Twenty years ago, Kenny Leon left a coveted post as artistic director of the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta’s Goliath of drama, and started from scratch.
With the late Jane Bishop, a former Alliance colleague, he created Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company, a crew dedicated to telling universal stories with a Black voice.
He knew a lot about running a theater group, but not much about inventing one. “The toughest thing was starting a company with no knowledge of how to do that,” he said recently, taking a break from tech rehearsals for a Broadway opening. “How to start a theater? How to build a board? How to raise money?”
With ups and downs, Leon’s company succeeded and outlived his tenure. In 2019, as he turned increasingly toward projects on Broadway and in television and movies, Leon handed the reins over to Jamil Jude, who had joined True Colors as associate artistic director two years earlier. Jude came to Atlanta from Minneapolis, where he co-founded the New Griots Festival and served as artistic programming associate at Park Square Theatre.
It wasn’t an easy transition. In 2020 the performing arts were smacked by the worldwide pandemic. Kenny Leon’s True Colors survived, and this week presents a look back at two remarkable decades of the theatrical arts.
Billed as “20 Years in 90 Minutes,” the cabaret and fundraiser will present songs and vignettes from some of True Colors’ most high-impact productions, from “Nina Simone: Four Women,” to the Tuskegee Experiment drama “Miss Evers’ Boys,” to “Fences,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning August Wilson play.
“It’s going to be fun, a great night,” said Jude. “A little food, a little drink, a little schmoozing, a lot of laughs, culture, community and art.”
Credit: True Colors
Credit: True Colors
Among the performers who will appear over three nights are Denise Burse, India Tyree, Adrienne Reynolds, E. Roger Mitchell and Elizabeth Omilami.
This year, True Colors became one of 17 arts organizations recognized as a Southern Cultural Treasure by the South Arts group, which provides support to the arts in the nine-state region.
The recognition comes with a $300,000 grant over the next three years and other forms of support. The program is meant to support arts groups of color.
True Colors began as a “moveable feast,” and staged productions at different theaters around the city, including at the Alliance, the 14th Street Playhouse, the Rialto and Theatrical Outfit, as well as in Washington, D.C. and in Baltimore. In 2017 the company adopted the Southwest Arts Center in the city of South Fulton as its home base.
Credit: Josh Lamkin
Credit: Josh Lamkin
True Colors has become a notable incubator of talent. Halle Bailey, who got her theatrical start in “The Wiz” at True Colors, is now a sensation in the upcoming live-action film “The Little Mermaid.” LaTanya Richardson Jackson, praised for directing August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” currently on Broadway, got her directing debut at True Colors with “Two Trains Running.”
In addition to staging plays and community discussions, True Colors hosts a monologue competition for high school students. It began as an event dedicated to the work of August Wilson, but now includes a variety of writers.
This year Joaquina Kalukango, the winner of the first monologue competition in 2005, won a Tony for her performance in the musical “Paradise Square.”
The competition helps young actors, said managing director Chandra Stephens-Albright, but it also brings a younger demographic to True Colors productions. “To bring them through the education programs into the audience is a goal,” she said.
There are still obstacles to overcome in getting an audience to the theater. COVID protections are costly, and can limit attendance, said Jude. Stephens-Albright added that True Colors, like other Black cultural groups, struggles to get the kind of funding that other organizations enjoy.
“We’re not too different from other organizations of color,” she said. “We’re underfunded when it comes to large transformational gifts.”
She also bridles against the “stigma” attached to the South Fulton neighborhood that keeps some audiences away.
“I’m often frustrated with the brush that gets painted across Southwest Atlanta,” she said. “It’s unfair and inaccurate. It’s a beautiful venue, a beautiful location, a beautiful drive. And the stories that we put on are for everybody.”
On the upside, Jude points out that True Colors, as one of the nation’s largest Black theater groups, situated in the Black mecca that is Atlanta, occupies a golden spot.
“That’s why I have the greatest job in American theater,” he said. “No other producer has what we have in True Colors, which is a community that is ready to receive the story. I don’t have to explain it to them, why the story is important. They know.”
THEATER PREVIEW
Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company presents a “Cabaret and Fundraiser: 20 Years in 90 Minutes,” 7:30 p.m., Nov. 11; 2:30 p.m., Nov. 12-13. $75, including food, cocktails, drama and music. Southwest Arts Center, 915 New Hope Road SW, Atlanta. 404-532-1901, truecolorstheatre.org.
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