April 7, 2008
Chuck Mike empowers audiences to think differently

Theater professor Chuck Mike has little patience with young actors who want only to become the next Sean Penn or Al Pacino.

He wants actors who believe acting is a "mutually empowering experience." He has been part of theater around the world that does far more than entertain, and he is trying to bring that mindset to his students at the University.

In the two-plus years he has been on the faculty, Mike has directed two plays offering that mutual empowerment to actors and audiences. Home was the first play in the University's history with an all-African-American cast. The second, Tegonni: An African Antigone, further broadened playgoers' "perception of theater of color," he says.

Mike's latest offering will be The Meeting, the Jeff Stetson play that engages Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in an imaginary conversation a week before the Black Muslim leader was assassinated in 1965. There will be six performances of the play this month at the Alice Jepson Theatre: April 12 at 7:30 p.m., April 13 at 2 p.m., and April 16-19 at 7:30 p.m.

Permeating all of Mike's projects is his experience with theater for development (TFD), a technique that uses theater as a means of change through research, dialogue and performance. Mike has changed the name of his courses at UR to theater for social change, a more recognizable nomenclature to Westerners.

In TV and movies, he says, there is one-way communication. In theater, "there is a two-way pulse between performer and audience." There is also opportunity to engage in dialogue afterward. People "can move forward on that," he says. "Dialogue is key to change. If you can talk about it, you can implement it."

Conventional theater, like conventional politics, operates from the top down, Mike says. "Government doesn't understand the pulse of the people. It panders to special interests." Hard-core theater for development wants to "find out what's in people's hearts." It wants to "get people to think and act differently."

Through The Meeting, Mike hopes to "clarify who Malcolm was, what he stood for. People see him as a violent act wanting to terrify white folk, as a plague of hatred. I see him as a great American hero."

Neither Malcolm nor King had a notion to lead, Mike says. "Malcolm came out of prison adoring Elijah Muhammad. 'You'd make a good minister,' Muhammad told him. Malcolm was a follower, really, but fervent. He really believed what he felt. I like that.

"King, of course, we know. He died poised to address garbage workers. He was concerned with economics, with race, war, class issues."

In The Meeting, says Mike, "We will see these men in a different light but in today's political arena. Today's student body knows little about civil rights. They don't rock the boat, they don't protest."

To get today's audience up to 1960s speed, Mike will set up an exhibition in the Modlin Center courtyard, through which everyone must walk after buying a ticket. It will be filled with memorabilia of those times: "Colored only" signs, "We Shall Overcome" music, anti-war posters, civil rights materials, montages and TV monitors showing sit-ins. Volunteers will dress as civil rights demonstrators, hippies, National Guard troops and police.

Audiovisual materials playing during the epilogue will show "less of the two men's work and more of them as human beings: Martin or Malcolm sitting among us," Mike says.

Mike's classes are creating the play's concept as well as the exhibition portion for the play. They are finding "events that created a Malcolm and a Martin."

"The play will give the audience a chapter of history, make them reflect on what aspirations are, what meaning there is in developing human relationships," Mike says. "They will find we really are fighting for the same things. It cuts across class and race."

The Meeting ties into other work that Mike does.

"In hardcore theater for development, you work from the inside out," he says. "You move into a community, make sure it's prompted by special needs. They [the community] will tell you sooner or later what those needs are. We're theater practitioners. We create. We can think together, linking up all those other people to bear witness and be part of the process. As actors, we want THEM [the community] to act."

As part of TFD troupes, Mike has gone to villages in Africa and to schools, community centers and prisons in America. The troupes foster dialogue and get results: a new road, better give-and-take relationships, improved working and living conditions, and more for the have-nots, Mike says. They help people get their needs met.

"TFD wants to provoke a change in behavior, provide, where possible, a sustainable development," Mike says. "It is seeking change in a very startling way."

Mike has led such theater projects not only on campus but also at Huguenot High School and Richmond Community High School. "What he has brought to the University is a global view of what it means to be an artist," says Walter Schoen, chair of Theatre and Dance. "He has established a series of classes, and his productions are related to those classes in terms that theater is something that is an active part of society and capable of creating great social change.

"Having worked in Africa, England and across the United States really allows him to expose our students and our audiences to an entirely different and wide approach to both the impact and the experience of theater specifically, but more importantly, the arts in general," says Schoen. "His viewpoints, his ideas, his experiences all are so wide ranging that they break us out of our little shell." That is "incredibly important to the University and vital for our students to see."

The Meeting

• April 12, 7:30 p.m.
• April 13, 2 p.m.
• April 16-19, 7:30 p.m

Alice Jepson Theatre
For tickets, call the Box Office at 289-8980.