Karamu House

Zelma Watson George

Located at the corner of Quincy and East 89th Street, Karamu House is the "oldest African American theater company in America." Founded in 1915 by Russell and Rowena Jelliffe, that also means Karamu shares with the Play House the distinction of being the longest continually running theater company in Cleveland.

The theater club at Karamu was originally called the Dumas Drama Club, and later the Gilpin Players after actor Charles Gilpin. In 1941 they adopted the name Karamu, which is Swahili for either "a place of feasting and enjoyment in the center of the community" or the word "pencil" depending on whom you ask.

By the 1950s, Karamu's reputation as Cleveland's "Black" theater was firmly established, and had been for decades, premiering originally works by Zora Neal Hurston and once employing Langston Hughes as Playwright-In-Residence — one of only two to hold that title. However, from the original husband and wife team of the Jelliffes through the 1950s, the artistic and management directorships were held by whites.

"According to the record, Cleveland is one of the most progressive theatre cities in America."
- Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

Interracial productions were the order of the day at that time — in recent days we learned that character actor Roberts Blossom got his professional start at Karamu, and Tedd Burr used to tell me he was half of a couple that engaged in the first interracial kiss on a Cleveland stage though for the life of me I can't remember what show he was talking about.

DID YOU KNOW ..?

Zelma Watson George (December 8, 1903 - July 3, 1994) sang the lead role in the opera The Medium for sixty-seven nights beginning in 1949 before the show transferred to Broadway? She returned to Cleveland, performing in The Consul at the Cleveland Play House and turn as Mrs. Peachum in a production of The Three-Penny Opera at Karamu. Later, of course, she was an advisor to the Eisenhower administration, as part of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Armed Forces from 1954 until 1957, and that was just the beginning of an illustrious philanthropic career.

For the record, Karamu House gave me my first professional theater job. I was a member of their youth outreach, Drama/Theatre for Youth Project (D/TY) from 1991-92, traveling Greater Cleveland in a van with four other young actors, performing world folk tales to elementary and middle school students. I also got to play Howard Wagner in Death of a Salesman on the boards of the Jelliffe Theatre. I never got to meet ether of the Jelliffes in person — Russell died in 1980, but I did attend Rowena's funeral, she died in April, 1992 just a month after her 100th birthday.

Stealing Christmas, 1991

8/1/11 UPDATE: In 1997 the Zelma W. George Recreation Center opened in Luke Easter Park, which is also the site of the annual Unity Day Festival, an annual family-friendly event of fun and music in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, now in its seventh year. On the very evening I published this entry (July 31) George Clinton was headlining the event, when someone with a handgun opened fire, wounding three and killing one.

The shooter remains at large.

Sources:
African American Registry
Wikipedia
Showtime In Cleveland (John Vacha)
The Handbook of Texas Online/Texas State Historical Association

Mulatto (play)

The New York Evening Post - November 11, 1935

Item: Langston Hughes, the short, smiling, eyebrow-mustached brown man who wrote MULATTO, a play which is right up there fighting with TOBACCO ROAD for the higher percentage of shock content, places the thoughts of this play back ten years and a thousand miles up the Niger River to Africa.

Hughes was working on a boat that stopped at a little town called Burutu. A mulatto there, the son of a native woman and an English banker who had returned to England, often came to the boat to talk to the dailors. No one else in town would have much to do with him, neither the black natives in their huts nor the pale Europeans in the English compound. Hughes went away and ever saw him again, though often wondering what had become of him.

The tragedy of the person of mixed race stayed in his mind more vividly after that experience and some years later he wrote it, though in a different land and with different characters.

...

The New York Times - October 25, 1935
Race Problems in the South the Theme of MULATTO, a ‘New Drama’ by Langston Hughes
By Brooks Atkinson

After a season dedicated chiefly to trash it is a sobering sensation to sit in the presence of a playwright who is trying his best to tell what he has on his mind.

...

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle - October 25, 1935
MULATTO: A Play by a Negro Poet about the Tragedy of Being Colored in the South Comes to the Vanderbilt Theatre
By Arthur Pollock

A good deal of warmth of feeling and sincerity has gone into the writing of “Mulatto,” the play that came to the Vanderbilt Theatre last night, but Langston Hughes is not adept in getting his ideas into shape for the theater and as a result the play is frail. MULATTO cannot expect to get much attention from the public, a fact which will no doubt not surprise the author.

...

The New York Daily Herald - May 9, 1936

Item: MULATTO the Martin Jones production of Langston Huges drama, will close tongiht at the Vanderbilt Theater and re-open Monday at the Ambassador, where the producer expects to continue it through the summer.

...

The Cleveland Press - Friday, October 16
Hughes Entertains Cast of MULATTO

Item: Langston Hughes, Cleveland poet, novelist and now a playwright, may not attend his first nights but he has no objections to throwing a party for the people who speak and act out the lines he has written.

Last night Hughes took the cast of his play “Mulatto” now at the Hanna, on a midnight junket into the local Harlem. The party included all the performers and such Harlemites as were attracted by the smell of grease paint and tagged along to join the fun.

Little Ham

Gilpin Scores in “Little Ham”

Call & Post - April 2, 1936

Offering the premiere of Langston Hughes’ newest vehicle, the Gilpin Players of the Playhouse Settlement have made another step froward. The Karamu Theatre has been filled to capacity for every performance since the play opened last Tuesday. A vivid portrayal of life in Harlem.

Little Ham is hilarious. I mean, it’s hysterical. Reading the cadences of these richly drawn, broad characters, it was impossible not to hear them, to see them. Maybe, hopefully, someday I will. I have been enamored of Hughes as a poet. I had not experienced any of his plays. I was wildly surprised.

Hamlet Hitchcock Jones is a player, but that is not to judge, everyone in this show is a player in one form or another and it is a world that does not condemn anyone for how they choose to make their way through life. Gambling, promiscuity, lying any which way to can to ingratiate yourself with anyone to get whatever it is you are looking for, it’s all the same to everyone.

It’s a comedy, and a period comedy at that. Written in 1935, it is set in the late (“roaring”) 20s in a version of Harlem where the people may be poor, but they are eternally optimistic. “Little Ham” as he is known (he is a short young man) is a charming shoe-shiner and numbers runner and by the end of the evening there have been songs, fist fights, a Mae West impersonation, live gunfire, and a dance contest live onstage - and Ham avoids several self-inflicted scrapes to end the night with everything he wanted as though he had it all coming to him.

Now I must read Mulatto, another of Hughes’ plays which was concurrently running in New York. That one is a drama, and after reading so much “non-colored” press, I feel the need to read something less cartoony. Hughes’ work is full of fun and delight, and inoffensive because the characters, though ridiculous in their way, are not the subjects of derision. Not like the black maid in Merrily We Roll Along, who, though so many characters in that show are beneath contempt, is one of two people in the piece who are entirely disposable, who exist as decor. The other would be the Japanese houseboy Ito (why are all Japanese houseboys named Ito?)

Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes, (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, but spent most of his childhood with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. After her death, he eventually reunited with his mother and and they and his step-father moved to Cleveland, where he attended high school.

The Hughes' home in Cleveland was sold in foreclosure in 2009; the 2.5-story, wood-frame house on the city's east side was sold at a sheriff's auction in February for $16,667. - Wikipedia

Hughes had relocated to New York and gained success on Broadway with Mulatto, when he accepted the position of playwright in residence at Karamu House from 1936 to 1939, a position only recently-revived and currently held by Michael Oatman.

In 1936 alone several of his plays received world premieres, including Little Ham (opened March 24) about a Harlem numbers game. Plain Dealer critic William McDermott said, "as a folk-picture of Harlem life it is rich in character in humor."

Other premieres included When Jack Hollers (written with Arna Bontemps, the cast included Margaret Williams as Queen Esther, Jack Stewart as Bogator, Paul Banks as Rev. Lovelady, William Day as Jerico, Don McGregor as Sid Lowery and Nolan Bell as Arcie) and Troubled Island, a "historical panorama" about Haiti that had a cast of sixty-five and was later adapted into an opera by William Grant Still.

When I was an actor-educator at Karamu in 1991, the offices for the education department were in the space previously occupied by Hughes' old apartment.

To this day Karamu produces Langston Hughes' Black Nativity during the holidays.

Sources:
Wikipedia
Showtime in Cleveland