FLY 2015

The Ensemble Theatre Presents Fly

A Portrait of the Tuskegee Airmen and Desegregation of the American Military

The Ensemble Theatre kicks off the New Year with Fly, written by Trey Ellis and Ricardo Khan, and directed by Allie Woods.

Fly celebrates the lives of the courageous and dedicated Tuskegee Airman who flew during World War II. This story shows the determination of the young men who made historic contributions toward the desegregation of the American military and furthering of civil rights. These heroic military pioneers landed a phenomenal place in history.

Featured cast members include: Kedrick Brown, Kendrick “KayB” Brown, Jason E. Carmichael, Brendon Lara, Rhett Martinez, Nkem Richard Nwankwe, Joe “JoeP” Palmore, and Taelon Stonecipher.

When: Previews: Saturday, January 24, 2015: 8:00 p.m.

Sunday, January 25, 2015: 3:00 p.m.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015: 7:30 p.m.

Show Run: January 29 – February 22, 2015

Thursdays: 7:30 p.m.

Fridays: 8:00 p.m.

Saturdays: 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.

Sundays: 3:00 p.m.

FLY written by Trey Ellis and Ricardo Khan and directed by Allie Woods Jr. is showing from January 29 through February 22, 2015. The Ensemble Theatre is located at 3535 Main Street, Houston Texas 77002 USA. Photo courtesy of The Ensemble Theatre. For more information, click on www.EnsembleHouston.com

Where: The Ensemble Theatre

3535 Main St.

Houston, TX 77002

713-520-0055

www.EnsembleHouston.com

The Ensemble Theatre's 2014-2015 Season is sponsored in part by grants from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. United Airlines is the official airline sponsor for The Ensemble Theatre. Fly is generously underwritten by Spectra Energy and the Humphreys Foundation.

The Ensemble Theatre was founded in 1976 by the late George Hawkins to preserve African American artistic expression and to enlighten, entertain, and enrich a diverse community. Thirty-eight years later, the theatre has evolved from a touring company operating from the trunk of Mr. Hawkins’ car to being one of Houston’s finest historical cultural institutions. The Ensemble is one of a few professional theatres in the region dedicated to the production of works portraying the African American experience. The oldest and largest professional African American theatre in the Southwest, it holds the distinction of being one of the nation’s largest African American theatres owning and operating its facility and producing in-house. Board President Emeritus Audrey Lawson led the capital campaign for The Ensemble’s $4.5 million building renovations that concluded in 1997. The Ensemble Theatre has fulfilled and surpassed the vision of its founder and continues to expand and create innovative programs to bring African American theatre to myriad audiences.

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The cast of FLY written by Trey Ellis and Ricardo Khan and directed by Allie Woods showing from January 29 through February 22, 2015. The Ensemble Theatre is located at 3535 Main Street, Houston Texas 77002 USA. Photo courtesy of The Ensemble Theatre. For more information, click on www.EnsembleHouston.com

An Ensemble Theatre production of the Tuskegee Airmen and Desegregation of the American Military

Director and actor Allie Woods Jr. returns to his native Houston following his Ensemble production of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean and Charles Fuller’s The Brownsville Raid, cited by the Houston Chronicle as “one of Houston’s 10 Best Theatre Productions, 2008.” Born and bred in the Fourth Ward of Houston, he took his God-given talent to reach his highest potential by being invited to Italy to attend the Venice Biennale Festival. He was also an associate producer / lead actor in New York’s Midtown International Theatre Festival’s A Question of Taste, directed by Jeannine McKelvia.

When I met him the first thing I wanted to do was to shake his hand and congratulate him for his great work with this daunting military project called FLY celebrating the lives of the United States Tuskegee Airmen.

Allie: The story has been immortalized in two films: The Tuskegee Airmen on television and Red Tails. In WWII 1943, the United States military developed in Tuskegee, Alabama a program to train black men for air flight. The story tells of these men who come from all parts of the world: West Indies, Iowa, New York and Chicago. They board a train to get there and you are taken through their journey as they arrive for training and their indoctrination. Of course, they finally graduate. And then the stuff begins, the war begins as they fly off as the support squadron for the bombers. They have an outstanding legendary record with not losing any bombs at all compared to other white support flyers. So much so that white bombers requested them during their bombing missions. One particular mission which was immortalized in this play was when they go to Berlin. They do have to go to the heart of Nazi land.

Theresa: What type of research did you have to do initially to be able to direct this play?

Allie: First I looked around at all the other productions that have been done on this. It originated at the Lincoln Center Institute which was directed by Ric Khan, who is co-writer with Trey Ellis. Trey Ellis as a matter of fact, wrote the screen play for the television production of The Tuskegee Airmen. There have been productions in New York, Washington DC, and the latest one is in Atlanta, Georgia. I also did research at the Tuskegee Airmen Museum in Detroit. I talked to just about every kind of Tuskegee Airman. I happen to run into one up in Harlem out in the streets, corner of 7^th Avenue and 131^st Street and he was in a car marked with Tuskegee Airmen license plates. I spoke with him. Unfortunately, he passed within weeks after I saw him. I also have a dramaturg and assistant director by the name of Jeannine Foster-McKelvia. We contacted Dr. Roscoe C. Brown. He was the squadron leader of the unit dramatizing this play, the 332nd fighter group.

Roscoe C. Brown is a distinguished educator in New York City. He’s 92 years old and he’s still got it. We called him on the telephone and spoke to him for about 40 minutes. He can’t travel anymore but he was aware because he was part of the other productions as a consultant. We called him because of his background.

Another part of our research was when we contacted Paul Matthews who is the head of the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum right here in Houston. I want to do a shout-out because he certainly deserves this.

We took the cast there and for over 2 hours, he’s the captain. In his museum, he’s got all these artifacts but more than that he showed the actors how to behave, how to act, how to salute, how to march, how to stand, how to carry out their deployment.

We also have a lot of video. This is a multi-media presentation: we’ve got video and film incorporated with the stage work.

Allie: I would have action sequences. The challenge is putting the action on the stage because we have warfare and airplanes going on and the German air force. I think we’ve come as close to meeting the challenges in a stage production. The idea is to move it along and to make it exciting and we involve the audience, in some cases in the middle of this war. If indeed everything we put up there works.

Allie: At the end, there is a poem titled High Flight. This is an unofficial poem of all aviators it was written by John Gillespie Magee Jr. a nineteen-year old white man from the United States who in WWII he went and joined the Canadians to fight. But before he got a chance to fight, he composed this poem but he died in a tragic accident. His mother published the poem. It has become the unofficial poem / prayer of aviators so much so that the class of the U. S. Air Force is required to memorize.

Theresa: You’ve also had the opportunity to work with a lot of great people. As a director at the New Federal Theatre in New York City, you won the AUDELCO Award. This was when you cast Denzel Washington…

Allie: I directed Denzel Washington in New York, he played Malcolm X. We did a play entitled When the Chickens Came Home to Roost. And our experience was that we had some trouble getting some young men to come and audition for the role up in New York. There were any number of young men who don’t want to be associated with Malcolm X. He came in we sat across each other just as we’re sitting here now. The air seemed to change. I looked at my assistant and my assistant looked at me and I said, get him! That’s one of those experiences.

Allie: I go back to when George (Hawkins, founder of the Ensemble Theatre) was here. He and I were together before he passed. I did a play called The Brownsville Raid, another military play dealing with the 1906 regiment in Brownsville, Texas, a true story of the segregated black. Eight years ago, I was here directing August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. I also directed the reading of the play dealing with the rise and fall of black African continents.

Allie: No. I was originally scheduled to direct the first play Women in the Pit. Eileen (J. Morris Artistic Director of the Ensemble Theatre) decided to take that one on. She gave me choices of three, one called What I Learned in Paris, and the other one Two Old Black Men Just Sitting around Talking. I spoke with the person from the Houston Chronicle. He asked me the same question. When does a stage director get a chance to do a show where you have all this action? You know, war planes and explosions? So, I said, let me take a crack at this one.

Allie: As far as childhood, I got involved in theatre when my mother took me to see a play at the old Music Hall. I remember I was about 12 or 13 years old. It had 3,000 seats.

I leaned forward on my seat from up in the balcony and looked down. It was the first time I’d ever seen a play. It looked like a doll house come to life. I remember saying this, “What a wonderful thing!” After all these years, I look at the wonder of it all. Because I know what goes into making it all. And that’s the challenge.

Mr. Woods’ numbers over 200 stage / film / media credits in the U. S. and internationally. New York directing: co-director of A Black Quartet, staging Ed Bullins’ The Gentleman Caller, the New York Shakespeare Festival; the Playwrights / Directors Units of both the Negro Ensemble Company and the Actors Studio; as a director-in-residence with the LaMama Experimental Theatre Club’s Short Bullins, Regionally: A Contemporary Theatre (Seattle); the Inner City Cultural Center (Los Angeles); and the St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre. He served as a director-observer with NBC’s primetime series St. Elsewhere and Law & Order, and was a consulting director on the PBS / Tony Brown’s Journal’s edition Malcolm and Elijah.

As an actor: the Alley Theatre; a founding member / resident actor for three seasons with the Tony Award-honored Negro Ensemble Company; the original cast of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Miss Evers Boys; Lincoln Center Theatre / Broadway’s Mule Bone by Zora Neal Hurston; and roles in seven of August Wilson’s ten-play 20^th Century Cycle, including Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Gem of the Ocean, directed by Phylicia Rashad.

Film / TV: Tower Heist, Everybody’s Fine, One Life to Live, HBO’s Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, and the Law & Order franchise.

Honors: “Living Legend” citations from the National Black Arts Festival (Atlanta) and the National Black Theatre Festival (Winston-Salem); the AUDELCO “Outstanding Pioneer Award in Black Theatre”; and the NAACP’s Beverly Hills / Hollywood Chapter’s “Trailblazer Award.”

A graduate of Texas Southern and Tennessee State Universities, Mr. Woods dedicates the FLY production in memory of his father Allie Woods Sr., who transitioned on the Opening Night of his son’s directorial production of Gem of the Ocean.

Allie: I’d like for them to gain a sense of the history of these men. Also, as I told some people, 2014 has been a nightmare year for black men. And the nightmare continues.

Just last Saturday we had an incident in Yale University, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this. It involved a son of a black writer for the New York Times named Charles M. Blow.

I want the audience to see that these extraordinary men existed and we’re not lost in history. Just bear in mind Tom Brokaw, the anchor for NBC News, he wrote a book called The Greatest Generation. When it came out, Brokaw mentioned of the black military persons, he does.

Theresa: The Ensemble Theatre, playwrights Ricardo Khan and Trey Ellis and award-winning director Allie Woods Jr. invite you to see the true story of the Tuskegee Airmen, “eyes glaring with determination, brown shoulders squared with pride.” Let them tell you how they brilliantly “defied the bigoted and racist ramblings of the period.” Some of these men are now gone and with your support, will never be forgotten. And with Allie’s guidance of this military project, you too can say that you were there!