Like a good black box should, UpStage Theatre’s diminutive Mid City auditorium holds the promise of an intimate cultural experience.
Tidy rows of cushioned seats, preserved from the former Broadmoor Theatre on Florida Boulevard, are arranged stadium-style so that each viewer has a clear view of the stage. Surrounding cinder block walls are painted black, and the stage holds sets it seems you could reach out and touch.
As Upstage’s 2022 season continues this month, the space comes to life again with an original production called Home for Christmas, a play written and directed by company founder and artistic director Ava Brewster Turner.
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“It’s a heartwarming story set in Tennessee,” Turner says. “The oldest daughter in the family, Nancy, has planned a wonderful Christmas for her adult siblings, and she wants them to return home.”
Naturally, the siblings protest—this is a holiday story, after all—but Nancy persists, convincing them to spend Christmastime with her and their ailing mother. While they’re home, Nancy also tries to coax her brother and sister into reviving the Christmas plays and pageants of their childhood, this time as adults performing for each other in the living room.
“The story kind of takes a look at how we can get so busy in our lives and lose sight of what’s really important,” Turner says. “It’s a wonderful lesson.”
UpStage celebrates its 20th anniversary this season, a major milestone for a small company often overshadowed by Baton Rouge’s larger arts organizations. Home for Christmas is the final production of the season, which has also included The Green Book in March, a play by Calvin Ramsey about the real-life travel guide created for Black motorists in the Jim Crow South. The previous November, UpStage actors also performed a dramatic reading of the play at the Capitol Park Museum for its “Negro Motorist Green Book” exhibit, during which Ramsey attended and gave a keynote address.
In June, the company staged The Dance on Widow’s Row, a comedy by Samm-Art Williams about four wealthy widows and their attempt to find the next Mr. Right. “It was a sell-out,” Turner says. “It’s a very popular show.”
Turner is an accomplished theater educator who can’t remember a time when the dramatic arts wasn’t a personal passion. She says she founded the company to provide more opportunities for Black artists to explore the dramatic arts.
“There were no Black theater companies in Baton Rouge,” she recalls. “There was a need.”
As a child in rural southern Arkansas, Turner was an avid participant in Easter and Christmas plays at her church and was in the drama club in high school, experiences she still draws on as a teacher and playwright. She graduated from Grambling State University with a bachelor of arts in theater and began a career teaching both theater and English in Chicago, Alexandria and Memphis.
In 1985, she and her husband relocated to Baton Rouge for his job, and Turner landed a job teaching theater at Sherwood Middle School, followed by stints at Woodlawn High, Broadmoor High and Southern Laboratory School.
In the ’90s, Turner took a group of Southern Lab students to a speech festival hosted by LSU. Her students performed so well that the LSU Department of Theater approached her about pursuing a Ph.D. in theater education, with a full scholarship. She accepted the offer, working on coursework and completing her dissertation over the next few years while working full time.
Around the same time, Turner left Southern Lab after being recruited to start the theater curriculum at then brand-new Baton Rouge Community College. Working with then-chancellor Myrtle Dorsey, Turner helped design BRCC’s Magnolia Performing Arts Theatre, developed coursework and taught classes.
“There were no Black theater companies in Baton Rouge (back then). There was a need.”
[—Ava Brewster Turner]
A couple of years later, she was recruited by Wiley College, an HBCU in Marshall, Texas, to create the curriculum for a minor in theater at the college. Turner successfully established the program at Wiley before returning home to Baton Rouge.
In 2002, Turner and her husband found a space in Mid City where she could fulfill her long held dream of opening a Black theater company in the Capital City.
“Theater is about telling stories,” she says. “Theater is life.”
Along with staging productions, the company offers acting classes and summer camps. It also takes submissions for plays to be staged from minority playwrights. In fact, the upcoming 2023 season, which opens in February, will feature only original works from minority playwrights selected by Turner and her board.
While UpStage’s home stage is the 50-seat black box theater located at 1713 Wooddale Boulevard, some theatergoers may recall that it had a second, larger location in Cortana Mall from 2017 until shortly before the mall was razed in 2021.
Many of the company’s regular spectators took umbrage with the performances staged at Cortana, Turner says. They believed the much larger space detracted from the company’s intimate feel.
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“I have a group of ladies that come to all of my shows who always sit right here on the front row,” she says, pointing to a group of seats. “They did not like Cortana. They thought it was too big.”
SEE THE SHOW
Dec. 4 + 10
UpStage Theatre presents Home for Christmas, a play by its founder, Ava Brewster Turner. Head to the theater’s home at 1713 Wooddale Blvd. for a heartwarming story about family. Find tickets and info at upstagetheatre.biz.