Nate Jacobs, left, and Bishop Henry Porter at the West Coast Black Theatre Troupe venue in Sarasota. (Staff photo by Dan Wagner)
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from Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe through the years
Telling stories in a parking lot at Florida A&M University, Nate Jacobs attracted an audience of fellow students laughing at his tales about Aunt Rudele, emphasis on “rude.”
Storytelling was just something Jacobs did while pursuing a degree in fine arts and design. But those stories were leading him on an unexpected path, one that would change lives and a community.
If you can pinpoint a specific moment, among many possibilities, as central to the birth of the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, it might be that day in Tallahassee, when a college professor and minister was visiting the campus and saw a crowd being entertained by the storyteller.
Bishop Henry Porter, leader of the Westcoast Center for Human Development — the “church of continuous joy” in Sarasota — was on campus to lead a prayer group.
When the two met sometime later in Panama City, Jacobs asked for career advice. He planned to move to Washington, D.C., to pursue design, but Porter recalls hearing a voice telling him that Jacobs was needed in Sarasota to start a theater company.
It took a while, but in a nondescript warehouse near downtown Sarasota, where a coat of paint doesn’t mask the need for improvements, a kind of theatrical miracle has been building for 15 years, nurtured by perseverance, love and supportive donors.
The theater group Jacobs founded in 1999 has created opportunities for young African-American performers, exposed the white community to the music and lives of major black artists, and brought a once-divided community together.
Tsadok Porter, Michael Mendez and Davronette Henson in the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe's "Nate Jacobs' 50s Jukebox Revue." (Photo provided / Don Daly / WBTT)
Despite the troupe’s many ups and downs, it is marking a 15th anniversary thanks to determined leaders and financial backers.
Its survival is all the more impressive because the troupe was created in a town with a small African-American population that had shown little interest in theater.
“I heard it all the time: ‘African-Americans don’t go to the theater,’” Jacobs, 54, says. “I still hear it, but things have changed in the last 15 years.”
There were plenty of times when he wanted to quit, questioning the faith others had placed in him or that he had in himself. He worried that not enough people would attend shows or donate money to keep the effort going.
He was barely supporting himself, his wife and young daughter from occasional acting and singing jobs. Starting a theater took a toll on his marriage, which ended in divorce after 10 years before the Westcoast troupe started performing.
Each time he came to the brink of shutting it down, someone provided needed help or guidance at a crucial moment.
Even talk show host Jerry Springer stepped up, offering a major donation and telling Jacobs, “Don’t shut down your company.”
Cast members dance during a routine in "Bubbling Brown Sugar," a musical that celebrates Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s at the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe. (DON DALY PHOTO/PROVIDED BY WBTT)
As the troupe marks its 15th year owing nothing and owning its own home, it is easy to forget those early, nomadic years, when audiences had trouble finding the next performance because the troupe kept moving to new venues.
And it is important to consider the impact Jacobs’ work has had on some of the people who have performed in his shows, those who have come to see them and the community at large.
The cast of "Ain't Misbehavin'," from left, Theresa Stanley, Nate Jacobs, Jnana Wilson and Solomon Burton. Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe. (Photo provided)
There is, for instance, Teresa Stanley, whom Jacobs coaxed onto the stage at age 14 in the musical “Purlie,” helping her find a career dream. Today, she’s starring in her second Broadway show.
And there are people such as Porter, who grew up in segregated Sarasota and swells with pride at the diversity of the audiences that pack most of the troupe’s performances. “We’ve gone from the darkest night to the brightest day,” he says.
When he moved to Sarasota in the early 1980s, Jacobs was working as a volunteer at the Westcoast School affiliated with Porter’s church and pursuing acting jobs when he could find them at Asolo Repertory Theatre or Florida Studio Theatre. There weren’t many opportunities because the theaters didn’t do many shows that called for black actors.
Jacobs started questioning the diversity of the local theater scene and wondering if he would be able to build a career.
“Everywhere I went to work, I was asking why there was no diversity and they would give the same answer that there were no black actors and no black audiences here in Sarasota,” Jacobs recalls. “And I was the only one talking about black theater.”
READ MORE: A more colorful theater scene in Sarasota
Getting started
You could say the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe has its roots at the Players Theatre, where Jacobs kept asking for a chance to produce a play.
“He was persistent,” recalls Michael Judson, the theater’s chairman at the time. Judson was concerned by Jacobs’ lack of experience as a director or producer. But the theater was trying to reach a broader cross-section of the Sarasota community.
“People used to complain that black folks wouldn’t show up for black theater presented in other venues,” Judson said. “One of the points they miss is that there aren’t that many black folks in Sarasota County, as well as a significant black middle class that can afford baby sitters and tickets and time.”
Cast members from 'Amen Corner' (from left) Paula Farlin as 'Odessa', Carolyn Robinson as 'Sister Margaret', Terry Hatfield as 'Luke Alexander', Gretta Sancho as 'Sister Moore', Nate Jacobs as 'Brother Boxer' and Donna Harvey as 'Sister Boxer'. (Herald-Tribune archive)
Judson struck a deal for Jacobs to stage James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner” outside the theater’s regular subscription series. Judson said the level of acting may not have been as strong as other shows the Players was presenting, but “I was very impressed that he brought it off, got the cast together, rehearsed and got the production values there. That gave me a sense that he could do more.”
Jacobs felt extra pressure to succeed. He remembers Judson calling him before the opening of the production and saying that “the board is going to be all over my back” if the black community doesn’t attend performances. “I said: ‘That’s your problem. I did my part of this. You said you wanted to do a black show, that means a new audience. They’re not going to call this box office with credit cards to buy tickets. They’re just going to walk up.’
“And they did.”
Jacobs followed “The Amen Corner” with Lorraine Hansberry’s ground-breaking play “A Raisin in the Sun,” which was part of the theater’s regular subscription series, as was an ambitious if problem-plagued production of “Dreamgirls” and the musicals “Bubbling Brown Sugar” in 1996 and “Purlie,” which introduced audiences to Stanley, and the young performer to working in musical theater.
Judson and Jacobs have different memories of what happened to end the partnership. Judson recalls Jacobs saying he needed to start his own company, and the Players felt that it couldn’t “have him doing shows with his company in our subscription series. It wasn’t appropriate.”
Jacobs’ version was that the theater “shut the program down.” He remembers Judson walking him to his car and saying: “I think you have a theater company. What are you going to do with all these people that you’ve got excited about the theater? You’ve got all these people out of the black community. What are you going to do with them?”
However it happened, Judson didn’t just offer kind parting words. Once he left his Players job, Judson spent about two years volunteering as general manager and executive director of the fledgling new troupe. “That was a rough couple of years,” Judson says.
It was a rough first 10 years, and there was no reason to think it would survive.
Out of nowhere
INTERESTED?
The Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe is at 1646 10th Way (now called Nate Jacobs Way) in Sarasota.
--The 2014-15 season continues with:
Langston Hughes’ “Black Nativity,” Dec. 3-21
--Charles Smith’s “Knock Me a Kiss,” Jan. 7-Feb. 8
--“Jazz Hot Mamas,” an original --musical revue featuring Teresa Stanley, Feb. 25-March 29
--Zora Neals Hurston’s “Spunk,” April 15-May 17
• For ticket information: 366-1505; wbttsrq.org
When Jacobs staged “The Amen Corner” at the Players Theatre, it had been eight years since the launch and demise of the Sarasota Performing Arts Guild, which produced a few shows under the direction of Milton Bradley, a drama teacher at Sarasota High School. That followed an earlier effort, the Heritage Players, which folded in the early 1980s.
Both groups set out to create a theater for local black audiences to attend and perform with, but neither was able to build any lasting support or stability from white or black audiences.
“We only did two or three shows because we didn’t have a venue to play in,” said Henry “Hank” Battie, who was involved with the Guild.
“For one show, we used my living room for rehearsals, pushed all the furniture back,” said Battie, who graduated from a segregated Booker High in 1962 and owns Cravats, a prominent downtown Sarasota haberdashery.
The group’s first show was “A Land Beyond the River,” a play set in the South about efforts to end segregation. “I was a preacher in the mold of Dr. King, working toward desegregation,” Battie recalled.
The Guild was part of an effort to provide opportunities for performers and audiences who felt no connection to the area’s other theaters, which offered little in the way of diverse programming.
It launched not long after the demise of the Heritage Players of Florida, which opened in 1980 with a production of “A Raisin in the Sun.” Heritage had some 28 actors from Sarasota and Bradenton involved, and presented such shows as “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men” and “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.” The group also organized a trip to Broadway for nearly two dozen people.
But both groups suffered from a common problem — no performance venue. That made it difficult to plan a schedule of shows and notify audiences.
Battie and Porter acknowledge that there was no tradition of theater-going for the vast majority of people living in the city’s African-American community.
In one of those chicken-and-egg debates, theaters generally didn’t produce shows with stories of special interest to the black community, and black residents usually didn’t go to the theater.
It was that continuous cycle that Jacobs encountered when he first started looking for acting jobs.
And even though segregation had ended years earlier, there was still a perceived Mason-Dixon line to deal with along Fruitville Road.
“We didn’t come downtown too much except to shop,” Porter recalls of his own growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. “Main Street at that time was bustling. The Florida Theater (now the Sarasota Opera House) was not a place African-Americans went or the State Theater, which was in the middle of the street. It was understood. I remember some signs for colored and white.”
The signs were no longer in place, but old habits and traditions die hard and can take ages to succumb.
To survive in Sarasota, the Heritage Players and Sarasota Performing Arts Guild needed to reach all audiences, and there weren’t enough ticket sales for a scattershot schedule of shows.
Those companies may have failed, but things had changed by the time Jacobs launched WBTT in 1999.
Creating a new troupe
After parting ways with the Players in 1997, Jacobs was encouraged by some friends to pursue his career in New York.
“I had people telling me, ‘You’re too big for Sarasota’,” he said. A few people offered to help support him while he tried his luck in New York.
Once again, Henry Porter played a key role in Jacobs’ staying in Sarasota.
“He told me that Sarasota is your New York, and I thought, Sarasota? What? He said: ‘Don’t make a quick move. Stay a while longer.’”
Porter says he frequently told Jacobs “to look at the people who were working with him on his shows, to see the light in the eyes of people” because of the impact he had already had on them.
Even though he had a plane ticket for New York, Jacobs says, “I was stopped by everything inside of me.” He thought of the children he taught and young performers he directed. “I knew I couldn’t go. I tore the plane ticket up.”
He would also be leaving behind his young daughter, Naarai, who graduated last year from Howard University and has herself grown into a performer.
When he went to meet with Porter to discuss his change of plans, it wasn’t long before Porter directed him to an attorney who helped Jacobs incorporate the new Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe.
“I didn’t have a dime, but I had a theater company,” Jacobs said. “Dr. Porter told me you have everything you need to do this. You have it. You created history with the shows at the Players. I had never gone to the Players and seen an all-black cast on the stage. That was history.”
Jacobs got help from what is now the Arts and Cultural Alliance of Sarasota County in filing the paperwork for nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service. June Gordon, who is still on the WBTT board, donated the first $100.
It took awhile to move from paperwork to production, but Jacobs got more unexpected help from Theatre Works, which operated for about 20 years until 2003 in what is now Florida Studio Theatre’s Gompertz Theatre. President Joe LaRusso offered Jacobs the theater’s stage on Sunday and Monday nights, typically off nights for the company.
Jacobs had a theater, but needed to come up with a show. With musical director LaTerry Butler, he created an original revue called “Cotton Club Cabaret,” a celebration of the Harlem Renaissance.
Performers were the next thing on the checklist. Jacobs and Butler scheduled auditions in a rehearsal room at the Players Theatre and waited along while before anyone came through the door.
SLIDESHOW: Click here to see the stars who got their start at WBTT
Teresa Stanley played "Effie" in the Manatee Players/Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe production of the Motown-inspired "Dreamgirls" at the Riverfront Theater in Bradenton. (Herald-Tribune archive / 2006)
Teresa Stanley, who had starred in Jacobs’ production of “Purlie” several years earlier, was the first to arrive, followed by several other promising young black actors, including Tsadok Porter, Jnana Wilson and Apphia Campbell, who would eventually become core members of the troupe.
They hadn’t come earlier because “they didn’t think they were good enough to audition,” Jacobs remembers. “They didn’t know what they had.”
Suddenly he had a troupe — young performers who would be with him, on and off, for years, with Tsadok Porter the most frequent and active participant.
Jacobs and LaRusso were stunned at the audience response. The twice-weekly shows quickly sold out and the run was extended by four weeks.
Audiences were eager for more, and Jacobs followed it up with “Eubie,” “Black Nativity” and “A Raisin in the Sun.” He also starred in several of the productions.
Even though ticket sales were strong, the troupe was often on the hunt for a new performance venue — moving from FST’s Gompertz Theatre to the Historic Asolo Theater, the Backlot, Glenridge Performing Arts Center and the atrium of Art Center Sarasota, where people danced at their seats to Motown hits.
All the moving around took a toll on the troupe. Patrons had trouble finding the latest productions and some of the venues got a bigger cut from ticket sales than the troupe itself.
The Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, which Jacobs had essentially been running by himself, was swimming in debt and constantly having to start over in each new theater space.
A fresh start
Christine Jennings at the West Coast Black Theatre Troupe building in Sarasota. (Staff photo by Dan Wagner)
About six years ago, the future of the troupe took a new direction.
Howard Millman, who had once cast Jacobs in occasional shows when he was producing artistic director of Asolo Rep, remembers that Jacobs had told him of his desire to start his own company.
“I offered as much help as I could at the time,“ Millman said.
He wound up doing far more than he’d expected. Millman joined the WBTT board and admits he was quiet for a year, taking in what was happening and trying not to be a backseat artistic director after retiring from his Asolo Rep job.
“I realized that Nate was a one-man band and he was trying to do it all. He had no other help. He had no other hired help. If someone gave him a $100 donation, he didn’t have time to send an acknowledgment. They had no home. They were gypsies. Right from the beginning, they had a following, but the following couldn’t find them because they kept moving.”
Millman was elected president of the board, and one of his first tasks was to hire Christine Jennings and Michael Shelton to study the theater’s operations and report on how they might be improved. The two consultants outlined the theater’s needs, from a stronger board to more financial stability.
Shelton moved on to other projects, but Jennings agreed to join the staff as a temporary executive director.
She planned to work for a few months, but retired this summer after five years.
Jennings was certainly not the person you might picture as the leader of a black theater troupe. Millman frequently introduced her as the “whitest white woman to run a black theater company.”
Jennings, who founded Sarasota Bank and twice ran for Congress, knew little about running a theater, but she did know business. In short order, she put together a small team, restructured the board, and found donors who helped wipe out the company’s roughly $150,000 debt.
“She also felt the way I did, that we needed a home. It took us three years to do that. Once we found a home, everything exploded,” Millman said.
That home is in one of two buildings that were in foreclosure on Orange Avenue, just north of 10th Street, between downtown Sarasota and Newtown. The theater purchased them in 2013, and within a year, Jennings raised the money to pay off the $600,000 loan for the theater and the adjacent Binz building.
Today, the company operates with a $1.2 million budget.
Jennings became the theater’s biggest cheerleader and turned fundraising events into pep rallies. Routine dinners became lively events featuring performances by Jacobs and other troupe members.
Apphia Campbell, a founding member of the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, returns to Sarasota with her one-woman show "Black is the color of My Voice," inspired by the life and music of Nina Simone. (Photo provided by WBTT)
The troupe, which already had an enthusiastic following, was generating buzz.
A home theater space has given the troupe a greater sense of stability, which has helped with fundraising and building audiences. Jennings said patrons are often enthusiastic donors to the troupe. That attitude will be important whenever new executive director Richard Parison and the board launch a capital campaign to start renovations on the two buildings.
It also has helped the theater in its effort to diversify its audiences.
“One of our goals at the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe is to bring the African-American audience up to 30 percent of our audience,” said Millman. “Whatever percentage you get is only a small percentage of the entire audience. They’re 7 percent of the county. We’ve been seeing increases every year in the number of African-Americans coming to see the shows.”
Jennings said she is most proud of WBTT for providing “more diversity, more togetherness, than anything I can think of in the 30 years I’ve been here.” She smiles as she considers how “so many African-Americans and Caucasians have come together and played together and worked together at the troupe.”
The troupe has benefited from a “big influx of black retirees to Sarasota who come from areas where they’re exposed to black theater or theater, period,” Battie said.
And Henry Porter hears “people all over the town talking about the troupe. They say, ‘I love what I saw the other day.’ The children are now saying, ‘I’d like to be in that.’ Little children. That’s a great change.”
Jacobs admits that the white patrons “always embraced us.” It has taken awhile for the black community to catch on. “They’re still learning about subscriptions. But they’re buying tickets.”
And they talk about the troupe. Or at least that’s the buzz among barbers at Phat Headz on Martin Luther King Boulevard, where Jacobs gets his hair cut.
“There are four young barbers, all in their 20s to 30s, and these guys would never discuss theater,” he says. But over the summer, as he was walking out, one of them came up to him and said, “I like what you’re doing in the community.”
It may have been a relatively minor moment, but it was a big deal to Jacobs.
“To have young black guys initiating that conversation is amazing to me. That kind of thing is happening every day now in the community.”
That barber also has a family member with some talent, and Jacobs said he has been encouraging her to audition.
With 12 years of shows behind him, it’s easier to find new people to try out from a community that now has a regular outlet for performance opportunities.
That’s a vast difference from when it all started and Jacobs scarcely had time to consider the bigger picture. Back then, he was just thinking about getting the next show on stage, or creating it from scratch.
He often writes the musical revues because it’s cheaper than licensing existing shows, like the season-opening production of “Little Shop of Horrors.”
The troupe grew from a seat-of-your-pants kind of producing style that Jacobs had used since his job as an art teacher at the Westcoast School expanded to include music and theater performance.
Everything had to be improvised.
“We had no salaries. We took some curtains, old theater curtains we bought from a guy that used to own a lighting shop,” Henry Porter recalls. “We put a rod up and he wrote this little play with some of the university kids and started writing things for our children, coming up with these exciting songs.”
The kids he worked with at the school formed the core of the initial Westcoast troupe. For the young performers, it was a chance to spend more time with friends.
“When the troupe was starting, it was really fun,” Tsadok Porter recalls. “We would come into the rehearsal studio, and this will sound so unprofessional, but we would just be ourselves and just be playing and the magic we created with us just playing is what people got to see onstage.”
But the troupe has had a more meaningful impact for many of them, and Jacobs beams like a proud papa as he talks about what they have achieved.
Tsadok Porter, who has probably been in more shows with the troupe than any other performer, said it has given her confidence in herself, while it “made her face whatever fears that I have.”
More importantly, she says, it has opened doors for home-grown talent like herself, made theater more accessible for the black community and showcased that community’s cultural diversity.
“We have a thriving black theater community,” she says. “African-Americans are not the majority here, but they support the arts. We’ve created a niche for ourselves. Usually, you have to go to D.C. or Chicago to see a good black theater company, but we have a unique and innovative theater company right here.”
The troupe also has been a launching pad for several artists who put a focus on performing, none more prominently than Teresa Stanley.
Audiences first met the 14-year-old when she played Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins in “Purlie” at the Players Theatre in 1997. She had sung in church and at school but never in a musical.
Jacobs practically had to push the nervous youngster onstage. But he saw something in her that she had yet to discover. The audience instantly saw it, too.
Stanley was likewise charmed by performing, and she credits Jacobs and the troupe with giving her the confidence and experience to pursue her dream of performing on Broadway.
“It helped me figure out my path in a way,” she said on a recent day off from her Broadway role in “Rock of Ages.” “I loved singing in church. I love the feeling I get when people are moved by the music and the singing that I do.”
Working with Jacobs over the years “helped me really hone that gift and really know what kind of avenue I could travel in to be successful.”
Stanley made her Broadway debut in “The Color Purple” in 2007; starred in a tour of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” that brought her to Sarasota, and then toured in “Rock of Ages” before joining the Broadway production nearly two years ago.
She’s taking a leave from the show to return for Westcoast’s production of “Jazz Hot Mamas,” which opens in February.
Some younger troupe members look to her for inspiration, and she has provided guidance to singer Alyssa White, who has performed with the troupe and competed on “Showtime at the Apollo.”
“I would never say I’m a role model, but I conduct myself just in case someone’s watching, so they’ll know what it’s like to be an artist, someone who’s easy to work with,” Stanley said. “You can be talented as much as you want, but if you’re nasty and unkind and don’t present yourself to the world in a certain way, no one will want to work with you.”
Stanley credits Jacobs and the troupe with helping her prepare for her performing career and discovering her dreams. And she won’t be surprised to find other Westcoast veterans following her into a professional performing career.
“There is so much talent in that area and the Westcoast Black Theatre helped us to see what was there."
Nate Jacobs, founder and artistic director of the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, thanks retiring CEO Christine Jennings during a 15th Anniversary Celebration and opening night presentation of The Eve of Jackie, A Musical Tribute to Jackie Wilson, at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall on Monday, Oct. 6, 2014. (Photo / Elaine Litherland)
