Too Good for His Own Good
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“He’s an exploration-type director, and that can be good,” says Smith-Faust. “Phillip will take something that you’ve never heard of before, and he’ll make something happen with it. [But] The Cave Dwellers didn’t really have any relevance to who we are as a people. I think he had a lot of other shows that basically were very risky. But that was the one that made me decide that maybe we need to sit down and see where he was going in the future. There were too many phenomenal pieces out there written by black writers for us not to be doing more showcasing, which is what we’re about as well.” Smith-Faust says she had mixed feelings about VanLear’s building a core group of performers and crew; though it undoubtedly strengthened productions, it also left fewer slots for the novices who depend upon community theater for experience. She also felt that VanLear, a busy actor who’s recently been cast in the Goodman’s revival of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, may have had too much on his plate. “I just felt that everything comes to an end, and it was time to do what we have been charged to do by our founders as well as the city.”
He discovered soon enough that the company was tied to its community. A city program funded by Evanston’s department of parks and recreation, it operates on an annual budget of about $140,000 but is ineligible for the sort of grants that endow nonprofits, and the city wouldn’t allow VanLear to raise funds from outside sources. For long periods the company was without a program manager, and its marketing and public relations duties fell to the marketing director of the park district. “She has 150 programs to run, and–I think rightfully so, even though it was so maddening to me at the time–she just couldn’t justify doing the little extra that a theater needs to do, in terms of press releases and arrangements for photographs and videotaping and getting notices out.” At times, he says, he was disappointed by the lack of moral support from the parks and recreation board. “I think the board as a whole came to maybe 3 shows, maybe 4, out of 20….In terms of just city employees, and the city getting behind it, it just hasn’t happened.”
Now that VanLear’s tenure with Fleetwood-Jourdain is over, he’s focusing on his role as Luke, the no-account jazz trumpeter who comes home to die, in The Amen Corner. He’s also busy with plans for a new company, Four Planks Theater, a multicultural project he hopes to launch in Chicago next year.
