After 2-year delay, Westcoast Black Theatre starts new year with ‘Flyin’ West’

Director Chuck Smith isn’t complaining that COVID forced a two-year delay in Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe’s plans to stage Pearl Cleage’s acclaimed drama “Flyin’ West.”

The play — about a group of Black women who in the 1890s left the South to settle in the all-black town of Nicodemus, Kansas — was originally supposed to close the 2019-20 season, with Smith at the helm. But before the pandemic hit, illness forced him to drop out of directing “one of my favorite plays.”

Smith is recovered now and is once again staging the play, which kicks off the new year for the troupe. While he’s sorry that a replacement director didn’t get the chance to take his place, “I’m happy things worked out as they did.”

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The play is based on a true story about Black Americans settling the West, in part to escape the harsh treatment and segregation they faced in the South. Nicodemus is home to a National Historic Site marking Black involvement in the nation’s westward expansion.

“A whole lot of those settlers were women, and a great deal were unmarried women and widows,” Smith said. “They went out to Kansas and settled on this land and started farms. I think very few people know about this. I kind of like that people get to know that the West was more than just cowboys. There were Black people out there, hard-working Black people looking for a better life. ”

The play also deals with a subject not often discussed in stage dramas, issues related to people of mixed race. One character is half Black and half white and is referred to by the once-common term of mulatto.

“They catch it from both sides,” Smith said. “The mulatto plays a really significant role in the play. He doesn’t take over the play, but his concerns push over to the family and cause tension in the family.”

Cleage’s play had its premiere in 1992 at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, where she was named Playwright in Residence in 2013.

She has written more than a dozen plays, as well as nearly a dozen novels. “Flyin’ West” and “Blues for an Alabama Sky” are her best-known works.

“They are done regularly along with the August Wilson plays and ‘Raisin in the Sun.’ She’s in that genre,” said Smith, who is resident director at both WBTT and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, where Susan Booth has taken over as artistic director after many years of leading the Alliance Theatre.

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Cleage’s work has not been done in Sarasota, but Smith said she is “a famous writer in the American community, not just the Black community. She has all her wonderful plays, and one of her novels was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club."

Smith is working with a cast of mostly returning actors at WBTT, including Renata Eastlick (who was also seen in the company’s video production of “Pipeline”), Donovan Whitney, Carmi Harris (who participated in a 2018 staged reading of the play), Ariel Blue, Sieglinda Fox and Michael Knowles.

Smith said he previously directed the play in 2017 at the American Blues Theater in Chicago. “That was the first time I was able to put my hands on it and I’m glad to be able to work on it again,” he said.

Smith, a winter resident of Sarasota, has worked regularly for decades at the Goodman Theatre, where he plans to direct Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” in May 2024. At WBTT, he has directed such shows as “Knock me a Kiss,” “The Mountaintop,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

“I like being a snowbird, but I’m happy to be part of the Westcoast season, wherever they can use me,” he said.

‘Flyin’ West”

By Pearl Cleage. Directed by Chuck Smith. Jan. 4-Feb. 12, Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, 1012 N. Orange Ave., Sarasota. $20-$48. 941-366-1505; westcoastblacktheatre.org

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe stages historic drama 'Flyin' West'