During the summer of 2020, as the murders of unarmed men including George Floyd spurred eruptions of civil unrest, John Sloan III wondered how theatre could help create social change.
Sloan and a fellow theater lover from West Bloomfield, David Carroll of Nicely Theatre Group, decided to create Detroit’s Obsidian Theatre Festival, which puts the spotlight on Black playwrights.
“There were protests, actions, and marches in the street, and at the same time, everybody’s stuck in the house,” Sloan, who is the festival’s co-executive producer and producing artistic director, tells Metro Times. “All of the tools and resources that we have as artists that help us express and push back on systems, that help us contribute to revolution, were taken away from us because of this global pandemic.”
He continues, “For me, it’s really just a conversation on how we can create a platform…. So often in theater, film, radio, whatever it is, the stories of underrepresented groups are shrunken down to stereotypes and tropes. Obsidian is here to present the diversity of all those stories and tell them without judgment or bias as much as possible.”
Now in its third season, the annual Obsidian Theatre Festival produces a slew of Black plays and musicals across one weekend in Detroit. The shows are chosen from hundreds of submissions that the festival team then develops alongside the playwright, hiring directors and actors to make the vision a reality. After about four weeks of rehearsals, the shows hit the stage, the majority of them for the first time. All the productions will also be filmed and available for online streaming in August.
“It's not like they're just coming through with a touring company and putting that work out. The show has to actually go up on its feet for the first time,” Sloan says. “In a film festival, the films are already done and the festival just presents them. For us, they’re works in progress, and we’re actually producing them. We’re responsible for hiring the lighting and set designers, finding the rehearsal space, running rehearsals, and working with the writers to get their piece up and running.”
The festival takes over the Detroit Opera House’s Chrysler Black Box and the YMCA’s Marlene Boll Theater from June 22-25 with four plays and a musical. It kicked off with a cabaret at Cliff Bell’s on Thursday, June 22, and there are nine more performances across the weekend with pay-what-you-can tickets.
Sloan emphasizes that keeping tickets accessible is part of community building. If someone can't afford to pay anything, they can come for free.
This year's plays range from a two-person show about how masculinity is constructed in Black culture called And God Made Man to an Afro-futurist musical about what happens when humanity loses connection with the ancestral realm titled The Last Gatekeeper.
“That’s a show that says, listen, we're just gonna forget about any sort of norms,” Sloan says about The Last Gatekeeper. “Let’s forget about what society tells us we have to do and who we have to be, and let's explore who we are… The actors for this musical have had 10 rehearsals to get this up and ready, and so it's like being shot out of a cannon for two and a half weeks.”
Sloan is a Detroit native who previously lived in New York for roughly 13 years. Back home, he recently directed the Detroit Repertory Theatre’s Gem of the Ocean and Passing Strange at the Detroit Public Theatre. He knows how difficult it is to develop a stage play and get it produced. He also knows how important it is for kids of color to see their stories reflected on stage.
“What I know from living and touring in New York is that there’s a lot of gatekeeping that happens in terms of getting in the room,” Sloan says. “So if Black folks aren't given the opportunity to present new work, then you’re not seeing as many Black writers develop their work regionally and you’re not seeing as many Black writers with shows on Broadway. We know that when a show makes it to Broadway they get produced across the country, but when they aren’t, that means the kids in drama in ninth grade aren’t reading them.”
He continues, “So you got a 15-year-old kid who thinks they might like theater, who’s looking at a whole bunch of plays and like one out of 50 actually speak to their experience… If we can't give access to folks and give them the opportunity to develop their work, then we're telling that 15-year-old kid that their dreams don't matter.”
Sloan says his goal for the festival is not only to create more opportunities for Black playwrights but to influence more arts infrastructure being prioritized in Detroit. Obsidian organizes acting and dance classes for K-12 education and is planning to expand its offerings with adult classes for the next season.
“New York has a lot of infrastructure built in," he says. "In Detroit, one thing that is absolutely untrue is that we don’t have talent. We have all the talent in the world, but the only way that you hone your abilities is by doing it more often. So what we need is the exact same thing that New York or Philly or [Washington] D.C. or any great theater town has, and that's more theaters and performing arts venues so that people can work and sharpen that knife.”
Sloan says some in-person tickets may be available for plays during the Obsidian Festival, but asks that attendees register online, even if it’s for a free ticket.
For more information and the full schedule, see obsidianfest.org.
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