority of its original cast. We sat down with The Black Rep founder and Dontrell director Ron Himes ahead of the show’s opening to talk about the play, wrapping up Season 45, and looking forward to (a rapidly approaching) Season 46.
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First off, can you share a little bit about Dontrell, Who Kissed The Sea and where this story takes us?
The play is written by Nathan Alan Davis, and it follows Dontrell, who is a young man who has just graduated from high school and received a full-ride scholarship to Johns Hopkins University. But he has been having this recurring dream, and it has been haunting him. He’s been having visions of his ancestors, and he sees one of his ancestors jump off the ship during the transatlantic journey [during the Middle Passage]. He is determined to go find the spot where his ancestor jumped into the ocean and to go down and bring him back. So in a lot of ways, the play deals with this vision through poetry and music and dance. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story.
You mention the mix of poetry, music, theater, and dance. It sounds like it’s going to be a really dynamic staging with all those elements working together to tell the story.
Right. Just visually, this production is really, really stunning. We have an incredible design team, there are projections, there’s video, tremendous soundscape, and all these elements come together for a really, I think, stunning production.
What originally drew you to this work?
Actually, years ago, I can’t remember how many now, but I was directing a play at Indiana University, and Nathan was finishing up his degree, and this play was his thesis project. I happened to be on campus directing another project when they did the first reading of the script, and I was invited to come to the reading. I did, and I just thought it was very interesting the way he approached storytelling. I sort of followed the play over the years—it’s been done at at least a half a dozen theaters around the country—and I just thought it was time for us to do it. I actually directed the play last fall at the Nebraska Rep, and we pretty much brought the entire production from the Nebraska Rep back to St. Louis. We were scheduled to run the show in January, but of course omicron closed us. We were fortunate enough to not have to cancel the production, but were able to secure these July dates and postpone the production.
Has anything changed between when you first started preparing for this production and now?
The primary thing is we lost one actor. It’s interesting. In Nebraska, Olajuwon Davis played Dontrell. When we were getting ready to go into rehearsal here in December, Olajuwon…couldn’t do the production. So we replaced him in January with Christian Kitchens, who’s now playing Dontrell. Well, between January and now, Ka’ramuu Kush, who was playing the father in the Nebraska production and was here in rehearsal in December, became unavailable for the July dates. So Olajuwon Davis is now back in the production as the father. So it’s a little shuffle, but it’s been great. It was great being able to have him come in because he was so familiar with the production, and it really was a blow to him and to us that he wasn’t going to be available to do the production in January. So things have worked out.
It has to be really nice to be working with a group that you’ve spent a good amount of time with and who knows this story well, especially since it’s a newer work.
It is. Four of the cast members were students at the Johnny Carson School of Theatre, which is where the Nebraska Rep is in residence. So we were able to keep all of them intact. One of them graduated in May, but all four are here. So we have the whole company from the original production, and I think it’s just gotten better. They’ve grown, they’ve matured, and I think St. Louis is really going to be in for a treat.
What do you most want folks to know about this show, or hope that they get from this production?
I think I want them to be amazed. I think that the production is, as I said, visually stunning. But I think that I hope that they take away an interest in researching history. Because that’s what Dontrell does. Dontrell goes on a quest to find his own personal history, and I think in Dontrell’s quest, we can all take away something that has to do with tracing our lineage, tracing our heritage, and being committed to celebrating where we’ve come from.
I know it wasn’t originally planned to be the final show of Season 45, but it seems like a really great note to end things on.
Oh, yes. It really is. And it has us just so energized at the theater, because a couple of weeks after it closes, we begin Season 46. This should have been our break period and our downtime getting ready for Season 46, but this has us still operating at full capacity. All of the staff is still in place. This show will close on July 24, and we’ll go into rehearsal August 16 for Season 46.
On that note, how does it feel to be wrapping up the 45th season? Is there anything that you were particularly pleased with?
Oh yeah. It was a wonderful season for us. We opened of course with the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Sweat, and then we had the opportunity to remount Sweat and take it to the Inge Festival. The festival was honoring Lynn Nottage, and they became aware of our production and invited us to remount the production for Lynn Nottage. So that was really, I think, one of the highlights of the season. We remounted it and took it to Independence, Kansas, the home of William Inge, and did a wonderful production there. Then the rest of the season is just really wonderful productions between Sweat and Dontrell. We just recently closed the production of August Wilson’s Jitney, and the great thing about that is we are two productions away from completing the August Wilson American Century Cycle for the second time. We just have two more plays to do, and then we will have completed the cycle two times. That is quite amazing, and we’re really proud of that. And we’re looking forward to producing King Hedley II and Radio Golf again. I’m not sure that there are many other theaters that can say that they’ve done the whole cycle twice.
We’re just a couple months from Season 46 getting underway. Is there anything in particular you’re looking forward to next season?
Yeah. It’s sneaking up quick, and Dontrell getting moved is sort of holding things a little bit, because actually we’ve been holding the announcement of Season 46. We wanted to make sure that we got all of the information out about Dontrell and didn’t get everybody excited about Season 46 before we actually completed Season 45. So [this] week we will be announcing Season 46. And there are some very, very exciting shows.
Is there anything else that you wanna share with folks either about Dontrell or about the season to come?
Just that we still have protocols in place. We’re still asking the audience to show proof of vaccination and requiring audience members to be masked during the performance. But that aside, I think that we just hope that people will come out and see The Black Rep in the summer, which is a new thing. Spend summertime with The Black Rep.
